LOAD "*",8,1
I started coding at 14 on a Commodore 128 my parents gave me for Christmas. No mouse. No windows. No GUI. Just a blinking cursor and BASIC.
If you were there, LOAD "*",8,1 just took you straight back... swapping games and code on floppy disks, and tying up the family phone line with a modem so slow you could practically hear it think, all to reach the local BBS. I programmed my first full video game at 17, and that was the end of any plan that didn't involve a keyboard.
Sputnik Digital Graphics
In my twenties I spent $10,000 on one of the very first Intel Pentium machines. A Pentium 90 with 32 MB of RAM and a 1 GB hard drive, which at the time felt like owning an aircraft carrier. Later it got a 3dfx Voodoo3, back when 3dfx was the graphics company to beat, right up until Nvidia came along and swallowed them whole.
That machine became Sputnik Digital Graphics. I built websites and rave flyers through the 90s, and for a kid who learned on a Commodore, it was a very good business. It stayed that way until Hurricane Ivan hit Pensacola in 2004. I was also designing for the Independent News, the paper that spun out of Joe Scarborough's Pensacola newspaper, and when the advertising money dried up overnight while everything else stayed soaked, that job went with it.
So I moved to Atlanta. That chapter has its own story, and this is not the website for it. For the record, I kept building software on the front end and the back end, and my design work moved from Photoshop to Dreamweaver.
Poisoning the Well
In 2015, one of my best friends, comedian Patrick Jolle, and I started a YouTube sketch channel called Poisoning the Well. We made fun of niche conspiracy theorists and religious crackpots, and we did it with production values nobody asked for. That's when I traded Dreamweaver for long nights in Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects.
Every video needed light skin retouching, and every minute of it was tedious. I eventually bought an early version of the Beauty Box plugin and used it on a few of our last videos. I believed I owned a lifetime license. Years later, when I came back to video, that lifetime turned out to be shorter than mine. Same story with my lifetime Digital Juice library. Lesson learned.
Back in the basement studio
In 2026 I wanted to make video again, so I shot a couple of pieces on my Canon C100 in my basement studio. Neither one was ever released. I had forgotten how much work high-end, studio-quality video really is, and I had definitely forgotten how long the retouching takes.
So I did what I've done since I was 14. I wrote software. Take the raw footage, smooth the skin a little, hide the random pimple, and soften more fine lines than I'd like to admit.
Built for one very demanding customer
The first version of VanityFilter had exactly one customer, and he was impossible to please. I could load a ten-minute run of clips, process all of it, and bring clean footage into Premiere Pro to key out the background, with no skin retouching cluttering an already complicated timeline.
That was the whole point. Our videos were already stacked with effects and layers, and adding skin smoothing on top could turn a 15-minute render into eight hours, twelve hours, sometimes more. I have watched enough progress bars for one lifetime.
Where it is today
VanityFilter comes from a lifetime of writing code and a stubborn insistence on video that looks right. Along the way I also co-founded Fair Lifts Helicopter Services and served as its chief marketing officer until earlier this year, which is where I learned that a great product nobody understands is just an expensive hobby. VanityFilter isn't a one-man show anymore, either. Zachary Jester, a Twitch streamer and YouTuber I worked with at Fair Lifts, joined the project and leads development of VanityFilter for macOS, which arrives with version 3.2.
Why the articles sound like this
If an article here insists on doing something a certain way, that isn't a style guide talking. That's me. I've shot it, keyed it, retouched it and waited on the render. I want skin that still looks like skin, and a timeline you can actually finish.
Erran "So Fain" Yearty
Founder, VanityFilter