TFT1957 Interview with Matthew Carman, Regional Sales Manager for Cinema Broadcast at RED Digital Cinema.

– Can you describe the family environment you were born into, and who your parents are?

My parents both grew up in the Midwest. My father’s family lived in Michigan and ran a women’s shoe and clothing store on Main Street, Ann Arbor, Michigan. My mother grew up in North Dakota. Her father was in the 1936 Munich Olympics and was part of the team that started the gymnastics program. He later ran VA hospitals, and my grandmother was a stay-at-home mom. After my father returned from Vietnam, he moved the family to Sarasota, FL, where he joined the family business at the shoe store. Later, my mother opened a handbag store alongside the shoe business. I have two older brothers (twins) who went into local politics.

– How would you characterize your demeanor and activities during your school years?

I was raised on an island, and we always seemed to have full access to do stupid stuff. We were allowed to leave the house at 8am, and our parents didn’t expect to see us until the streetlights came on or we brought friends over for lunch. I was into anything adventurous, and I played every sport we had: baseball, soccer, tennis, surfing. In later years, I was in Boy Scouts because my father was the scoutmaster. We traveled and did camping and hiking trips around the state and country. I ended up achieving the rank of Eagle Scout at 15.

– When you were a child, what subjects did you enjoy most in school?

Social studies and probably math were my favorite subjects when I was in school. Later on, I got into some sciences. But then I got into sports, and my grades started reflecting that shift. So, yeah, in the beginning, I’d say social studies and math—I was pretty good at both.

– Why did your family move to Florida?

They were originally from Michigan and Minnesota, and they just didn’t like the snow. They wanted full-time summers and year-round sunlight. So, that’s how it went.

– What did you do after high school?

I ended up going to school in Gainesville, Florida. I originally planned to play soccer for the University of Florida. That was the route I wanted to take. Unfortunately, their soccer team was postponed, so I ended up not staying in Gainesville to play soccer. I think even to this day, they still don’t have a men’s soccer team. But that was the original plan—to play soccer at the University of Florida. I ended up going to community college in the meantime, waiting for the sport to return.

– Which university did you select for your higher education, and why?

I attended Full Sail University in Winter Park, FL. I had already been in the film industry for 10 years and wanted a fast-track program to learn more about film and earn my degree.

– At what point did your interest in technology or technical fields begin to materialize?

When I was 17, I fell into modeling, and that was truly my first experience in the production world. I was able to work with some great photographers, and watching what they did really sparked my interest. It wasn’t long before I had the opportunity to work with some great production companies and learn from the best.

– Can you recount the experience of your initial job role and the industry it was in?

I worked with a company in Orlando called MFMP, and they shot most of the marine photography in the country, from Bass Pro to Sea-Doo and Wellcraft. If it was on water, they filmed it. I was tasked with the video team, shooting beta cams and ¾-inch tape. It was my first time seeing how images could be captured to tell a story, and I was hooked.

– How would you describe the trajectory and evolution of your career path?

It took time, but when it launched, it really took off. From 1991 to 1999, I went from a PA and assistant videographer to owning my own small company. I did live multi-camera TV shows—about 70 per week in the lineup—and commercials for the New York Times company. From 2006 to 2017, I worked in television, shooting commercials, TV series, and films. For 9 years, I worked in outdoor television and was honored to have a #1 rated series for 5 years. It was the best job ever—traveling around the world and filming. In 2017, after working an average of 225 days a year in freelance and over 8,000 productions, I received an offer to launch a new program with Canon USA, working in education and system integration. I stayed there for 7 years before being offered a spot at RED Digital Cinema to launch the Cinema Broadcast side of RED.

– What does a typical day in your life look like outside of your professional commitments?

My life outside of work revolves around my wife and 2½-year-old son, Archer. We are into snowboarding, hunting, fishing, surfing, and traveling. I’m currently planning our next trip to South Africa. I want to make sure my family gets to see the world like I did.

– Reflecting on your journey, what would you regard as your most significant achievements?

In the production world, it would be the fact that I was never over budget or time on any production I ran. In life, I have the best group of friends and colleagues anyone could ask for!

– When was your first experience with the world of video, TV, or cinema?

I think I was 17 at the time. It was my senior year in high school. I actually got involved in modeling and acting, and I signed a contract to do a lot of modeling. That’s how I got into it. I started meeting the right photographers and producers, and that was my first taste of everything. I ended up working with some very good photographers, which helped everything else that came later in my life.

– What position did you play in soccer?

Pretty much everything—usually right wing or sweeper. I also did midfield and defense, just wherever they wanted to put me. But most of the time, it was right wing or sweeper.

– And about your university life—would you say that your university education is what spurred you to become a professional?

Honestly, after I left Gainesville, I went straight into production and started working. It wasn’t until after September 11, when the world came to a standstill, and there was no production work, that I decided to move to Alaska for a year just to get away. I wanted to go snowboarding, to be honest. I just needed a break. After a year, I came back and started thinking about what I wanted to do next—whether I wanted to stay in sports or go in a different direction. Around that time, my best friend was planning to go to school in Orlando at Full Sail University for music production. He suggested I go with him, and though I wasn’t sure about going back to school, I looked into it. Full Sail had a film degree program, and since I always wanted to finish my degree, I decided to go for it. Even though I’d been in the industry for 10 years and was pretty successful, I thought about how I’d want my future kids to know that I went to school, so they’d understand the value of education.

At 29 years old, I was by far older than most of the students, and I had more experience than 95% of my teachers. But I wanted a degree, and I did learn a lot. I had been working in HD, shooting beta, and then transitioning to HD, which was my specialty. If you were filming in Florida and needed HD, I was one of the first people you’d call. But at Full Sail, I learned to shoot on film, which was something I always wanted to do. So, yes, going to Full Sail definitely leveled up my career. But I was already deep into it and had clients lined up when I graduated. I knew that production was the job and career I wanted to continue in.

– How did you find these jobs?

My first job was from 1991 when I was modeling. I actually worked with a marine photography company out of Orlando called Mike Fuller Marine Photography. They shot commercials for Bass Pro Shops, Sea-Doo, and the majority of the boating industry. I met the team there and mentioned that I was interested in going to school in Orlando and doing some work. They offered me a job over the summer, working with them before I started at Full Sail or any other school. It was a great opportunity. I worked with them for five months on location in Missouri, and I learned more on set with them during that time than I could have anywhere else. It was an incredible experience, and it launched me into being behind the camera more often.

I ended up, when I was back in Sarasota, working for a local network that did 70 live TV shows a week, and I started out—yeah, it’s a lot, every night. So every night I was there. It was crazy. We had about five to six minutes to change sets in between and switch sides. My job at first was as a camera operator for them, and after about a year or so, I moved up to being a director. I used to do live production for multi-camera shoots. We had, oh man, I think on average, 40 to 45 live shows every week. That was from 5 o’clock until 11 o’clock at night, every single night—at least five days a week, if not more. So it was good training, good experience, and I learned a lot from that. We had a pretty significant lineup. We had some pretty good shows, including a really good sports show, and then we had a farm and garden show, which, honestly, was the highest-rated show we had. We had over 250,000 people tune into every episode, which was unreal for a local show. But that’s what we had.

– It’s truly amazing with your level of experience. Why would you attend a university after that? You already had so much experience—why?

Honestly, I just wanted the degree. That was it. I just wanted to have the piece of paper that said I had the degree. To be quite honest, I don’t think I needed it. In fact, there were times where it kind of hindered me. My very last month at school, while I was working on my 35mm thesis film, I got a phone call from my cousin, who’s a very well-known filmmaker in Hollywood. He asked me to come work on a shoot with him, but I had to say no because I was the DP for the final project at school. I probably should have left school and gone to the film because the movie was Batman Begins, and I would have had a spot on that with Christopher Nolan and everybody else. I probably should have done that, but I didn’t.

– From 2006 to 2017, you worked in television, shooting commercials and working in outdoor television for nine years. You had a #1 rated series for five years. Can you talk a little more about this period?

Yeah, that’s when I started doing reality TV shows and more television work. I got into it by fluke. There was some downtime in the industry, and a lot of commercials weren’t being shot. This was back when Craigslist was actually a place to find real jobs. I applied to a job listing for outdoor television. At the time, I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I sent my resume anyway. It just so happened that the person who posted the job accidentally posted it in the wrong state, so I ended up looking for work in North Carolina, but the job was in Jackson, Mississippi. They went through my resume, and we had a phone call. The person was a young gentleman with a hunting and safari TV show that aired on NBC Sports and the Sportsman Channel. I told him, “Listen, I’ve never done any hunting in my life, but I’ve shot sports, and I think I could do what you’re asking for. But I’ve never done it before.” We made a deal: if he liked my work, he could keep me on, and if not, he could fire me. Simple as that. The first job he hired me for was a 30-day trip to Africa. We went over there, and I shot enough content by myself in about two weeks. Then, he compared my footage with what he had gotten the year before with two camera guys in a month. After seeing what I shot and what I had done, he immediately said, “You’re hired.”

So, I did his TV series for a year and then started looking for other production work in outdoor entertainment. I ended up working with a company out of Colorado and appeared on several different TV shows for fishing—Ford Frontier, Fishing Frontiers—as well as several other channels and networks. I then worked with a show called Bucks of Tecomate, a deer hunting and safari show. It was the number one-rated show on outdoor TV at the time, airing on NBC Sports. I took over as the camera operator and field producer/director for that show and stayed with them for five years, traveling around the world. Honestly, that was the best job—hunting and doing safaris. During the winter, from September to January, I worked on the hunting and safari shows. From March until June, I worked on a fishing TV series. So, I had the best of both worlds—hunting and safaris in the winter, fishing in the summer and spring. I also had about five months off each year, which was great.

– What happened seven years ago? Why did you switch your career path?

It reached a point where I was traveling about 265 days a year. I was always working, always on the road, and I didn’t have much of a social life. I knew I wanted to get married, have a family, and settle down at some point, but being on the road for over 200 days a year wasn’t going to allow that. Around that time, I got a phone call from a headhunter looking for someone to work for Canon. They had a new position opening up for Head of Education, where I’d be in charge of working with universities, film schools, and journalism schools.

At that point, I had just finished a project with an Indian tribe in the Pacific Northwest and didn’t want to travel as much anymore. So, I accepted the job and went to work for Canon USA. I was there for about eight years. We started an education program, and I also began the House of Worship division, focusing on churches. We expanded into system integration and grew that division into one of Canon’s top producers. We had a team of four people, and we exceeded all expectations. We helped design cameras, lenses, and other equipment during those eight years.

However, I eventually felt like I had reached the end of the line because Canon wasn’t interested in about 80% of what we were asking them to do in terms of camera builds and certain features. I didn’t feel it would be a good fit for me any longer. Around the same time, I learned that a church in California had switched from Canon cameras to RED cameras. Originally, it was supposed to be an all-Canon deal—cameras and lenses—but after COVID, they switched to RED. I couldn’t understand why because I thought RED was too expensive and out of their budget, plus RED wasn’t really in that market. I called RED and spoke to someone, introducing myself as working for Canon and asking if they were going into the House of Worship market. They said no and that they had only done about $300,000 in camera sales to churches in their entire history. It wasn’t a market they were focusing on. But someone in the church had used RED cameras because they were right around the corner from the headquarters. After a 45-minute conversation, the person on the phone asked, “Do you want a job?” I learned more about their cameras and what they could do, and I realized it was something I could really dive into. So, I told Canon I was done. I gave my two weeks’ notice, and two weeks later, I started with RED.

I launched their cinema broadcast side, system integration, and House of Worship network for RED. It’s a position I absolutely love because we’ve taken a true cinema camera that everybody knows, and now we’re using it in the broadcast world. It’s been great seeing the strides we’re making, and the fact that every single person I show it to is blown away by what we can do. Right now, I can say we’ve taken the top 10 churches in the country away from Sony and other camera companies and brought them to RED in the last two years. We’ve really elevated what we can do at live events. I sold our first camera to ESPN, and they’ll have it in their system in the next couple of weeks. I’m talking to more networks. We took over the Spanish Football League, and they’re now shooting everything on RED. We have four cameras going into the Saudi Football League. We’re doing a lot more live events, concerts, and sports that people never thought we could do, but we’re doing it extremely, extremely well. It’s nice seeing this side of cinema broadcast elevate. We have a product that people know from movies, but they never knew we could do live broadcast events—and we do it extremely well.

– Why did you move from sunny Florida to Denver?

At that point, I was traveling so much, and I was always out west. If I stayed in Florida, I’d be home for maybe 16 to 30 hours before flying out again. I realized I could live anywhere. I was born and raised in Florida and lived on an island most of my life, but I like snow, I like snowboarding. I thought, where could I go? Colorado seemed to be a good fit because it had a big airport, it’s kind of in the middle of the country, and I could get anywhere within a couple of hours. So, I thought I’d give it a shot. I drove out there around my birthday in September 2011, and I only planned to stay for about four or five years. Now it’s 13 years later, and I’m still here.

– Moving to more personal questions, how did you meet your wife?

Actually, at a wedding. One of my best friends married her best friend, and we met in New Mexico. That was about seven years ago. We introduced ourselves, and that’s how it started. About a year later, I was in Texas, where she’s from, at an event with Canon. It just so happened they sent me to this event, but I didn’t really need to be there. I don’t know why they sent me, but I was there for three days. I reached out to her and asked if she could suggest a good steakhouse since I had never been to San Antonio before. She suggested a place, and I think I replied, “If you’re not busy, would you like to join me for dinner?” She was off from work, so we went to dinner. That was it. We’ve been together now for over seven years and married for six. We just celebrated our sixth anniversary, and we have a two-and-a-half-year-old little boy. We’re also working on baby number two as we speak.

– Do you still work 225 days a year now that you’re married?

Now, I’m actually home a lot more. While I still travel and do freelance work in production, I’m probably on the road about two weeks out of the month, meeting clients and doing demos for our cameras and broadcast systems. But I get to spend a lot more time at home now. For example, I’m home this entire week, which is great. Next week, I have a couple of events to attend, but I spend at least half my time at home now.