Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1524863
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 153 Kevin: Yes, for undergrad. I really enjoyed doing post sound there, and people also seemed to think I was decent enough at it, so it stuck. I think coming from a visual arts background, working in sound was really liberating in a way—I could still use my visual creativity to interpret the image, but expand the world beyond the borders of the frame with sound. And I think as both a bit of an obsessive, and at times impatient, creative person, sound is such a powerful and fast way to create compared to visuals most of the time. USC is also where I met Eric Marks, our MPSE Vice President, who was a graduate student at the time. We ended up TA'ing undergrad post sound students together for a semester, and my friendship with Eric was a big influence in my joining MPSE, among other things! We've also been on-and-off collaborators on a project-to-project basis ever since graduating. I did both production and post sound when I graduated, but I never acquired a full production sound kit. I was running on-set sound on lower budget projects where I was also doing post, and the teams already had some barebones equipment, and just needed someone to operate it. Chris: What was your first gig? Kevin: My first significant gig was with a YouTube channel called FreddieW, made up largely of USC film grads (the channel later renamed to RocketJump). We did a web series called Video Game High School (VGHS), which released its first episode in 2012. At this time, YouTube was this amazingly optimistic, democratizing platform of the future—before it became modern YouTube! FreddieW and some other channels, like Corridor Digital, who I also worked with, were releasing high-quality action short films week, and it was like, "Hey, Hollywood, we're the new generation," and they were generating a lot of attention. Five, 10, 20 million views per video. Video Game High School was FreddieW's first big narrative project, and was crowdfunded on Kickstarter, raising over a quarter million dollars from fan donations, which was unprecedented at the time. It was essentially an indie feature released episodically as a web series. I was initially brought on as the boom operator. For Season 1, it was a boom that plugged directly into camera; that was all we had. Since my cables would constantly get yanked when camera moved, I wore earbuds with a breakaway mini-jack cable, so my whole head wouldn't get yanked off every setup change. Chris: Was that your first sound editorial gig too? Kevin: Correct. I had previously worked with an actor named Jimmy Wong, who's the younger brother of Freddie Wong, one of the directors, and because we'd met each other on set, I was introduced as a production sound guy. I sent in a resume, but I think they just saw "USC," if they even looked at it at all, and between that and the recommendation, I was in. So I got brought into a kind of interconnected family. Chris: What I'm hearing is that a lot of it was networking. The fact that you had USC behind your name and you knew people from USC. Kevin: Correct, yeah. At the time, going to a film school like USC was great value for the money in terms of the equipment you'd get access to, compared to trying to buy it on your own. While I was at USC, the first RED camera came out, and there was a joke Facebook group, "My mom bought me a RED, so now I'm a cinematographer." But that was a big deal, because when I entered film school, if you wanted to make a professional-looking movie, that was a quarter million dollar camera, and then suddenly, there was something available for, like a tenth of that price. And of course, filmmaking technology has become significantly more accessible across the board in recent years. But I still tell people who are considering film school that there's value in the networking opportunities. The chance to meet people with the same passion and interests, at the same stage in their careers, still carries so much value, even though there's much more viable ways to self-learn these days. Chris: So, you're working on Video Game High School, recording the audio for it, and you also cut the sound? Kevin: Right. While I do enjoy being on set—it's great being a part of the production process, and getting to go outdoors and do all the things we seldom do during post—I also knew my interest really lay in the creative side of audio, in post sound. So during shooting, I asked Freddie if he had anyone lined up for post sound, and he said yes, they had someone great. I immediately emailed Freddie a sound design demo reel anyway. It was a full sound replacement for