I am David Gaskell, the author of Media Circus - the juggling tutor. I lived in Lancashire in the United Kingdom until January 2004, when I moved to Perth, Western Australia. Whilst working as a croupier in a casino in 1994, I discovered that one of the other croupiers, Adrian Glass, was also a professional entertainer and could juggle. I learned the basic 3 ball cascade and then over-the-top and by then, I was hooked. Fortunately, Adrian had a few circus videos to fuel my enthusiasm and I found that I could watch a pattern, break it down and then learn it. I learned lots of 3 ball patterns and then moved on to 4 and 5 balls and bought some cheap clubs also.

I went to university in 1995 to study Physiotherapy and joined the Manchester University Juggling Club, where I got to see new tricks and access new video material. I also started helping doing workshops and started to learn diabolo, devilstick and cigar boxes (and a bit of balloon modelling). I remember being amazed at the tricks that could be done with a diabolo - up until then, I thought it was just for throwing in the air. Studying Physiotherapy was great because there was a gym in the school and I used to practise there every day. I started looking around for more instructional material, but was very frustrated trying to learn from books and having to keep rewinding video tapes to watch the same 5 second clip again and again. Fortunately, I had two video recorders and used to transfer a trick onto a separate tape and repeat it a few times, so I could several repetitions without having to rewind every time. I would like to say that it was then a natural progression to come up with the idea for the cd-rom, but it didn't happen like that at all.

The idea: I had been dabbling with some balloon modelling and only had books to help me. It struck me that, with the available technology, the illustrations were very basic. I thought about writing a short balloon modelling book, with photographs to illustrate and phoned my brother Andy, who works in the computer industry. To this day, neither of us is sure exactly who came up with the idea for a circus skills cd-rom, starting from a discussion about a balloon modelling book, but by the end of the telephone conversation, that is what we decided to do.

The making of the cd: Not really appreciating what was involved, we set ourselves the time scale of 4 months to get the cd up and running. That was in May 1998. It has been a steep learning curve ever since, especially considering the fact that I had virtually no computer skills when we started.

I started by listing all the tricks I knew of, in each of the circus skills and after ticking off the ones I could perform, realised that I would have to learn at least a third of them. While I set about learning new tricks and writing the text explanations, Andy started looking into software etc. that we would need to author the cd-rom. We managed to find a suitable program and Andy started to put together a basic framework.

The next big task was to produce video clips of all the tricks. We thought we would be able to use a camcorder, but after many frustrating hours, realised we needed someone who knew what they were doing. We used a television company in the end and as we needed to keep cost down, I performed all the tricks on the cd-rom in an afternoon. Sounds really impressive, but you should see the out-takes. The digital video then had to be captured onto computer and every single clip (more than 200) edited down to look as seamless as possible when played as a continuous loop.

I posted a short message on the newsgroup rec.juggling, asking for ideas on marketing and Brian Dube contacted me soon after. When he saw a demo version and was interested in retailing the cd-rom, that was a big boost. It was suggested that I contact Renegade and they also were interested in retailing the cd-rom. Since then, Serious Juggling and more recently Butterfingers have got involved.

I worked on the second edition of the cd for about a year, to include many more tricks and improve the navigation. I also included audio tutorials for most tricks and improved the size and quality of the video clips. The best improvement however was the control of the video - instead of just one slow motion speed, you can now slow down the video to any speed with a single clip whilst it is playing. When I moved to Australia in 2004, I put the business on hold for a while, and then found a company here to market the cd. That is about where I am at in May 2006, but have a few ideas and plans to work on now.