PlasterCITY Digital Post
PlasterCITY Digital Post, the facility that was used to edit Journeys Below the Line: ER The PropMasters, has a history with the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. The post production supervisor, Michael Cioni, and many of the employees are graduates of Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. While at the university, Cioni and his partners produced and directed a program “alt.news 26:46” that won prizes in the Academy College Television Awards three years in a row. Cioni and some of the other participants of the program came to California for the College Student Awards banquet where they met their mentor, Dan Birman, a Governor of the Academy and member of the Educational Programs and Services Committee.
Birman encouraged them to come to Los Angeles, and in 2001 Cioni moved from Chicago to Los Angeles and began working as a high-definition technician for Christopher Coppola’s HD feature “Bloodhead.” Because Cioni was well versed in Final Cut Pro since its introduction, he began editing for Coppola's independent production company PlasterCITY, named after an actual city in central California. Business started pouring in so PlasterCITY moved from a garage to two rooms in a city building to its own facility at 6500 Sunset Boulevard. This new facility, which opened in 2003, is supported by Coppola and by Elyse Meredith’s New Media Company, EARS XXI.
As business grew, Cioni brought out a number of his college colleagues who had worked on “alt.news 26:46.” One of them, Jody Leggio, was the editor for this episode of Journeys. In addition to online editing with Final Cut Pro, PlasterCITY Digital Post offers color correction, offline editing, digital cinema consulting, digital effects and broadcast design, and digital technology seminars. Clients include HBO, Discovery, Wal-Mart, and Sony. The website is www.plastercitypost.com.
The SIU graduates are very appreciative of the start that the Academy gave to their careers. “The Academy was the catalyst for our having the guts to come out here,” Cioni says. “It gave us a frame of reference for Los Angeles. The mentor system really worked. Dan Birman is our surrogate father and made us realize that making it in Hollywood wouldn’t be as hard as we thought it would be.”
