MCA-I Member Profile February 2009 - Tim Keenan the Digital Mayor - 16-Feb-09: Media Communications video production multimedia producer director editor camera operator

Tim Keenan is just at home in the city council chambers as he is in his control room at Creative Media in Orange County. Tim has always welcomed change in his life. He moved from radio to the recording studio, to leadership roles in MCA-I, and then city hall. He’s open to change as a means to an end – making things better.

DR – I start with the same question, but since I always get a different answer, I’ll keep asking it. How did you get into this business?

Tim – Well, I went to school at Cal State Long Beach. I was a radio-TV communications major and started out in radio. It was kind of coincidental that the chief engineer at the last station I worked at, started this business - Creative Media. He said me, “would you like to come to work for me?” Well what is it you’re doing? He said, “I’m working with a company that has a contract with the army. And we’re doing slide show sound tracks for these army training programs and there are gobs and gobs of them.” They accounted for about 90 percent of his business.

So I went to work for him part time and worked in radio part time. I discovered this whole other side of the business – this whole non-broadcast corporate side of the business that’s really kind of the bread and butter of our industry for MCA-I folks.

DR – You mentioned “slide shows.” I have memories of multiple projector slide shows, but they are distant memories. You’re really dating yourself.

Tim – I will admit I’m an old timer. When I hear the term “Multimedia” I still think of banks of slide projectors. We used to do a lot of those – sound tracks for multi projector slide shows that were considered multi-media. So, yes I’m a veteran of the industry, no question.

DR – This is not the same business that you left the radio station to come to work for, is it?

Tim – It has evolved over time. But I still have a passion for audio. I think that you can do so much with audio to tell a story - with audio only - whether it’s a corporate training program or whatever. You watch television and turn off the picture, you can still tell what’s going on. But if you turn off the sound, you generally don’t have a clue. And audio is also that ethereal, forgotten part of the industry. I’m kind of an anomaly. We have this passion for audio – the things that you can do with it. The music and sound effects, the emotion you can capture.

DR – And talk about an evolution – the tools of the trade have certainly changed haven’t they?

Tim – I could have never imagined the tools that we have to work with now. We used to cut tape. I got very adept at cutting tape very fast. The entity Creative Media has been in business almost 40 years. We moved into this facility 20 years ago. 20 years ago we were analog multi-track, locked to video. And now it’s so much easier and so much faster.

Tim – From the business side of it, because the technology is so accessible price-wise, so affordable, everybody has it. And so there’s not necessarily the need for the structure of going to a post production facility or going to an audio facility.

Tim – The cool thing about audio is that not everyone has a passion for it, and the history that I think we have. And so we still have great clientele who appreciate what we bring to the table. Even those who might have the capabilities on their own computers and their own systems, we’ve built acoustically isolated booths, control room, huge collection of sound effects and music that we’ve gathered over the past 3 plus decades. That’s what we bring to the table.

DR – So the art of sound design really requires a complete pallet of skills and tools and experience. And in many ways, these are going to be unique to each person or facility.

Tim – Exactly. Touching on this experience – one of the things that I feel great about and where I’ve grown in the last 30 years is that I have had the opportunity to work with some amazing voices talents, and I would include you in that list of some great voices whom I have learned from. And I’ve worked with some great directors. I’ve sat side-by-side and watched them pull a performance from a voice talent using words and using emotions. And I’ve learned working with those great voices and directors over the years. I started out in radio thinking voice work was one thing and finding out that it could be so much more. So that’s another evolution in my process.

Tim – I would say it’s kind of a sculptor - someone who takes disparate elements, puts them together and fashions them into something that becomes something else, something that captures emotion.

A sound track is multi-layered and it’s multi-dimensional. The visual people who think in visual terms know all the layers that go into graphics. The client looks at the end product and says “that looks really nice”, not knowing the layers that it consists of. Same thing with sound. You have the layer of the spoken word, whether it’s on-camera performance or voice-over performance. Then you have another layer of background sound, and then a layer of specific sound effects that punctuate something. And then a layer of music, and all those layers put together for the end product.

We don’t do as much sound design as I would like to do. That’s really not my niche. My niche is helping people find the right voice to capture the exact mood and style of what the end product is.

DR – There are so many different uses for the audio that you produce – from learning to sales and motivation. And is a range of environments that the sound has to exist in too.

Tim – We’ve seen a variety of different playback mediums and how they are used whether it’s a classroom setting or now web based training. People are sitting at a computer, whether they’re doing it at home or doing it at work. There’s still a lot of work that goes into making the sound as good as it can be, no matter what it’s being played back on - a DVD, web based or on a huge screen in a theater to inspire 300 sales people.

DR – You really have one of the finer facilities in the region. Could you tell us about it?

Tim – When we moved to this facility 20 years ago we built two separate control rooms so we could have two projects going on simultaneously. Our computers are networked together. We recently switched to the latest Mac based system. We’re using a program called Sound Track, which is the audio version of Final Cut. And that’s working out real well. We have music libraries and a fairly large control room so that can accommodate multiple clients.

We’ve built acoustically isolated rooms – high ceilings and no straight corners. We didn’t just take an office building and convert it, we actually built the studio from scratch. We had an architect design the facility for us.

Tim – We’re set up so that we can do radio style interviews, with a host and two guests, or phone in interviews, done for CD distribution or podcasts.

Tim – This actually has given a little bit of life to the audio side of things. Corporate podcasts have become part of the wave of new trendy things that utilize a lot of audio.

DR – Let’s talk about the hardware evolution. When you set up this facility, analog was still the mode of operation.

Tim – Yes. When the whole digital thing started and we switched away from tape we used a system called the Roland DM 80, and that was our first digital system. We look back on it now and think it was kind of clunky, but it worked for us because it was an affordable system to get into. That was before computer based systems were affordable. Then the next system we had was called SAW. That was a PC based system, a multi track system much like Pro Tools but more appropriate for long form projects, which were the kinds of things we were getting into. But, with the new technology, the more bells and whistles that you get, the deeper the learning curve is.

Tim – That’s the other thing about having been in the business for so many years. We’ve seen every possible type of client and every type of project that you can imagine. On the corporate side, it’s never ending. We do a lot of automotive stuff for sales training and service training as well as programs that are aimed at the consumer. We work for the food service folks, food service training. A lot of the technology companies are based here in Orange County. We’re privileged to be in the city of Cypress, which happens to be the home of the corporate headquarters for Yamaha Motor Corporation, Mitsubishi Motor Corporation and Van Shoes, all within walking distance of our facility. We have a very broad business park here in Cypress. But in the wider Orange County, there’s a breadth and depth of businesses that are here, from technology to food service and we’ve provided service to all of those. Then on the commercial side, there are ad agencies and we’ve done radio commercials and audio for TV commercials with them.

DR – You and I recently crossed paths at the MCA-I ProTrack conference in Anaheim. Let’s talk about your role in the organization as an involved member.

Tim – Yes, I was able to help out. I was very pleased with that. I attended the conference and helped out with the awards ceremony. I’ve been an MCA-I member for 20 years. I was involved in leadership in the chapter in the late 80’s and early 90’s. It was a great experience, I really enjoyed it. Of course, I’m still involved in the chapter. Our chapter has had its ups and downs, just like the national organization, but is continuing to thrive. And I think that’s partly due to the leaders who are in the organization today. They’re doing a great job. It’s been great for me and I can’t say enough about MCA-I, from the networking stand point, and from the friendships that I’ve built over those past 20 years. I’ve been a continuous member for that period of time.

In the early 90’s I got to be a Golden Reel judge, which meant going back to Texas at the time to the headquarters and spending a week in a hotel room watching hundreds of videos deciding who was going to get Gold, Silver or Bronze. That was a fantastic experience for me.

DR – Let’s engage in some constructive criticism. How could MCA-I grow and strengthen?

Tim – I would say reaching out to a younger group of people, and I think that’s where we’ve had some successes here in the Orange County - L.A. chapter. We’re doing a lot of our meeting notices through electronic means. That will reach a whole different kind of an audience. There are hundreds of producers here in Orange County who know nothing about the networking organizations, the professional development organizations that are out there. And that’s true in most large cities. You just need to reach out a little further and help people expand their network base. When I was involved in leadership in the chapter, it was an interesting challenge. I was membership director and feel proud of some of the accomplishments that I made to the chapter back then in the 90’s. But it was tricky. You had to call people up and say this is a really worthwhile organization and you’ll benefit from it. You just have to keep at it and provide great programs and make it work.

DR – We have to say that you’re involvement in the community at large extends beyond MCA-I leadership, you moved into the realm of public service through government.

Tim – Yes, and it’s funny that you mention that because I have to give MCA-I a little bit of credit on this. After I moved my business to Cypress, there was an issue that I disagreed with that was being pushed by the city council. We were part of a citizens group then that helped over turn that as an initiative. Then we got some friends elected to city council. A couple of years later they tapped me and said, Tim we need you to run for city council. I served on the city council for 8 years. I served as mayor twice in that time. It was a great growing experience for me as a person. And I have to give credit to MCA-I because my leadership in the organization got me up in front of groups of 50 or a 100 people where I got over my intimidation of speaking in front of crowds. So when it came time to run for city council, no problem. It gave me a little bit of an edge.

DR – I trust if an MCA-I member needs a key to the city you have a couple of those left.

DR – We thank Tim Keenan for his time with us and his continued and productive involvement in MCA-I.