About FWI...
Back "in the day", Steve Switaj used to be an electrical engineer. He designed airborne infrared cameras for Martin Marietta Aerospace.
If, in the last decade and a half, you've watched any of the dramatic televised panoramas of Iraq as seen from the point of view of a plummeting smart bomb, then you've watched, or more accurately, watched through, his work.
He was a good engineer. It was a good career. His family was proud. Most men would be happy with that.
But noooooooo. That would be too simple.
Steve was feeling... unfulfilled. You see, he always loved photography and ever since he was a little boy watching Star Wars, he's always wanted to make special effects.
So at about the time most men are starting families, Steve started an internship with a visual effects company.
Oh, the salad days! His first job was on a heavy metal video that went 101 hours in 5 days, and the artist got sick on Steve's shoes. On-the-job training really meant something back then.
But Steve persevered. Undaunted, he went out and got new shoes. Better shoes. This time, with Scotchgard™! And in those shoes, he practiced until he became a motion control operator. Maybe not a legend, but his name got passed around, and he works a lot. He went on to DP and supervise a whole bunch of stuff, and people occasionally accuse him of cinematography.
But you know, engineers are a funny lot. It's genetic. Salmon have to swim upstream, lemmings have to leap, and engineers, well they have to build things.
Eventually came the day we all knew would come. The day when, no matter where he looked, Steve just couldn't find the right kind of high voltage step motor drives. They just didn't exist.
Well, there was only one thing that could be done about it.
He would just have to go out and build himself some. And maybe some spares, you know, for his friends.
With blinking lights.
And thus, with the dam broken he started building the other things it had always irritated him that he couldn't find, like specialty cameras and miniature dimmers, and all kinds of stuff to interface and sync everything to everything else.
And soon he noticed that other people kept calling him to borrow his gizmos. He was not alone! So he started a company, Flying Wombat Industries, to give him a name to put on his stuff.
