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By Jill Heffner
The plans for the journey began in 1992 at a place called "Hippie Haven," a pale-yellow clapboard house nestled on 400 North in Logan. The 900-square-foot house was home to some people Lott played with in a band. The band would cram into the front room while a minimum of a hundred college students would fill in the gaps. "One night the floor was bowing in the middle and I was just hoping to get through the song before we busted through the floor," Lott said. This was a regular weekend occurrence, the band, a party and college students. "This was my first introduction to college," Lott said, "and I thought I could party hard enough to be in college." Lott said he was not ready, at that time, to go to school, "I would've been a total screw-up." If he had started in 1992, Lott said he would have a different perspective on his minor, Multimedia Development, offered through the Instructional Technology Department at USU. Now he is able to take DVD production classes and other classes, which are new to the University. The biggest hurdle, Lott said about getting into USU, was all the paperwork. Summer of 1998 was Lott's first quarter. Lott is using his minor to enhance his German teaching major. Lott is working on phonetic training software, which he said he started in an independent study course. The software is patent pending since Nov. 20, 2002. Lott became interested in the German language after a summer trip to Germany. He said he just really wanted to learn the language. Fall of 1999 Lott took an intensive one-month German course in Germany, with the classes lasting six hours. The trip set graduation back a couple of semesters, but Lott said the experience was worth it. Lott plans to graduate in May 2004. He only has eight classes left and plans to take all the courses on-line. "I just don't get into campus social life," He said while rubbing his shaven head. His orange framed and tinted glasses rest around his neck. The 6-foot-7-inch frame looks uncomfortable behind the little café table. "I find it a distraction." In addition to school, Lott has two children, Dylan age 10, and Ciel age 8. They moved to Brigham City in August. Chris spends every other weekend with his kids and more time with them in the summer when they are out of school. Lott was also working 35 hours a week at Translux as a CNC Turret (a machine that bends metal) operator while attending school. Recently, Translux laid-off some employees and Lott was one of them. He said it was a happy thing, for him, and feels fortunate to have almost earned his bachelor's degree in the six years he worked there. Now Lott has more time to spend pursuing a DVD production as a career. Lott said he has always been an artist of one sort and authoring, gathering and programming information onto a DVD is another vehicle for expressing himself. Lott said in high school he was into drawing and then he dropped drawing to play music. He has been in and out of bands for 11 years. The last band he played in, Fhüda, went their separate ways last summer "It is hard to see such a talented musician leave. He is such an easy going guy," Jason Heffner, former band member and friend, said. "It is such a good time to get together and jam and an even a better time to be in front of the energy of a live audience." "Now I can build on that stage of my life," Lott said. Without art Lott says he wouldn't be good in music and now both aspects will carry over to the software. "That's how I want to build my education, one skill leading to the next." In spring semester Lott had an assignment to create a "How To..." instructional DVD. Lott created a DVD on the fundamentals of golf. He expanded the assignment into a separate project, and will create a "How to play Guitar" DVD for Jeremy Nivison, a guitar instructor at KSM Guitars. Another business Lott wants to pursue is a virtual Realtor. He said he wants to take all the digital photography of a house and produce DVDs to sell houses for Realtors. "DVDs are cheap to make and cheap to send," Lott said. For people who live somewhere else, planning to move to this area, Lott said he thinks they want to see perspective housing rather than purchase a home blindly. Although the virtual realtor idea is already in place on the Internet, if the user has a slow connection or no access to the Internet, this will be more accessible. DVDs may cheap to make and send but buying a camcorder can cost anywhere from $295 on the low end to $33,000 on the high end according to www.dvdcreation.com. Even $295 is hard to fit in a student budget, Lott said. Lott's plans are to be his own boss after graduation; he said he is tired of working for someone else. He said school is an opportunity to get skills and support himself with art, music and digital manipulation. He also said he wants to sell his phonetic software patent. "If I don't at least try. . . . Some people work in factories all their lives and don't even try," Lott said. "It's like jumping off a cliff and hoping for the best. MS |
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