Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546054
14 M PS E . O R G Brad Beaumont MPSE Sr. Manager, Sound Design – Central Creative, Riot Games y younger brother Ryan would tell you that our action figure battles in 1980s suburban Ohio rarely got past the planning stage. This was my fault. I insisted every battle have appropriate music, and the deliberations over what should score a G.I. Joe ambush could eat an entire afternoon. The fight itself was almost beside the point. Ryan wanted combat. I wanted a soundtrack. We lived about half an hour outside Cleveland, backed up against a big state park, and I spent most of my Getting into "The Industry" is something each of our members has a unique, and usually unusual path into the film, TV, interactive, and gaming audio community. MPSE Wavelength is pleased to present an ongoing column that presents the various experiences of our membership in their path into the industry. Our MPSE Board of Directors will be presenting their experience, and we would love to see our membership contribute to this column about their experiences as well. childhood in those woods building forts and inventing kingdoms. I was just as at home digging in the dirt as I was holding a Nintendo controller, and I was obsessed with video games in the way only an '80s kid could be. Back at the house, my dad always had the newest computer gear around, and I burned through cassette tapes making ridiculous radio dramas. Imagination, technology, games, and recorded sound. I had no idea those things were a career, I just knew they were the only things I cared about. Middleschool gave me a short, unremarkable run on the saxophone. High school gave me choir, where I fell in love with the communal act of a room full of people performing together. College gave me a wake- up call. I started at the University of Cincinnati in 1999 as a business major and made it through my freshman year before admitting I needed to do something creative or lose my mind. The university's electronic media program took me in and gave me a foundation in everything: film and video, audio production, broadcast theory, entertainment law. By junior year, I had figured out who I was. Not the most gifted musician in the room, but the guy who knew what sounded good and wanted to be behind the glass making the calls. I was going to be a recording engineer and music producer. The program is also where I met Shannon, who would become my wife and who was chasing the exact same dream. In the summer of 2003, hungry for more hands-on time with large- format mixing consoles, we toured Full Sail, looked at apartments in Florida, and came home ready to enroll after graduation. Then we had a beer (or four?) with our UC audio production professor, Tom Haines, who told us to scrap the whole plan, move to Los Angeles and get on with it already. So after graduating in December 2003, that's what we did. In February 2004, we packed two cars and one Australian Shepherd named Merlin and drove west. We arrived to find the industry we had come for was quietly disappearing. Home recording was getting cheap and good, and the small studios that traditionally hired hungry kids were closing. We hadn't fully let go of the training itch, though, and enrolled in a concentrated program at the Los Angeles Recording Workshop that finally put us behind those SSL and Neve consoles. It was there, almost by accident, that everything turned. A few class sessions on post-production sound; performing Foley effects to picture, taking video game cinematics that had been stripped of all audio and rebuilding their soundtracks from scratch. It was performance without needing to be a virtuoso. Storytelling through sound. I recognized it immediately. It was the action figure battles all over again, except now, somebody might pay me. My first industry internship lasted exactly one day. I walked into an audio BY CHARLES MAYNES MPSE BREAKING ENTERING & M