Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1535880
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 19 Howard Karp MPSE Board member I quickly got the fever for working with audio since I was allowed to play with the quarter-inch reel- to-reel Sony tape recorder that we had in the house. I acquired my first cassette recorder by the age of 10 and "sound on sound" recordings between the two machines began. Soon thereafter, when I was in high school, I was playing in bands and booking time at local recording studios. I also landed a production directorship at our high school radio station (I was editing tons of promos a la morning shock-jock style in the early 1980s). At 17, I entered the US Army where I served actively for four years as a communications specialist, to which I then exhausted my GI Bill at Bloomsburg University to acquire a BA in mass communications. Through college, I interned at one music studio close by, and then another music studio closer to my hometown of Philadelphia during the summers when I wasn't attending college courses. At that studio, I cleaned toilets and contributed as much time as I could to those internships in hopes to prove how driven I was to work in sound (during those summers, I worked three jobs that clocked me in at workweeks of more than 78 hours a piece consistently). One of my mentors from the studios introduced me to a group of his friends who were working at Musicians Institute in Los Angeles. I interviewed for a job there and was hired just a week after the Northridge earthquake in January of 1994. In addition to becoming one of the first instructors for their "RIT" program. During that time, I had a great run in music studios as a recording engineer, mixer, and even produced a ton of independent acts. I worked freelance through 2002 when I eventually was offered a staff job at Technicolor. I started there in sound restoration which was fascinating to me. The job allowed for me reviewing all of the old masters of TV shows and features there dating back as far as the late 1920s. After expanding my re- versioning knowledge in post sound, I eventually was offered work on film shorts and any other original content I could find. My staff job at Paramount Pictures allowed me to show my worth for workflows necessary to maintain their catalog, as well as vetting all of their acquisition titles (which included a lot of additional editorial and mixing before they were cleared for licensing). Since 2020, I have specialized in dialogue editing (my restoration background was a great crossover) but have also continued full sound design for much content. My takeaway from my own career path was encapsulated in one quote from a meeting I had with Mark Graziano (Head of Post at Amblin): "Be a humble badass." Mark reminded me during my longer hard pivot into original content to keep my work standards high and to stay personable and modest as my new network in our post sound community grew. That's my current trajectory, and I'm happy to report that I receive a large amount of word-of-mouth referrals by multiple degrees of colleagues. Be great at what you do, and make every effort to establish good working relationships! FYI: I still have the little boxy microphone that came with that Sony quarter-inch reel-to-reel machine; that microphone is my inspiration (more than I'll ever get from an awards show). Mark Lanza MPSE Board member and Past President I got into film completely by accident. I was in college for computer programming when a classmate, who was a sound guy for live shows, had been doing some television programs and was now starting to do movies. He said that with my computer knowledge and his sound knowledge, we could do sound digitally. He got me an interview at an up-and-coming sound house, which led to me being hired there and started working nights and immediately going to work on an Oliver Stone film, of whom I wound up doing six films with. The sound house bought a second digital system, and I started to train their lead editors to abandon cutting on films and use this new system. The people I was training were "rock star" editors and much better at the craft than myself, I was just teaching them the new tool. In turn, it was a crash course for me in the art of sound editing and I was being taught by masters. About two years after starting, there I got a full-time editing/design opportunity because I was one of a handful of people who knew the computer system, so I took this opportunity and ran with it. I was not in the Editors Guild for my first three years there, since it was hard to get into the union at the time because they weren't allowing new people in. The company had