We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Micah Manaitai. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Micah below.

Alright, Micah thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

So I just took the big leap that everyone in this field takes: I quit my job to do what I’m most passionate about. For better or worse I have a broad set of crafts I feel that way about. I worked in audio post production for TV/film and became a dialogue editor, while an interest in both composing and mixing began to incubate in me. For the past 6 years, I can’t think of a time that my work day wasn’t at least 12-13 hours minimum, given that I had a full time staff position in a studio and I would continually book a full after-hours schedule of freelance work. I even managed to progress through the ranks at the studio while growing my freelance clientele base, which set me up for the big move. I started taking on bigger projects at work, but getting to write and mix for really beautiful stories at home at the same time, and I started panicking because there just weren’t enough hours in the day to complete the work I had committed to, and that’s when I knew I needed to make a change. So I bought my first pair of big boy professional speakers, and with a full time schedule of work planned for 6 months, I left the safety of a solid paycheck and jumped for to opportunity to compose for one feature film, and mix another. I’ll let you know in another 6 months how it all turns out, but for now it is immensely rewarding to feel like years of work is paying off into truly changing my life for the better.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

As much as I roll my own eyes at the label, I am a multi-hyphenate audio creative. That ranges from all things audio post production, such as dialogue editorial, sound design, VO/ADR and foley recording, and re-recording mixing and mixing music for broadcast. 6 years in a high volume studio in Hollywood will put you in a lot of situations. When I would get home from that job, I’d work on composing for short films and commercials, as well as writing, producing, and mixing original music. The benefit of being that focused for so long is that when productions come to me for creative services, I really can do as much or as little as as they may need. Ultimately, I find that folks enjoy having fewer team members to coordinate with, and if we do need to coordinate with multiple vendors, my experience from the studio world makes that a really easy bridge to cross. What’s currently keeping me busy is composing for a feature documentary, then I have a sound design/re-recording mix job for another feature documentary lined up after that. Knowing the ins and outs of several different roles in the finishing process and being able to switch between them has been hugely helpful for me and my clients in the past, and I’m grateful I put in the time in the right environments to make it the center of how I work, regardless of what my role on the team is.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

I think TV show ‘The Bear’ brought to light something that is difficult to explain to people who don’t do this kind of work. The characters on that show seem like they’re miserable, it looks like the work they do is slowly killing them, and they barely look happy doing it, but in the moments where they have breakthroughs, in the moments where they get to feel like they are fully realizing themselves, the audience gets to see what having a true career passion looks like. As cheesy as it sounds, I believe there is a world on the other side of a set of speakers, I’m obsessed with it. Every day I sit down in front of them, I learn one thing and 10 more things I need to know present themselves. I never feel like I’m rehashing the same thing over and over again, I truly get to be creative and use all of my problem solving mind. From the outside, it looks like I”m frustrated or doing the same thing over and over again, but the internal process is so different. I’m learning the muscle memory, my ears are getting better and better, working with sound and music is the only thing that I want to do and that work ethic reflects in everything I work on. Circumstances change, I feel really successful sometimes and like a clown other times but the work remains the same and I believe in putting in that work regardless of the project. For whatever reason, the desire to master craft is what drives me, and I’d have a lot of difficulty explaining that, but I feel grateful that show does such a good job of humanizing what this ridiculous urge actually looks and feels like.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

More than any particular lesson, I just want the opportunity to say that one of the best skills you can have is the ability to unlearn. I’ve found that adaptation is the most import skill to have in a field where the technology, landscape, and the basic way business is done changes constantly. My ability to learn and unlearn hard skills is the thing that has kept me employed. From client to client, I’ve needed to constantly unlearn each director’s preference for workflow, I’ve needed to unlearn what one person views as “too much” or “too little,” I’ve needed to change my definitions of words depending on the collaborator, and I’ve needed to change the tasks that make up the job description.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.alternatone.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/micahmanaitai/
• Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/micah-garrido-b44732106
• Other: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm11567020/

Image Credits
Taylor Hungerford