In this report Playback looks at the state of the union for editors, getting the opinion of tried and true talent on creativity, technology and where do they go from here? (See story this page.) We also talked to a couple of the growing shops, Productions Modulations (below) and Solar Audio (p. 32) to see how they’re functioning in a growing and changing field. And last but not least, we profile three up-and-comers who are making names for themselves early in the game. (See pages 24, 25 and 28.)

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Vancouver: When his bosses said he’d direct an episode of ReBoot before he was 20, Michael Ferraro thought initially, ‘As if,’ but then pressed them to keep their promise.

The result is episode nine – ‘Crimson Binome’ – which wrapped 10 weeks of production in July, a month before his 20th birthday.

The episode, in which the lead characters are involved in a jailbreak, airs in mid-October on ytv.

While the young director admits that it was ‘half-luck’ getting where he is today as a senior modeler and animator at Mainframe Entertainment in Vancouver, his career in animation really began during eighth grade at Yale Secondary in Abbotsford, b.c.

‘In the drafting class, there were several computers with Autocad on them, introducing me to vector graphics and rudimentary 3D computer modeling,’ says Ferraro. He credits teacher Bill Henderson for getting him started working with computers and exploring animation.

By tenth grade, he was working with 3D Studio. ‘For the end-of-year project, a group of us designed a kids’ toy and did an animated video presentation of it,’ says Ferraro. ‘I took all the animation duties for myself, because I liked to do it so much, and I was the most proficient at it.’

For his final two years of high school, he moved to Robert Bateman Secondary in Abbotsford, following Henderson who had set up an extensive technical program. It was in his senior year that he went ‘hard core,’ committing almost half of his schedule to the computer lab and earning a work experience position with ReBoot. During that February stint with the then upstart computer animation company, he animated a shot of villainous Megabyte speaking.

A week after graduation, Ferraro was hired full-time.

He began on ReBoot and then started modeling characters for Beasties, another Mainframe computer-made series, before it went to air. He has since returned to be a key animator on ReBoot and to be assigned to special projects such as the Imax ReBoot ride.

But being a director has captured his imagination. ‘As an animator, you’re working for someone else who has the creative vision,’ says Ferraro, who says his interests have shifted from the technical aspects of the job to the intricacies of storytelling. ‘As a director, you’ve gotta see [the story] in your head. It’s quite a cool thing to make all the creative decisions for the show.’

Ferraro says his biggest challenge was learning how to be in charge and delegating creative tasks. By his own assessment he did ‘pretty good. I got what I wanted.’

As for the future, the twentynothing is not looking beyond the corporate walls of Mainframe. He’s been promised another directing gig, and while the draw to go to the States is strong, there are enough projects in-house to keep him interested. ‘I’m feeling pretty loyal to Mainframe,’ he says, of what has to date been his only employer.