When it comes to working with vehicle stunts for the camera, you don’t get there by guessing. As a professional stunt driver and stunt coordinator with over 30 years experience, Mike has a formula and an approach for each and every movement in a sequence. Mike spends a lot of time crafting vehicle stunts so that when he is on the set, he can address the project from every conceivable angle. Mike reads the treatment, spends time with the director, UPM and Special Effects team to get the comprehensive scope of the stunt and the budget and then he begins his process. From the location to the characters, Mike works to make the scene amazing, maximize the set up and make it safe for the talent and the crew. He considers the set and the environment it is in, to minimize damage. Not only to ensure more takes for the director, but also to protect production from liability. He often works with studio safety personnel as well as production’s insurance carriers to describe how he will run the stunts and handle safety. In Mike’s 35 years in the business, he has worked primarily as a stunt driver and a driving coordinator. He is a founding member of Driver’s, Inc and a member of LA Motorsports Driving Team. Additionally, he has worked in special effects, accident reconstructions, for the state and several law firms. He has produced live stunt shows and he started Picture Vehicles Unlimited in 1982, which he owned until 2015. Mike’s background in racing includes desert and vintage dirt track motorcycles, offshore race boats, local short track stock cars, SCCA events and racing Hill Climbs and the Bonneville Salt Flats in Semi Trucks. Mike has set speed records at Pikes Peak, Mt. Washington, Queenstown, NZ and at the Bonneville Salt Flats, running 225.675 MPH in a 23,000 pound Freightliner semi truck. Mike is the first driver in the US to ever drift a semi truck and in six months time in 2011, he gained over 1.5 million views on his various You Tube videos.
Mike has spent the majority of his career in TV Commercials. Print, TV, live shows and features come second. Commercials are the most difficult driving in the business. Demonstrating a vehicles performance without wrecking it, while running it near it’s limits through, smoke, on wet roads with the sun in your eyes if often much harder than rolling a car over. But if that is what you want, Mike has rolled plenty of cars and semi trucks as well. If it has wheels, Mike will jump, roll, pipe, T-bone, side-wind, slide, spin, ramp to ramp jump, cannon roll, jack-knife a semi or just wreck the hell out of it and he has hundreds of jobs on his resume to prove it.
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For a full printable resume, please download here.
From reality shows to feature films, celebrity talent often needs to perform some level of stunt driving. We have the space and experience to train them to safely perform in any vehicle whether it be a motorcycle, boat, race car, off-road racer,semi-truck or bulldozer.
When projects demand special shapes or materials, being able to reach out to the designers and engineers at some of our racing sponsors has been a major benefit. Knowing that I can make a call to Freightliner’s staff or Michelin’s, or any of the others, gives us the confidence and the competence to tackle some really wild projects.
