This article was originally published on The Rough Cut by Eddie AI. For the full piece, please click here.The walls were bare. Concrete floor, uneven.A single phone line, a borrowed desk, and the faint smell of rust still lingering in the air. If you had wandered into that disused machine shop in Boston circa 1988, you wouldn’t have seen the future of Hollywood.You’d have seen a startup that barely qualified as a company.Just two guys, Bill Warner and Eric Peters, crouched over mismatched monitors, surrounded by the whine of drives and the hum of ambition.Warner had been working in marketing at Apollo Computer for 4 years when he ran into a problem. The company asked him to cut a promo video for their high-performance workstations, and he figured, how hard could it be?Write the script, shoot footage, and maybe borrow an editor for a few hours. RIght?Wrong.Cue a week-long nightmare. The editing process was painful. What followed was bouncing between tape decks, linear systems, and a $3,000 bill.He asked his colleague and engineer, Eric Peters, a deceptively casual question: “Why can’t we just do this ourselves?”Most engineers would’ve laughed. Eric didn’t. He opened a notebook and sketched something radical: a video editing interface that worked like writing software.Something nonlinear. Intuitive. Something you could do with a mouse.They pitched the idea to Apollo’s top brass.“Meh,” said Apollo.And that was that.So they quit.No investment. No roadmap. Just a basement and a dream.Family Vacation, a Camcorder, and a Perfect Crime Bill Warner cleaning...
Published By: NoFilmSchool - Today