Mathieu Marano
"Based on my early experiences sound mixing, I decided to become a sound engineer within the music industry. To start with, I went off to college at CEGEP Sorel-Tracy in Montreal, where I leant everything from costume design, props, through to sound engineering. After I graduated, I then went onto a sound recording school called Musitechnic to become a professional sound engineer."
"During one of my classes, I was able to do an interactive CD about my punk band. I pulled together all of the old VHS tapes I had from our early performances and started to edit everything for this interactive CD assignment. This was the first time that I had ever had a chance to edit, and I found that I really enjoyed it!"
"While I was studying sound engineering, I was also involved in a independent publication that happened to be heavily involved in Montreal’s music scene. I suddenly became very involved in the music scene in Montreal and even signed a couple of bands to start our own independent record label. I had this idea of including an interactive video section on each audio CD. When I contacted a couple of duplication houses to see if they could do such a thing, I found that one of them really wanted to to do the same thing as I did! It seemed like the perfect ‘first job’ back then."
"These guys had a very nice sound recording studio called, Studio 408. Before long, I was their junior sound engineer and I was starting to learn duplication, info graphics and interactive design. In the corner of the studio, I found that they had this Discreet edit suite, that the company had owned for only six months before Discreet dropped the product! For the first year that I worked at Studio 408, they never used the edit suite. So in my second year, I asked if I could play with the edit suite and learn how to use it. They had a Betacam SP deck, reference monitors; in-fact, they had a whole setup for editing but no editor!"
"I was still involved in the music industry at this stage, and I really wanted to be able to produce a music video or two; and here was all of this edit equipment not being used by anyone. They said to me, that it was very complicated and that it worked off disc arrays and that I may not be able to get it going. However, they were wrong and I did manage to get it going. I then bought myself a Canon GL1 camera and I started to shoot music shows and do all of these interviews with the bands members."
"However, when I tried to edit all of my material on the Discreet edit system, I found it very difficult and clumsy. So the company purchased FCP 1.0 for me so I could develop an editing division for Studio 408. I started working on a G4 to begin with and then later bought a G5 with an AJA Io. We started to do more and more video jobs, in-fact the first job I did, was for the famous Canadian photographer Heidi Hollinger. By day I was doing all this commercial work and then by night, I was doing music videos. It was perfect."
"Because I was doing other work at Studio 408, I only ever got a couple of serious edit jobs a week. So when I asked them if I could please be paid more than $8 an hour, and they said, ‘no’, I decided to move on. After leaving Studio 408, I was called by a producer doing a French TV show called Contact TV asking me if I wanted to work as an assistant-editor for them. It was a great show to be part of as they wanted to be the first TV show to broadcast in HD on Télé-Québec, which is one of the big national broadcasters here. Within a month, I became technical director and eventually came to work as their online editor."
"It was a very cool show where they would interview all of these seriously creative people, like great screenwriters, chefs and architects. They would interview creative people from across Canada, France, Peru and Portugal, so the content was really excellent. This was the first show where I was really doing all of the motion graphics too. I worked on this TV series for two seasons before seeing if I could make it freelance."
"During the day I was working freelance on snowboarding and wakeboarding TV shows like H2O and H2snow, and the during the weekends. At first I was doing all of the motion graphics and titles and then by the second season, I was able to use my contacts in the Montreal music scene to use a lot of really great music that we put into the show. Being freelance, I could use some of my free time and weekends doing color correction on TV commercials for La Fabrique d'images and Pop 6. This was a great time for me, as I was hanging out with really cool people, getting free passes to the best snow resorts like Mont Tremblant and St-Sauveur; and getting paid to do it too!"
"Montreal is a very, very creative city, particularly when it comes to television production. Although we have a very small French population compared to The States and other parts of Canada, we have no less than 15 TV stations that all broadcast in French here. So there is always a lot of work going around for anyone wanting to work in broadcast or music. We also have to dub English TV commercials into French before they go to air, so there was a load of work for me doing this sort of production too. All of this TV work allows creative people like me to be able to find a way of making a good living here."
"There are also many opportunities for young producers here, because there are so many French broadcasters looking for local content. You can go to the TV networks and just pitch your idea and they will give you time in the broadcast schedule; they just won’t give you any money for the production! So you have all of these first time producers, who once they find a couple of sponsors, all want to make a TV shows, but real cheap. It's a great way to do your first TV show, but it means they can’t afford to get things posted at places like Technicolor."
"Instead, these young producers get themselves a Final Cut Pro station, shoot their footage on DV and have it go straight to air without proper post. The problem is, a lot of them didn’t even know how to conform for broadcast! When you used to go to a big post house like Technicolor, they would always take care of all these problems, but now the ‘new guy’ only does what he knows. So that is where I come in and help do all the color grading, conforming and QC before it goes to off to the broadcaster."
“That’s why Marc-André Ferguson, François Dumoulin, Yves St-Jean, Éric St-Martin, Julien Célin and myself, came to start the Montreal Final Cut Pro Usergroup. For ten years now, we have done a blog, forums, meetings and conferences on all of things the ‘new guy’ should know about doing work for broadcast. Like how to use scopes or do a 3:2 pull down. Sure all of the guys out of college should know this, but the guy who has learnt it himself may not see this as obvious. We bring in 3D modelers, VFX artists, colorist and anyone else that is happy to explain how they work for broadcast. For seven years now we have been recording all of these sessions and putting them up online for free. I get a lot of work because of my understanding of broadcast. Most of my work is TV production where the producers really need an online editor or colorist who knows exactly what has to be done to make their series or commercials perfect for broadcast.”