Warren Todd Belcher This is Me

Education

 Web References

1. 1. Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal

   www.chroniclejournal.com/story - [Cached]

   Published on: 6/12/2002   Last Visited: 6/12/2002

   Warren, who has spent 14 successful years working as a film sound engineer for Deluxe Toronto, didn't mean to get into the business.
   
   He did want to take a music recording program, but he didn't think it would lead him into the film industry.
   
   "I left Thunder Bay with sort of visions of grandeur of becoming a rock star," he said.
   
   It was those visions that led him to change his name. He was born Warren Todd Belcher, and didn't think Belcher would suit a rock star. So, when he was about 19, he took Warren as his last name.
   
   "Recording goes hand-in-hand with music," he continued of his post-secondary program choice. "I thought, you learn how to record the music, you play the music, and then you make albums," he said.
   
   With those goals in mind, the former Hammarskjold student enrolled at Humber College in the recording/music program. After he'd paid his tuition and found an apartment, he discovered the recording program was axed.
   
   But rather than waste a year, he took instrumental jazz. The interest in recording was still there when he finished, however.
   
   "The next-best program that I heard about was Fanshawe College in London, Ont.," he said. "I went there for two years and got a degree in recording engineering - still not thinking it was going to be anything - and I moved to Toronto with a band," he said, adding he "figured the band would be my ticket to the future."
   
   Guitarist Warren and his band Big Huge People took a shot at the big time. But it didn't work out quite the way Warren had hoped.
   
   Playing in a band was a money-losing proposition, he said, because they spent all their time rehearsing. When they did land a gig, the pay was too low to make it worthwhile.
   
   "After finding out that Toronto is a pretty harsh city if you don't have any money, I decided that, well, I could go and get a job as a fry cook or I could try to put to work my engineering diploma," he said.
   
   It was the late 1980s and the Canadian film industry was booming.
   
   Warren signed up with the Futures program and started working with now-defunct Videosound Studios. He spent 1 1/2 years there, partially bolstered by Futures, "which pays employers to take you on a limited basis," he said.
   
   "Through that, I made connections in the recording industry and I found out that Deluxe Toronto was opening up a new sound facility here in Toronto," Warren said. "I went over there and I banged on their door for about two months, and then they finally gave me an interview and hired me."
   
   Warren is a rerecording engineer at Deluxe, and does post-production movie sound - basically a touch-up of sound recorded during filming which takes several weeks.
   
   "We take all the sound for a film or a television show and manipulate it," he said. "Most people think they just stick a microphone out there and add music, and you get what you see on the television or in the cinema. But it's a lot more involved than that.
   
   "They're lucky to even get the voices of the actors sometimes. So all the background sounds are replaced, all the wind tracks behind it, all the squealing of tires," Warren said.
   
   "Anything that you see on the screen, the sound is more than likely replaced. It's not very often that they're able to keep usable sound."
   
   The replaced sounds are controlled, he said, so that sound engineers can draw audience attention to different things on screen.
   
   He used the example of the sound of a jet airliner being drowned out by music.
   ...
   "The jet (sound) will be there sometimes, and sometimes it won't be," Warren said. "All of the jet sounds would have been replaced, so they're totally controllable."
   
   The Genie and Gemini awards came for his work on the Canadian film Treed Murray, which played at this year's North of Superior Film Association festival in Thunder Bay.
   
   Among the projects Warren has also worked on are the film Cube and the series Road to Avonlea. He's currently working on A&E's Nero Wolfe series.
   
   His personal life is going well, too: he's been engaged to Cathy Neves - a French woman Warren met in Cannes when he was taking a French immersion course - for about a year. No wedding date has been set.
   
   He's not a rock star, and he has no plans to take another shot at the music business. Any regrets?