Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/82522
Student To Pro Mo Ghayour is now at Trollback, where he's worked on titles, logos and rebrands. Brown's Modern Culture and Media program, she says, "was less about producing professional imag- es or films, and more about being able to express something as a film, a video, or a story." commercials, music videos and even features. "Being it's a smaller facility, I get exposure to a lot of different things," he notes. "And get- ting to learn Flame is awesome, because it's one of the most powerful tools in the indus- try for compositing and graphics work. Flame is hard to get your hands on outside a dedi- cated room. At school, we had things like Nuke and After Effects, so you have a basic knowledge of workflow and compositing, but the first time I got to sit down with Flame was when I got here." In the few months since joining Fluid, Paparatto has worked on a music video fea- turing Cold Play and Rihanna that plays on tour, along with end credits for the upcoming feature, Hot Flashes. The studio also regularly works on com- mercials for Nationwide, and recently creat- ed graphics for client Red Stripe. MICHELLE AMBRUZ Michelle Ambruz says she fell in love with Apple's Final Cut Pro while attending digital video summer camps while in high school. "That's when I decided it was something I would love to do," she says of her interest in editing and storytelling. After high school she went on to Brown University, where she studied Modern Cul- ture and Media, giving her a background in media theory and media practice. "You do a lot of reading about series of images, film analysis… you also have a lot of production classes, and have digital arts, computer stuff, film. It's a pretty well-rounded program." Ambruz says her goal coming out of school was to find a position that was both creative and technical at the same time. "I like being hands-on," she states. "And that's reinforced by the production side of things. I am a visually- oriented person and like creative — that's what drew me to the industry as a whole. " 36 Post • September 2012 An "intro to video" class gave her experi- ence with cameras. Other subjects included TV Theory and TV Production. Her final year's assignments were pretty open, allow- ing her to pursue personal areas of interest. "My last year of college, I discovered more on the production side of things, and the process from beginning to end," she recalls. "I fell in love with the elements of cinematog- raphy. I did some DP work on a couple of different films, and that was a lot of fun… Our last year, we got a bunch of new tools and used them in production classes. We got Canon 7Ds and a bunch of Zoom recorders. We had film cameras too — 8mm. There were a lot of different tools that we could play around with." When she graduated in May of 2011, she continued her part-time work at The Jacob Burns Film Center, a non-profit educational and cultural institution in Pleasantville, NY, not far from her home, where she worked as a counselor and helped teach kids video production skills. She also spent time brows- ing online job postings, which is how she met Goldcrest Post editor Katie Hinsen, who was looking for intern to help with a feature documentary. The project ended up being on hold, but Hinsen recommended Ambruz for an internship at the studio. When the facility's film scanner left on short notice, she was given a chance to quickly learn the ArriScan system and fell into an important role. "They told me, 'Drop whatever you are doing. You are no longer an intern. You are a film scanner,'" she recalls. She had just four days to learn the scanner's functions. The film scanning business at the studio has busy and slow times. One of her first projects was scanning 16mm footage for a film called The Girl, which was later finished at the studio. She's also done pin-registered scans for studios working on VFX sequences. www.postmagazine.com During slower times, Goldcrest will scan some of its own work for restoration, as is the case with the studio's current work on the 1991 animated feature Rock-a-Doodle. "The scanner does a lot," she says of her experience "There's a program called Digital Ice — it uses infrared to detect dust and dirt, and gets rid of some of that in the scan itself. We also have the Dark Energy system, that can do a lot of powerful image processing." Six months into her first position, Ambruz has this to say to those just getting out of school: "There is a period of this weird exis- tential crisis when people graduate, and they say, 'Well I want to be a filmmaker, but where do I start?' I think the thing to do is start anywhere. Don't be afraid to take opportu- nities that you never expected. I didn't even know what video engineering was." She also stresses the importance of internships, noting that employers will take notice of those who are not afraid to do what she calls grunt work. "It's the reality of it. It was a little disconcerting when I started because most post production internships that I had done before, there was actual edit- ing involved. I think that hinders a lot of people. If they give you something to do and if you are willing to do it and make every effort to do things well, people take notice. And that will get you farther." MO GHAYOUR Mo Ghayour has been with Trollback + Company (www.trollback.com) for a little over a year, following his graduation from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Coming out of high school, he had an interest in graphic design and animation, so he enrolled in a motion graphics program at the institu- tion with a goal of ultimately working on broadcast design, television commercials or title sequences. While in school, he frequented industry job boards, keeping an eye out for job open- ings. "I saw a listing for a designer and anima- tor, and applied, and ended up getting called back," he recalls of the Trollback position. "We went through talks and the logistics of the