Mike Carroll Productions

Home
United States
Salt Lake City, UT
Mike Carroll Productions

We provide a service to create videos, animation and motion graphics. This includes 3-D animation, i

Address

205 E 2nd Avenue
Salt Lake City, UT
84103

Telephone

(408) 888-0484

Website

http://www.mikecarrolljr.net/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Mike Carroll Productions posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Mike Carroll Productions:

Shortcuts

Making Movies in High School

From amateur movies to virtual reality and special effects

Back at Peterson high school (Sunnyvale CA), we had an extraordinary drama teacher, Mr. Graves, who inspired us to make movies. We drove out to downtown San Jose and filmed Downtown. Ran along side of Petula Clark’s 1965 Downtown, Graves wanted to show the deterioration of downtown districts compared to Clark’s depiction of glitter.

In 1969, the only inexpensive way to do this was on super 8 mm film. Generally, kids would synchronize a record player up with their project like we did with Downtown. I spent the summer working at my Dad’s gas station and saved up for a projector capable of adding a soundtrack to film. A bunch of us got together and made, The Monster Everybody Created. The plot was a bit goofy but fun: A smog monster emerges from the Sunnyvale dump and creates havoc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TT53Wf9h0Y&t=400s . This included a full voice track from the original source, unheard of from those days coming from highschoolers. Stored for several months at the Milpitas high school film department, it received honorable mention, but we didn’t hear anything more about it until around five years later.

In 1976, The Milpitas Monster made its debut at a local theater in Milpitas, CA. Suspiciously similar to ours, it was made by the Milpitas high film department, the same school who participated judging our 1970 movie: A smog monster emerges from the Milpitas dump and creates havoc http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073393/. Of course, they had a better budget, produced it on 16 mm and it received worldwide distribution, even talked about to this day.

A few years later, we invested in better super 8 cameras and gear, creating Wasn’t Born to Follow: A young man is tired of the city life and rides his motorcycle out to the country https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LedDrkuYJu0&t=79s .

Fifteen years later, I began dabbling into 3D modeling and computer graphics, with the hope one day to use this to create my next “big production”. At the same time, I was creating canvas art depicting life a Bay Area 1950’s. That received considerable media attention https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_T5rNsjr0lg&t=89s .

I also created an illustration a classic Dodge winning a first place award in the Corel World Design Contest. It was featured in Corel Magazine and the book CorelDraw7!: The Official Guide.

In 1997, I was hired by CGSD, a Silicon Valley company specializing in virtual reality. I created various 3D datasets that could be tested with the companies VR systems, which included a driving simulator. We brought it to Los Angeles in 1999 and was a hit at the SIGGRAPH convention.

Since then, I’ve worked with several other companies, building 3D ballparks to battleships, such as Reality Response (Monterey, CA) and Rockwell Collins in Salt Lake City, whose division specializes in flight simulation.

In 2010. I set up Mike Carroll Productions, services including graphics, 3D concept, special effects and virtual reality. I was immediately hired by MonaVie for a promotional video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hALnM3sWlAE.

In 2014, I came up with the VR Drive-in https://www.facebook.com/vrdrvin/, allowing users to watch their movies on a virtual drive-in movie screen. In 2015, we brought it to the Salt Lake City Comic Con and showed it off on the Samsung Gear VR.

Currently, my goal with Mike Carroll Productions is help out with some awesome projects and create stunning graphics and special effects for clients.