Mesgen Gebremeskel. Photo courtesy of Mesgen Gebremeskel.
Finding a career that aligns with one’s interests and passions is no easy task, but it is always rewarding, Mesgen Gebremeskel, Texas Tech alum, shares his journey to realizing his dream career as a colorist.
“I was always interested in cinematography as a whole – but there was just always something about it that I felt like I understood the theories, and I understood composition and lighting and stuff,” Gebremeskel said. “I felt like sometimes I wasn’t the best at it, but I knew that I loved that aspect of things.”
Gebremeskel, originally from Amarillo, Texas, said he always had an interest in media and film but had originally intended on studying architecture at Tech.
“My original major was actually architecture, and I loved it cause I did a lot of projects in high school that dealt with architecture and developing plans and I was very interested in that,” Gebremeskel said. “After I graduated high school my friend with him and his buddies were filming like a YouTube web series – something very small, but they needed someone to edit their project so they asked me…and I was like ‘you know what I have nothing else going on,’ so I started helping them out and things just kind of naturally fell into place.”
It was during this time with his friends helping them create and edit videos for their YouTube channel, that Gebremeskel discovered his passion and potential in videography.
“I changed my major and yea my parents were – my parents were not that happy – going from architecture to film and television production is a huge 180 but it definitely turned out for the best,” Gebremeskel said.
Gebremeskel graduated in May 2014 with a degree in electronic media and communication from Tech, and set his sights on working in Los Angeles, California after graduation in either production or postproduction.
“So, my first four years out here I was focusing more on the not coloring side but it’s called online editing, and it’s basically watching down the whole show or doing any technical major fixes like if you see a camera crew in like a window reflection, my job was to remove and paint that out, so it was kind of like visual effects-heavy,” Gebremeskel said. “And then one day I was just kind of exposed to the color side and I was watching one of our colorists just go through a show and mark it down and I immediately had interest.”
Gebremeskel said he always held an interest in the colorist side of film and production but seeing it done professionally is what piqued his interest even more and led Gebremeskel to pursue a career as a colorist.
“I just like to look at movies and shows visually in terms of lighting and composition and most importantly just the final color correction and just seeing the quality and the detail and the – what we call color separation,” Gebremeskel said.
Gebremeskel said he felt being a colorist was a good fit because being a colorist is an extension of the director of photography’s work.
“The fun part is that I get to collaborate with the director – with the director of photography and then also the producer so, it’s a nonstop learning curve, you’re just gonna keep going cause you meet so many different people with different creative intentions and it’s just a lot of fun,” Gebremeskel said.
As a student, Gebremeskel said having an advisor and professors in his corner during his time at Tech helped him reach his goal of moving to Los Angeles.
“I had a handful of professors behind my corner, Dr. Peaslee, Dr. Foster, Paul Hunton, and there was one more, he knew how serious I was about this stuff, my advisor at the time…Don Ellis he – he was actually the reason why I got out here to L.A.,” Gebremeskel said.
Gebremeskel said it was his advisor Don Ellis, who encouraged him to apply to the Television Academy Foundation for an internship in Los Angeles during his final year of schooling.
“I remember it was the Friday before Spring Break in March of 2014 and my friends and I were going, since it was our last year at Tech, we were gonna go snowboarding in Colorado and I was saving up money and I had a good amount of money saved for the trip,” Gebremeskel said. “I don’t know why I procrastinated, in terms of sending in what I needed to supply, I had to send in like two letters of recommendations, an editing reel, certain things…and everything…was due on that Monday.”
Gebremeskel said he went to FedEx days before the application for the Television Academy Foundation internship was due to ship his submission material but hesitated in that final moment because of cost.
“I went to FedEx and said ‘I need this in Los Angeles by Monday,’ and they said ‘ok that’s gonna be like 55 or 65 dollars,’ and as a student that’s a lot of money, it’s a little too much, and so I grabbed my wallet and started hesitating,” Gebremeskel said.
Gebremeskel said he began to run through the math in his head and question if paying for his submission was really worth it.
“It was like, am I really gonna stake my entire career – potential career on 55 dollars – and I said you know what, let’s do it – so [I] ended up shipping it and you know within two months I got the final phone call saying that I got the internship,” Gebremeskel said.
Robert Peaslee, associate professor and chairperson of Journalism and Creative Media Industries at Texas Tech, said Gebremeskel was a student in his international electronic media class and global cinema class.
“He was a student in both those classes – performed very well… [and] just you know [was] very attentive and nice to have in class and asked good questions and things like that,” Peaslee said.
Don Ellis, assistant director & academic advisor in Creative Media Industries at Texas Tech, said Gebremeskel’s success was in large part due to his determination and hard work.
“My personal opinion, I don’t know how accurate this is, I feel that we had three or four years after he had gotten that internship that we had students apply for it…and every year for the following three or four years one of our Texas Tech students in this department got the same internship,” Ellis said.
Ellis believes this achievement was largely due to Gebremeskel letting other students know the deadlines for the internship and posting this information on the Facebook page for their student organizations after he graduated.
Gebremeskel will be one of four Tech alumni serving as guest judges for JCMI Fest on May 3, 2022, at 6:30 p.m. at the Alamo Drafthouse.
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