Michael Mattioli:
“Building Green” on PBS
The Contractor Is Here
Some of the challenges of producing the TV series would be achingly familiar to anyone who’s undertaken a remodel. “There was so much uncertainty while we were shooting,” says Mattioli. “We’d have a guy scheduled to install solar panels and he’d show up a day early or a day late. I’d be busy and Kevin would call me saying, ‘The solar guy is here — we have to shoot!’ If our cameraman wasn’t available right then, I had to dash over to the site to shoot the installation myself.”
When Mattioli’s preferred editor wasn’t available to work on “Building Green,” he plunked himself down in that seat as well. “I got the editing job by default,” he says. “But it wasn’t entirely new to me. As a composer I’d worked on lots of music videos where editors gave me rough cuts to add music to.” Still, he says, “this is the first project where I’ve been the main video editor.”
He chose the platform he knew. “Final Cut Pro is the inexpensive way to get professional results,” says Mattioli. Shooting was done in DVCAM, with two decks for playback and capture. Next he digitized and logged more than 150 hours of footage in Final Cut Pro. Thirteen external FireWire drives — one for each episode — served as backup.
Easy to Fix
Final Cut Pro smoothed the gaps in Mattioli’s expertise. “Frankly, on some of the early scenes I shot the color wasn’t great,” he admits. “But if it was just a little oversaturated or blown out, we were able to tweak it. Final Cut Pro is simple to use, yet it does really sophisticated color correction — and that makes it an amazing program.
“Being able to save those shots meant a lot to us, because we couldn’t roll back to an earlier stage of building to reshoot a scene. And in a show like this, the content is what’s important. So if a take was basically okay, we wanted to use it.”
Mattioli used LiveType to create the graphics. As a novice, he says, “I started with wireframe animation and preset backgrounds; then I developed custom backgrounds, tossed out the presets, and overlaid the animation.” He adds with a laugh, “It actually looks like I knew what I was doing!”
Nothing for Granted
When it came to scoring and recording music and sound, Mattioli was back on terra firma. “I’ve been a composer and sound designer on Macs for 20 years,” he notes. In addition to writing all the music for “Building Green,” he sings and plays keyboard, flute, sax, guitar, and bass.
He recorded location sound — host monologues, interviews, and B-roll effects — directly to the video camera, then digitized the video in Final Cut Pro. After locking the edited picture, he used OMF interchange to edit production sound and music tracks in Digital Performer.
“I exported the tracks with couple-second handles on each side,” he recalls, “so I could do fade-ups, fade-downs, and so on. It worked great — I couldn’t do without that OMF feature.”
During production Mattioli was always on the move. “A huge asset of Apple gear is that it lets us continue a multitude of essential operational tasks in the field,” he says. “We log takes in Final Cut, use iCal for schedules, iDisk to post and access docs, iSight for video conferencing, Safari and Mail for browsing and email. We count on this stuff to work day in day out, and it does.”
Michael Mattioli, bestrewn with sound equipment, sizes things up.
Walking the Talk
A committed environmentalist since he began recycling at age 10, Mattioli is eager to see others take home the lessons he and Contreras have learned. “‘Building Green’ is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me as a creative person,” muses Mattioli. “I was able to work on so many aspects of a project where I can really make a difference.”
Building projects strain many relationships, yet Contreras and Mattioli remain friends — perhaps because they hewed to a strict division of labor. “He was consumed with the building,” explains Mattioli, “and I was on the production side. We each had our hands full.” Most importantly, he adds, “we were working toward our shared goal of creating meaningful, entertaining media that leads to positive change.”
In Mattioli’s view, the Mac lets them live and work greener. “We integrated ‘Building Green’ into our lives,” he says. “Working from home, we live greener. And when we travel, we always find someone doing an interesting green thing we can show our audience. How does it get any better than that?”
