Part 13
I’m eighteen years old. I stare out from the stoep (porch) of our house overlooking the rolling sands of the Namib Desert, the oldest desert on Earth with the highest sand dunes in the world. As I sit in quiet thought, the scene is starkly beautiful and offers the sense of space and solitude I need and have seldom found elsewhere.
My newfound interest in classical music has Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto wafting out from the record player in the sitting room. The second movement provides an ecstatic mixture of joy and grief in tune with a wisp of sand cut loose from the top of the nearest dune, blown by the daily winds that scour the desert clean of man’s pollution.
At a crossroads in my life, I ponder the age-old question of youth: What am I going to do with my life?
I know I’ve been provided with a decent education at one of South Africa’s top private schools, yet all the knowledge I seemed to take away from it was what a great rugby player I am.
Hanging over my head too is the fact that my dad, with his slightly warped sense of humour, has opened up the first-ever fish and chip shop in Namibia and is waiting for me to run it. This, I’m thinking, must have something to do with bringing me down to earth from the lofty corridors of learning (my school was run on British public school lines) to which I’d become accustomed.
As I sit and think, the air on the porch fills with the odor of the small town of Walvis Bay. I can’t help but imagine that this also is a factor in my future, the fishy smell which permeates my clothes being offensive enough to keep the pathetically small number of interesting young girls who live here disinterested in me forever.
So this is my future? What I am to do? …
Today, many years later as a man who’s had a full and adventurous life, I look back at that moment in my youth as the point where I had my first inkling of what, apart from rugby, I may have some talent for – the arts.
My very first story emerged from that emotional moment on the edge of the dunes. How I ended up in television and eventually movies is yet another story for yet another day.
I just read that it is estimated that by 2050 virtually all work will be done by robots, leaving us poor humans to twiddle our thumbs and no doubt pick fights out of sheer boredom.
If we have any sense, we should start to prepare ourselves for a future in which the arts and sports predominate. Despite the purveyors of doom and gloom and a father-in-law who said that his son-in-law was a nice chap but didn’t work (when I was putting fifteen hours a day into writing and directing documentaries), I’ve had a wonderful career in the TV and movie business. The creative process expands the mind far beyond anything else – except perhaps for the exhilaration of touching down for a try (a score) in rugby!
I view ExoBrain as a vital extension to this thinking. Take away the complexities of today’s infuriating computing systems and work with the simplicity of ExoBrain’s ExoTechnology and the creative mind will soar into realms un-thought-of previously. Imagine a computer that thinks like you think and doesn’t hinder the creative process by worrying about which icon to click on or how to save your masterpiece!
I haven’t yet figured out how ExoBrain will improve anyone’s rugby skills, but I’m sure there’s a way!
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.