ace white says uh what was the first job that really solidified your interest
in the field and was there ever a magic moment where you realized that you found your thing
i love a question that is hoping for a specific narrative when it turns out i
have that narrative to give this is great ace um so as i've been describing i worked
in new york and special effects for a few different places in 1990 uh my good friend
of mine at the time called me and asked me to come be his roommate here in san francisco
i came out to san francisco and found an unbelievable city where i could kind of try
everything that i wanted in new york if you wanted to get your sculpture or art shown in the gallery
there were like waiting lists for even the tiniest gallery in the most far torn corner of the five
boroughs it still took two years to get someone to look at your size in san francisco man you
could glue a couple things together and have them in a gallery by the end of the month it
it is one of the reasons that san francisco embraced me and i embraced san francisco and
just to give a little side note here one of the key reasons i left new york is because
i didn't have any idea really what i wanted to do i didn't have ambition
and new york is a terrible city if you don't know what your ambition is
it is unforgiving if you know what your ambition is new york is ready to run you through the paces
san francisco is a great place to be and not know your ambition it means that the sort of base level
of art in new york is of in general a much higher quality than in san francisco i'll admit that and
i think the same about los angeles um at the same time san francisco provided and provide
provided me and i think still provides people a place to really let their freak flag fly without
without too many expectations and that was a a perfect environment a perfect hot box for me to
figure out what my ambition was so i spent a few years in theater working for george coach
performance works the eureka theater project arto doing a bunch of black box this was an
amazing theater town back in the early 90s then i started getting the attention of the film industry
and jamie called me up uh said uh i'm working on a nike commercial i've heard a lot about you
come in and show me some stuff i showed him some stuff and i started working on the nike
commercial and very quickly jamie saw uh this guy has a whole bunch of different weird skills and
he's very uh applicable towards many different jobs and jamie started giving me a lot of work
and you know commercial work is long days when you're on set and you just gotta be ready and like
i said i had just about at that time in my life learned how to work hard to really apply myself so
oh also the other thing that was happening commensurate with all this i worked for
beach blanket babylon as a backstage tech i worked for berkeley repertory theater and i was
making sculpture all the time i was i was a sculptor and i had shows at heart attack gallery
and the nelson morales gallery and katie clark's gallery uh i mean uh uh i showed all of probably
30 different group shows in san francisco in the first three or four years i was in
i was here um so all of these things happen i start working for jamie on the regular
and now i'm i'm really now i'm working in the commercial special effects industry and it's
taking a lot of my time and energy not that that's a bad thing but what i notice after about six
months or eight months is i'm not making sculpture at home the whole time i was working in theater
i would be working full days and then come back to my loft and work all night i the the eternal
energy of youth um but here i was working just as hard or harder in special effects industry and now
i was going home and not doing anything and i started to examine that in myself and i thought
you know part of the reason i'm not working on the sculpture is because all of the aesthetic and
mechanical problem solving that i make sculpture in order to enjoy is being fed by this industry by
special effects and sure i'm selling products for the man but on the granular level at the workbench
level the work is just it's just as satisfying to my brains and my hands
now if you spend any time on a film set you're going to meet a lot of people who will say
things like i used to be an artist i used to be a painter and having grown up with a painter and
called myself an artist i thought specifically at that moment when i realized that less of my mental
energy was going into the sculpture because the the employment was feeding that part of my brain
i made a conscious decision not to say i used to be because i don't think that stuff leaves
you i think when you when you allow yourself to go on aesthetic explorations that are purely for
personal exploration which is one of the ways i define art
um that that exploration informs everything else that you do in the best possible way so i didn't
lament that i was no longer making sculptures i i stopped trying to show my work or get in group
shows because i started putting all of my energy into into this field um and the idea was okay
this is what a career probably feels like here all of my disparate skills and they're all necessary
for this thing that i'm doing for a living that's that felt like an amazing thing to realize like oh
this is what people mean by a career okay i'll give in for a while let's see how much this feeds
me and yeah it fed me man i mean not and not just not just the literal feeding but it fed
my creative brain and it fed my artistic brain and it it it fed that kind of problem-solving that i
that i revere that i seek from the workbench um that was a magic moment i mean you know i
would have several more tiers of understanding as i went through the special effects industry
that was actually just one of the key ones to realize like well okay it's important to
say why i how i realized the split was happening because it had already happened to me once before
and this is just another little side story so it's the late 80s and i'm living in new
york and again i'm living in my parents house and i'm making sculpture in the basement this
is again part of me adam the sculptor and i'm making sculpture all the time and then i
got obsessed with pool and i started playing pool and billiards and in the late 90s there was a huge
in the late 80s excuse me there was a huge boom in pool and billiards in new york and there were
pool halls everywhere and i was visiting many of them on a daily basis i was literally playing at
like two different pool halls every day for the record society billiards and chelsea billiards um
julian's was where the hardcore batting was happening and i didn't want part of that scene
at any rate i noticed that the more i spent on learning and investigating and diving into
billiards and pool the less sculpture i make so i i had already learned by the age of like 21 22
that when you're feeding one part of your brain it sometimes needs to do the other thing it used
to do to do that feeding less and i'd seen this kind of these shifts of these interest fields
so i was attuned to that when it showed up again uh working for jamie thank you ace that is like
that's a great question c2 lawson did freelance work play a big part in your past experience and
can you offer any advice on setting prices oh this is such a good question yes yes yes
okay first of all freelance is kind of the only way i've worked for decades um
yeah uh film work is freelance work there are permanent jobs
permanent uh in film but they are few and far between films are the best way to think of a
film from a business standpoint is uh a film is a company that has started to make a thing
called that film that it's been built to make and then when that film is done that company
like goes away like it is it is a serial operation of capitalism so there's very little throughput
from film to film especially in special effects so you are always freelance even at ilm when i
like even when i had their reputation and the chops and enough experience to be regularly hired
at ilm i was still only working like 60 65 of the time there the rest of the time i had to augment
with other jobs so freelancing is hard uh it takes a certain mindset and that mindset is what's next
what's next you're never in freelancing you might get a job and get paid 10 000 bucks for that job
this for three weeks of work and you're like yeah man i just made some dough that'll pay my rent
for five months the question you should be asking is what do i do after that
like the freelancer's brain is never not going what's next what's next what's next what's next
and it's a it's a great frame to hold in your head as a freelancer and it is really
really important i mean even in television production i'm freelance right i do a show
and if it gets picked up i do more episodes stuff but when it's done i'm done it's not this yeah
i mean at higher work it's kind of made us all freelancers right
which is a problem but that's a whole nother issue um you want advice on setting prices okay
the only way you can learn how to set prices is to set them right and set them wrong and
learn the difference between the two and ask for advice from people in your industry and
keep asking for advice and keep asking for advice i will tell you though that
one of the things i have learned is your goal of your goal my goal as a freelancer was always to
set the price if you came to me as a client and said could you build this for me my goal is to
that the first number i tell you is 10 more than you were hoping to spend that's the inside
baseball and freelance price setting i want to go i want to if you think i'd love to get this
table built but i can only afford 500 bucks my goal would be to give you a bid of 550 bucks
because whatever we think we want to spend we know we can spend a little bit more
that's one thing secondly as a freelancer i want to i want what the market will bear i
want i want to be able to extract from you what you're willing to pay in terms of my in terms
of my time and energy but also i don't want to charge you so much you're really unhappy i
don't want to charge twice what you're gonna what you're gonna pay but at 10 more you could even go
550 is a little much for me can you lower that the almost the very first thing i'd be willing
to do chop 10 percent right off the price i've just quoted that now that like it's funny so at
one point um when was this in the mid 90s the san francisco maritime museum uh asked me to bid on
making a replica of a piece from their collection and they sent me some drawings and some pictures
and i bid it at a thousand i bid it at 950 yeah i bid it at 950 to build this piece and they were
like ah it's too expensive and then my friend who had gotten me the chance to make the bid
told me that they ended up spending 860 bucks on making this thing and that was
an appreciable difference to them right between my 950 and 860 they meant to do it internally
and i was like holy hell i bid precisely to the dollar 10 more than they were hoping to spend
and then i told my friend i was like you know they should have just asked me i would have literally
chopped off that back back in now that was so how do you charge 10 more than they're hoping to ask
that is one of those you you learn about the client like if it's pharma they can totally
afford it uh you learn about you know maybe it's a client you've worked before before that's
that's one of the best ways you'll have knowledge about what they're willing to spend um sometimes
you have back channels sometimes you have someone who brought you the job who can help you
learn what they were hoping to spend that is great intel to get and really really important
i heard once about a supervisor who used to bid like this he would go all right this is we've
looked at all your figures and it's a 20 000 job and then he'd look at your face and if you went
he'd be like no that doesn't include delivery and taxes and sundries and contingencies
and he would just keep on tacking stuff until your face fell and then he'd like stop there
because he knew he had kind of extracted the most amount from the equation
and i don't mean to give the impression that the goal here is to extract the maximum amount of
money even though it sort of is there's also an expectation of what the market will bear
if you're a company hiring a special effects company presumably you've hired other special
effects companies so you have some idea of what the market will bear and how to learn i know i'm
bouncing all over the place i'm sorry there's a lot to get through here and i'm excited about it
what the market will bear is a moving target and it's one that you learn and it's part of
the institutional knowledge of what you'll learn in any industry that you're working in
the most granular way i have learned to set prices and i still do it this way is to like the first
pass with any bid is how many person days will this project take well one person will sell this
that'll take them four days this person will cast these pieces i'll need them for two days uh i'll
need to do five days worth of problem solving for this so it's a total of nine or ten days
or whatever my once i've figured out the actual hours of labor it'll likely take i then bid it
at 500 bucks per person day and that sounds like a lot um but that number has worked for me for uh
20 years or more in in setting prices now part of that is that weight stagnation i would guess but
at the same time 500 bucks a day is a great place to start for a home shop because you
might not think that you're worth that but making a shop work that is a reasonable price that is
a reasonable place that's a reasonable price to use to get yourself into the ballpark of what the
thing costs in the early part of your career i am almost guaranteeing you that someone will come to
you and offer you what sounds like a lot of money for something and it's actually painfully low
i remember someone coming to me and asked me to build
10 4x8 flats for them and they wanted to pay me five thousand dollars for this and i thought
ten flats for five thousand bucks i could do those all in like two days that seems crazy
and then i talked to my friend todd who's a scenic artist and he's like dude he's trying to get you
build a whole set that's like a 17 18 000 job to build the set he wants you to build he's
broken it down into flats but each flat has to be finished differently and each of them has to join
together and it's going to be a whole set he can't have that that cheap he's trying to screw you
todd i'm still grateful to you for that bit of knowledge and insight
if you're a professional make yourself available to a young upstart to give them advice like that
i certainly do and i love it when friends call me up and ask me for advice about a specific job or
a specific thing it's like pay it forward man uh because those people that gave me that advice in
the early parts of my career were super super critical oh we're doing great here thank you
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