Ten years ago, Dave Thies was opening a bike shop in Mount Lookout. Today, he is in Japan shooting behind-the-scenes footage for a DVD about Ozzy Osbourne's Asian tour, which hits Tokyo's famed Budokan Hall on Friday.

        The switch from bikes to head-bangers was more logical than it sounds for the entrepreneurial Mr. Thies. And, if things keep going according to his plans, it won't be too long before the 30-year-old Mount Lookout native will be directing a feature film in Cincinnati.

        It all started when his bike shop proved so successful with hard-core riders that Mr. Thies ended up moonlighting as a traveling mechanic at mountain-bike endurance races.

        That's when he bought a mini-digital-video camera to shoot his first footage, some of which was used by National Geographic Channel in an episode of Explorer's Journal.

        In all, he shot 55 hours, which he since has edited into a full-blown documentary called Into the Divide, which he expects to be available soon on home video.

        Along the way he trained himself to use professional editing software and worked on local cable commercials. The big jump came with the creation of Tvacom (www.tvacom.com), a company originally intended to be a subscription-based Web outlet for live sporting events.

        “Then the bottom dropped out” of the Web-site market, he said. “Because we had the technology for streaming video, we started doing corporate networking,” he said.

        Mr. Thies' brother, a partner in Tvacom, is an artist's manager in Nashville, and he opened the door to music videos. In October, Mr. Thies directed a video for the Charlie Daniels Band's patriotic hit “In America,” which was edited by local filmmaker Terry Lukemire.

        The director also hopes to tackle some 60 hours of video footage collected by pop band 98 Degrees over the last few years for another DVD. There is also a documentary about World War II veterans and a script for a feature film waiting for his attention.

        First, he has to finish the Ozzy project. “I'm bringing a laptop and a mini sound deck (to Japan), so all we have to do when we get back is finalize the story and lay in the graphics,” he said shortly before he left.

        Now that Tvacom has an an office up and running near Lunken Airport, he said, it's time to close out his first chapter. The bike shop has been sold and will formally change hands as soon as he returns from Japan.

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