LOGAN ROMJUE
Interviewed by Nicole & Hashika
July 4, 2020
A lot of the time in audio and engineering fields, it attracts a lot of people who don’t necessarily have great people skills. So they’re brilliant but their brilliance is captured in the way they think and the way they solve problems instead of their interpersonal relationships. I have a little bit of both of those things so I feel like I work really well with directors.
Logan (they/them) is a sound editor and mixer based in the Los Angeles area. After graduating from Emerson College, they worked at a series of places until recently (last year!!) when they started their own company, Rogue Post and delved into the crazy world of freelance. For this creative highlight we will be jumping into their journey in audio post production and how they came to create their own business.
Hashika: When did this love for audio post production and sound engineering begin? What inspired you?
Logan: I have a background in music. I grew up playing piano at around 4 or 5 years old. I switched to flute when I was 9 or 10 and continued throughout high school. I was also involved in flute choirs and orchestra at my high school so music was always big throughout my life. My dad was super into music too. All of this kind of came together with film when I was part of a documentary program as a junior and senior in high school. In that program, I got really into editing. I used an old version of Final Cut Pro. There were three things I loved about it: finding the right music for a scene, seeing how it changed the emotions of the film; it completely swayed your emotions, and zero editing of videos that we had taken of people. I was able to edit their dialogue underneath the B-roll of them. I was able to piece together their dialogue and that was so cool for me. I was building something, I was building a story. That was so fascinating for me and I thought, wait I can probably go to college for this.
This prompted me to start looking into film programs. I was bouncing around between music and film for a while and I eventually settled on films because I liked the editing part of it whereas in music you’re doing a lot of the recording and then the editing afterwards. I liked editing to picture. I found two schools that I really liked that had solid audio programs specifically in the film department. I applied to both of those schools and got in and ended up picking Emerson College for sound design. They have a specific Audio Post Production and Sound Design major. That program was really pivotal in my understanding of how audio works and within film as a whole. The structure of that program is built so that all the film students are making their own films throughout the semester in their different classes and all of them need audio people to do all their audio work. So, I was involved in a program where I was hired by the school to mix and edit all the student films. It was really cool that Emerson had that program. They had 4 or 5 people that mixed all of them so immediately I got hands on experience. We were trained on how to get a film and within 4 to 8 hours we just would sit there with the director and do the whole thing which is very indicative of how it’s done in a real life mixing session. Having that hard core training in college with films that other students have made was really really important in teaching me how everything worked together. In the second year, the professor kind of dipped out and I ended up teaching a program to the incoming people which was really cool. Me and my co-worker and fellow student put together an entire lesson plan based on everything we had learnt that year and taught that program. We taught a college class! I’m very passionate about teaching so I really wanted to figure out how to best mentor other students even though they were my age and teach them the skills that I had learnt in a way that they could understand. Some of the skills obviously are very technical and there are a lot of terms you need to know to comprehend what you are being taught.
I was hired by a director while I was in college and she was working with an editor that went to Emerson College. She was Persian and was making an international film. It was a feature film, meaning it was around 120 minutes versus the 10 minute films that I was doing. So it was a massive step and something I had never done before. I was doing sound design and mixing for the entire film. There were three lines of dialogue so it was all an intense sound design and piecing together ambiences. And she was very difficult to work with. So right off the bat, I had the longest project I had ever done, a director that was very difficult and an international film that relied very heavily on sound effects. A lot of the audio that they captured on set was not there so we had to go back and manually record. It was a shit show of a project but it was really awesome and taught me a lot.
One of the things was figuring out how to work well with a director. A lot of the time in audio and engineering fields, it attracts a lot of people who don’t necessarily have great people skills. So they’re brilliant but their brilliance is captured in the way they think and the way they solve problems instead of their interpersonal relationships. I have a little bit of both of those things so I feel like I work really well with directors. That’s when the love for teaching comes in - I love helping people understand what it is that I’m doing and putting things into simpler terms to help them find a creative vision for their project.
I had a lot of experiences in college with directors that were difficult and didn’t know how to talk about audio and didn’t know how to get their audio ideas across. They would say, “I want it to sound like this”, and I would say, “I don’t know what that means but let’s try and figure out what you’re trying to tell me.” That was very important in my early audio career, hitting those roadblocks with people that were very difficult to work with but having to get through the project and figure things out. It was really rewarding, the start to finish of those films. That film, ENDLESS?, is actually in film festivals around the world right now!
Logan: I think a big aspect of that too was time management. Huge. The two most important things that I learnt from that program was how to work with directors and time management. If you get a whole film and you only have eight hours, how do you budget your time? What’s important, what’s not? What will potentially fall through the cracks, what do you really need to work on? It changes depending on the director. Some do not care and just want you to do it for them and some really want to know every step of your process. Going from having ten minute projects to ones that are over an hour long, I had to really figure out how to manage my time. I was getting paid hourly for this so I had to put together a budget for this director. I had to figure out how do I make my time worth what I am getting paid and how to not go over what she is expecting to pay me. Right away, it put me to a more business mindset.
Nicole: You’ve done so many different types of projects from feature films, 10 minute films, podcasts, everything in between. What is a project - I’m sure they all vary - look like when it’s handed to you? Is it a full film, is it just a planning sheet? Is the project handed over before it’s filmed or after?
Logan: So it comes to me in many different stages. The films that I probably work most on are short films and features. I’m just getting into TV series right now and it’s very different because it’s on the big studios and broadcast side. In terms of short films, and I guess features too and more independent projects, if a director is on their shit, they’ll reach out when they’re filming. What will happen is that I’ll ask for a script and go through it to see what story they’re trying to tell. I’ll also see cuts of the film as they’re working on it. As audio editors, similar to doing color for film as well, you can’t really work on the project until it’s picture locked which means there are no more edits being made on it. If they take out 3 or 4 frames while I’m working on my end of things, it messes up the whole sequence. Once it’s locked, I’ll work on it. I’ll normally get a video file. If it’s a short film, it’ll be the whole thing. If it’s a feature, it depends on their workflow. Sometimes it’ll be the whole thing or they’ll give me an act. There’ll be 5 different reels or acts. It depends on the director and how they’re working on everything.
I have to do a lot of file management, which I love. My brain works that way. It’s called an AAF file and basically it’s a project file that encapsulates all the different audio files and keeps it in tracks that are laid out. Instead of them being one single file like a music track, they have all the different sounds split up like the bass, the drums, piano and all that. You can see all the dialogue, all the characters and all the ambiences of the music. They’ll send me a package and I’ll start from that.
Hashika: What softwares and programs do you use? And where would you start if you were, let’s say, a budding sound engineer?
Logan: I was definitely very fortunate because in high school we had access to Final Cut Pro which is video editing software. It’s similar to Premiere. It had video editing as well as basic audio editing capabilities. But the main audio editing platform is called ProTools. I love ProTools. I don’t know too much about the music capabilities of it but I love the way it works for audio editing for film. Once I got to college, they had a number of computers that had that program. And then I bought it. They’re now doing subscription based plans. It’s not very expensive. Maybe $10-20 a month depending on if you’re a student or not.
I recently started to use a couple of different platforms for syncing all my audios and stuff. I use Dropbox religiously to transfer files. There’s a video converter app which helps because I manage a lot of video files and space runs out quickly. This helps me compress videos and make sure they’re the right format because I’m interchanging so many types of files that need to be streamlined. And Google Drive is a must!
Hashika: I love Google Drive! I remember when I came over for Thanksgiving two years ago and you were talking about your big move to LA. What has that been like?
Logan: Emerson had a really awesome program for seniors where they had a satellite campus in LA. They had one big building with dorms in it as well as studios and classes. I finished college there. It was my final semester. This was two years ago. When I applied to schools - I don’t know what I was thinking - I applied to only two schools for college. But one was LMU in LA. I knew I was going to end up in LA eventually so I specifically went to Boston because I wanted to experience living somewhere else first. I also have no relatives on the East Coast so I knew I would be coming back to California.
Going to LA didn’t feel like that big of a deal to me because I knew that that was where I was going to end up. My family lives in San Francisco so it felt like LA was a nice divide where it was close enough but I could still do my thing. So I went to LA for my senior year. You had to have an internship. There’s a company called Formosa Group and they’re one of the top audio editing companies in LA. My Dad went to college with one of the people that had founded the company years ago when it had been part of a different company and then they merged and all that stuff. I had visited when I was 15 or 16 and I had seen all the huge mixing rooms and really liked it. I ended up setting up a number of meetings and talking with them and totally made my way into an internship there (note: they do not take interns). That was really awesome. It was unpaid but they were very aware of how internships can become really shitty sometimes. So they made sure that I was not going to work because I was not going to get paid. So it was an informational internship. So the way that they had structured it was that I would sit in with a different editor each time that I went into my internship two or three times a week. I was sitting in with editors that had worked on James Bond films and all these crazy things. It was so cool! It was extremely intimidating but it definitely taught me how to network. Right off the bat, I told myself, even if I was having a bad day I had to talk to this person. That was a really good experience for sure and I made sure to keep in contact with those people. It really helped me to settle into LA by having an internship like that. It was around the corner from where I was living and everyone was really nice. There were definitely, since it was a very established company, a lot of older people so I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to work there for a while. My ultimate goal is to work there and I’m making my way there very slowly.
But, a lot of that is trusting that gigs will come.
Transitioning to LA wasn’t very difficult because it was very easy to fly back home. My parents were also really supportive. I was working on films here and there. After I graduated, I moved back home from a little bit and then moved to LA. For the first couple of months I was looking for jobs and positions. It was a little bit discouraging because I had to go for a production assistant position even though I knew I just wanted to be doing editing. I knew that I was good at what I was doing. I was getting jobs for different films but I didn’t have a set up to work on. But I stuck it out at this company. They were called The Farm and were based in London. They had a couple hundred people working in London and one small office in LA with around 30 people. I was a PA for them. They were great. They did color and audio for TV shows. They did ADAM RUINS EVERYTHING and a couple of documentary type shows. I really just wanted to do audio editing. They had editors there so I got them to train me but weird stuff kept happening at the company The company got bought out by another company. The new company that had bought them was based in the US rather than the UK. So all of the people who were British, their visas expired. None of them could work including the people that were training me. They had to leave for a couple of months. Two of the mixers, who were also training me, both of their wives had babies at the same time so they also took a break. I was like “oh my god, I just love to be trained!” It wasn’t going to plan. I was hitting nine or ten months there and felt exhausted. Towards the end, I was working night shifts which is around 3pm - 11pm because I was starting to get more short films and feature films.
There was one day when I got a call from the editor who was the picture editor for the feature I worked on in college. He reached out to me three years later and said: “Hey, I’m working on a feature film. This is our budget. Do you have the time to do it? We need an editor for everything.” So normally for a film, it’s broken down to a dialogue editor, a sound effects editor, a mixer and a supervisor. But he wanted me to do all of it. So it was like, well if I stay in this position I can’t do it but if I quit, I can do full time freelance. That was a really difficult decision to make. I listened to a lot of business and motivational podcasts. I worked out while listening to motivational podcasts to hype myself up. And then I eventually quit. Then the company closed two weeks later. I definitely left at the right time. But, a lot of that is trusting that gigs will come. I planted the seeds for that three years before the project got to me. So I continuously reference examples like that when I start to freak myself out about where my next gig is going to come from.
I bounced around a couple different apartments in LA. It’s been cool seeing that in each apartment my desk set up and space has been getting gradually nicer. Like now, I’m able to have speakers instead of headphones. I have like two monitors with my laptop instead of just one. So I’m definitely upgrading my gear which helps with my workflow and productivity for sure. I just moved to Long Beach. I loved LA but I’m definitely more of a community person. I get the most satisfaction from working within a community and being in a good neighborhood where I know the neighbors.
I started dating someone around nine months ago and she lived in Long Beach. It’s about an hour away from LA so people would joke that it was a long distance relationship because traffic can be gnarly. But we made it work for a while. I was just doing freelance projects and working from home. My desk was in my bedroom and that was really draining to me. I was having issues with my roommate and stuff. So around a month and a half ago, she and I were on a walk in her neighborhood and they were painting an apartment. It’s a gorgeous apartment. This was two weeks before quarantine hit. I reached out and said I know this apartment isn’t listed yet but I am super interested. So they gave me the application. I was the only person to apply because of quarantine. At that time, my best friend who lived in Chicago, was going to be moving to Hawaii but it closed down. But she needed to get out of the situation she was in so she ended up moving in with me. Now I live in this beautiful Spanish style house in Long Beach, a little cheaper than LA. My partner lives in the building behind me and I’m a mile away from the beach. That was a really big move for me in terms of space. She works from home too so we kind of co-work together. That’s where I am now.
Tell us about Rogue Post.
I’ve been freelancing for around ten months and I was getting a lot of projects. I had a couple of feature films, short films and was working on a web series. I was figuring out what my rates are and how do I charge people, how do I invoice people and how to keep track of my clients. I became really interested in organizational systems and how to organize a business. And to make things easier, I was able to register my business as an actual business. I chose the name Rogue Post because Rogue was my family cat growing up. She still is. But I remember when I was younger I had a little microphone and I would record her purring. And I thought, you know what, that’s a really cute and cool name. I wanted to lean into the idea of exploring and using the sounds around you. Even basic sounds can capture your interest. So I opened that up. I am hoping to hire people in the future. Right now it’s just me but being able to streamline everything that I was doing really helped. I have a business bank account and everything that I am getting paid for goes there. It really helped to separate what I was doing business wise.
Nicole: And that happening very shortly before this quarantine situation, how has life changed for you in terms of freelancing?
Logan: Well I have a little kitten. He wants my attention all the time. In terms of my projects, with short films, if they don’t have a deadline, it can sort of drag on for forever. One of them actually finished two days ago but another has been going on since February. With no film festivals going on, they don’t have a deadline to submit anything. So I have one of those that is still ongoing. I have a feature film that I am working on the dialogue for here and there. Things have generally slowed down but I don’t think that that’s out of the ordinary. I think especially being a freelancer, I’ve had to work on trusting that projects will come and having blind faith in that. And that’s what has happened in the past with these projects. Like, I’m not expecting them. The way I kind of view networking is not to get things from people but rather to like let people know that “hey I exist and I’m ready to do work if you have it”. So that is what I kind of do. Even now with virtual networking - I know those gigs don’t exist right now but still reaching out to people and letting them know that I’m open to any projects but also asking them how they are doing. It’s important to stay connected to people. I just got on a project which is my first broadcast TV show. It’s a reality TV show called CELEBRITY WATCH PARTY on Fox. It’s quarantine content. They basically film different TV stars and celebrities and their reactions to watching things. Normally when I’ve been working, it’s just me and the director but as you get bigger projects, you get more people working with you. I got this gig from one of the guys who trained me while I was at The Farm. He told me this would be an overnight project. They turn out the project act by act. They start rolling out the act at 5-6pm in the evening. I won’t get an act till like 8pm. It takes me an hour or two. If the other editor can’t get to it, I’ll get to it and then we have to give it to the mixer and he mixes it overnight. They have a review session at 4am and at 8am it gets sent to Fox and five hours later it airs. It’s totally different from the short films. TV is harder and faster. It’s definitely a good way to sharpen up your skills. Right now I’m not editing things for quality. I’m editing for speed. That’s very important because I’ll get other projects when I’ll have to do that. It’s really nice to have something consistent even though it’s during the night. I’m getting paid for something and it’s airing somewhere so I’m working on getting those credits.
Hashika: That sounds incredibly fast-paced and stressful. Do you get into rhythm?
Logan: Definitely. It’s more stressful for the mixer because I get something and I get it done. But for him, he’s coordinating with the director and the crew and his sound editors. So it’s a lot more stressful on the supervision side of things. It’s definitely where I hope to go in the future but for right now, I’m working on getting my skills up to that point.
Hashika: Good for you! You’re really doing it! This was so helpful.
Logan: I also have one more super big life change that I’m excited for. I’m going to get my masters in the fall! I’m going to get my MBA. I live seven minutes away from CSULB. It’s a beautiful campus. I loved school growing up. My partner’s in school right now. She went back for another degree. I was helping her with homework and I felt like I missed it. When I was watching my sister’s NYU graduation, I knew I missed school. In my free time, I’m into looking up business management and productivity. Especially at my job as a PA, I was training some people. I was really curious about how to properly manage people and create a place where people are being heard. A lot of the PAs had really good ideas but were not being heard. We had a different viewpoint than other people in the company so I was able to talk to my boss about it. I just got really interested in the psychology behind how people work and what motivates them and increases their productivity. I’m excited to learn more about that in school.