Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1475048
As I was researching your background, I came across a credit you have as a "parrot wrangler" from your early career?! Care to share how that came about? That may well be my first credit! A film called Hurt Penguins rented the music studio I worked at for a weekend to shoot a few scenes. As the assistant engineer, I got volunteered to be the one to hang out and help the crew turn lights on and off and stuff. Living at the studio, we had a parrot (actually a conure) named Poncho, and they asked if they could have him and his cage in the background of the control room scenes. I was one of the few people that Poncho could tolerate being near him; he was quite a grumpy bird. I was able to get Poncho to do some interesting things while they were shooting, like having him standing on the lead character's head! Sounds like you made a strong impression! My first boss took a chance on me, and I did the best I could to show him that he made the right choice. I'm really grateful for that chance. I might be in some other industry entirely if I didn't get the job. I really believe that whatever success I've had is because other people along the way have taken a chance or supported me in some way. When did you come to the realization that you wanted to do audio post, and how did you break into that side of the audio industry in Toronto? A lot of turning points in my career came from responding to the things happening around me. I started at the music studio in the early '90s when the industry was starting to change and you didn't necessarily need a full-blown commercial studio to make albums. It was getting harder and harder to run a business with just music clients, so we pivoted to doing commercial audio post during the day and music at night and on weekends. Naturally, I began working on commercial sessions as a result. We also did some film and TV scoring jobs, one of which was an eye-opening experience about what proper film audio post can be like. At this studio, I was used to working 10 AM to 10 PM, six or seven days a week. When I worked on the feature, we would get to the end of a take and the director would look at his watch and say, "Well, it's almost six o'clock guys! I don't want you to get tired. We had a good day today, see you tomorrow morning." My first thought was, "What do you mean? We're just getting started!" When I visited the dubbing stage, everyone was very civilized, worked easily together, and again would wrap at six. That seemed like more of a "real" job than I was doing at the time, and so I realized I wanted to do post. I found out later from some people on the feature that it was one of the smoothest and most positive experiences of their career, so maybe not the best example of what film post is really like! I worked at that first studio for a little while longer, and then got a job at a relatively new post facility. There, I slowly went from technical engineer to ADR mixer to re-recording mixer.