Starting Small, Dreaming BIG & Making Movie Magic! with Howard Berger

This week, we have a returning friend, Howard Berger. You may remember Howard from episode 74 of DREAM THINK DO. He's an Academy Award and Emmy Award-winning special effects artist. He and his KNB EFX Group have been involved with over 800 feature films and television shows… including the Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, the Orville, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (which he won an Oscar), Hitchcock, and every Quentin Tarantino movie… just to name a few. The first film that he worked on was Aliens, and he did that the day after he graduated from high school. If you go to his IMDb page, you'll realize that he’s touched just about every horror movie that's scared the stuffing out of you the last 20+ years!  I can’t wait to talk again, so let’s get to this! Listen To The Podcast: RESOURCES: IMBD Page: https://imdb.to/2z3qVpt INTERVIEW: Howard, welcome back to DREAM THINK DO. Thank you so much. That was a good intro. It was definitely shorter than the last one. I think so.  The last time, I think I went about 10 minutes because the list is so long!  I knew I needed to keep this one under five minutes. I put it out to the DREAM THINK DO community that you were coming back. I said, "Alright, what would you ask Howard this time?" And we got flooded with some great questions, so I can't wait to pepper those in as we go. But what have you been up to lately? I’ve been busy with KNB, which this is its 30th year in existence. Greg Nicotero and I own it and run it for the last 30 years. I was talking with someone the other day about how we used to do all movie work, rarely TV. Now it's tons of television, be it Netflix, or AMC, or whatever it is. TV has become more of a creative venue for us than feature films to some degree. We love working on movies; it's a whole different animal too. But, it's been great. I started working on Seth McFarland's Sci-Fi drama comedy hit, the Orville. Then I got approached for a TV show called Legion. This was for season two. I signed on to that, then Orville went over. I had planned for two weeks off. I had three days. I had Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and I was on set Monday for Legion for the next several months, and then I went onto a film with Mark Wahlberg, a film called Mile 22 that's coming out August third. My wife Miriam and I just got back from Atlanta, where we shot Mile 22. I had four days off, and then started another movie with Mark. Kind of a family comedy called Instant Family that'll be out next year, I think Valentine's Day. We just finished, and I just got home, and I'm just getting acclimated to my house, my bed, my things that I haven't seen in seven months. Well, you know you've been away for a long time when you get to your own bed and go, "This is the best hotel I've been in for a long time." Yeah, you feel like you're on location in LA.   That's amazing. It leads into one of my first questions. So, you love what you're doing, but that's a tough schedule for anybody, whether you love what you're doing or not. How do you stay fresh when you're running a marathon like that? What are some of the things you do for Howard to cultivate creativity, to stay fresh as you're doing this? Well, I’m not getting any younger. I find that what keeps me going is I love everything I do. So, I'm always enthusiastic about the people I work with, and the projects I work on. I always try to have as much fun on everything as I can. But, on my days off, I like to not think about it, and I just need to decompress. I love spending time with my wife. We are big foodies. When we were in Atlanta, I literally would plan Friday, Saturday, Sunday because there are so many great restaurants in Atlanta. Oh, it's amazing, yeah. So, we had seven months of amazing restaurants. I think we ate at one restaurant three times. That was the most. I like just chilling and taking long walks,