Episode 6242 - Marissa Tomas

Original Recording Date: June 6, 2024

Marissa Tomas Main is originally from Burbank, California and graduated from University of California Santa Barbara with a BA in Economics with an emphasis in Accounting. After college, she worked as an assurance associate (AKA an Auditor) for an Accounting firm in LA. During her course of auditing, she enjoyed working with her Entertainment clients and decided her path to Finance in the Entertainment field.

She is currently working at Disney as a Director of Post Production Finance and specialized in VFX and Post Production. Some of the movies she worked on are Avatar the Way of the Water, Alice Through the Looking Glass, The Amazing Spider-Man, Edge of Tomorrow, Oz the Great and Powerful, Green Lantern, Valkyrie, Speed Racer and many more films.

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Transcript

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[Music] Stay tuned for Breaking the Biz, an informative podcast where we dive into the world of entertainment by interviewing seasoned professionals who have made their mark in the industry. Gain invaluable insights as they share their personal journeys, offering advice on navigating the dynamic landscape of the entertainment industry. Whether you're an aspiring actor, musician, filmmaker, author, animator, or any creative soul, tune in for expert career guidance, insider tips, and first hand accounts on breaking into the entertainment industry. Get ready to unlock the secrets behind successful careers and fuel your own passion for the limelight. Please remember to like this video and to subscribe to our channels for more great conversations.[Host] Greetings from Breaking the Biz brought to you by Yes I Can Unity Through Music and Education. I'm William Felber, your navigator through the intriguing universe of the entertainment industry as revealed by the visionaries and creators who bring it to life. Stay tuned as we delve into diverse insights from the forefront of entertainment. Hearing from pioneers, creators and agents of change, prepare for a journey filled with tales of innovation, resilience, and the undying quest for artistic brilliance. Welcome to Breaking The Biz Podcast with the Yes I Can Crew. We've got a great guest with us. When we talk about the entertainment industry, we always think about all the amazing jobs of the camera operators and the actors and, you know, but we don't really think about how all of that is kind of choreographed and the cost behind it and how everything is arranged. And our guest tonight is going to help us kind of get a better idea of what that looks like. We have Marissa Tomas who is director of post production finance. She's originally from Burbank, California. She graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a bachelor's in economic with an emphasis in accounting. After college, she worked as an assurance associate, aka an auditor, for an accounting firm in LA. During her course of auditing, she enjoyed working with her entertainment clients and decided her path to finance in the entertainment field. She's currently working at Disney as a director of post production finance and has specialized in visual effects and post production. Some of the movies that she's worked on are the way of the Water, Alice through the Looking Glass, the amazing Spider Man, Edge of Tomorrow, Oz, the great and powerful Green Lantern, Valkyrie and Speed Racer, and of course many more films. So Marissa, I want to thank you so much for making time for us tonight. My first question is, when you initially were getting your bachelor's, what did you think you were going to do with your degree? Well, I knew I love numbers. I always enjoyed math, and I knew I wanted to go into something that related to math. And one of the things that I enjoyed besides math was problem solving and understanding why things are happening the way they are. Why do things cost the way they cost? And trying to understand. I've always been a budgeter growing up, and I like to, like, make sure I can budget my money and understand how I can use what I enjoy into reality. I love that answer, you know, and it's so true. Like, you. You. You identify right from the fact I have the skills with numbers and I'm good with money management. I love how you mentioned problem solving, because we teach 21st century career skills within our yes, I can program. And one of them is that problem solving and being able to, you know, look at any job or any company that you're going to work for is going to hire you to solve a problem, or you're going to solve a problem that they don't even realize that they have. I loved how you kind of said, this is what I'm great at, and let's see where it goes. Now, in your bio, you mentioned that you started working with entertainment clients and decided that was kind of the path you wanted to go and finance. What were some of your original clients? So I worked on numerous of different entertainment clients, one being Disney, other, like, smaller units, in house productions. I worked on a nonprofit. Probably most of you know, is the Holocaust museum, the nonprofit for the Jewish Holocaust Museum. So I did a lot of different things here. I did some casinos in Vegas. So I started this path in auditing, where, you know, you go into a company and you look at their financial statements, and you try to start auditing some of their line items to ensure that what they're stating is correct. Looking at unrecorded liabilities and kind of go from the top to bottom on a cash flow statement and looking at your assets liabilities and your stockholder equity. So we always start with cash. So when you come out of college, the first place they take us is like, okay, let's start looking at bank recs. Let's look at all the stuff. If their bank recs are correct, if they're having. If all the number of money that they say that they have on their financial statements is accurate. And so you're just an investigator. You're going in and investigating. A lot of the times, clients didn't like us because we are going in to investigate their numbers to ensure that their numbers are accurate and precise. So that was kind of a hard take because you go in as a bad guy, but you try to be on their side, and you try to work with them and explain to them, like, hey, you know, we're here to ensure that your numbers are accurate in case you made a mistake, and we're here to help you out. And that was a fine line that you have to kind of work with, with these clients, because who wants anyone auditing their financials? So because I was doing that, I did some boring clients. I had some OSHA requests. I had to count lumber. I would travel to different places. And one of the places that I enjoy, besides the casinos, because there's a lot of money, there was these entertainment companies, because I wanted to understand, how does this happen? Like, okay, we see the movies, we go to the movies, we see the theater, we see the films, but, like, what goes into all of this? Yeah, we all know the principle of photography. We know the cast. We know all the hot, you know, the a star list actors. But I always wanted to understand, like, behind the scenes. So one of my passions was when I was auditing, I was able to look at different things, part of the financials, and it engaged me to be more involved working with more entertainment type companies. Medical field was not my place, so I realized that when I was going through my path, I was telling my leaders, hey, I would like to work more on entertainment companies just so I can get a better understanding of how this all works together. So you learn, it's a big brain. It's huge. It's like there's so many different assets, facets everything going on into the entertainment company. But as an auditor, you get to see the behind the scenes and kind of look at every single line item. So that was really exciting to understand how these financials were derived from. I absolutely love it because there's so many people. I'm obviously on the other side of the brain, on the English, and the bad side, I'm not great with numbers. And I love how, you know, everyone finds their place. And, you know, in some sense, sometimes people need to do an internship to kind of see how all of the departments work and how things, you know, fit into the grand scheme of things. And even though it wasn't an internship for you, it was a job, but you got to experience working with those different companies. And I always say it's so much easier to figure out what you want to do by learning what you don't want to do. So by me saying that, like, obviously, medical supply company counting lumber not so exciting. I can see where the casino and the movie business and then honestly learning all of the different things. You mentioned assets and, you know, people's salary. And the one thing you always hear with, you know, directors like, we got to stay within the budget. How does that the budget get created? Is that someone like yourself that looks at everything and says, guys, you have, you know, $2 million to make this movie, you know, keep it under that. How is that figured out? So that's correct. So talk about how budgets are done. So through my path, there was different avenues that I went to. And currently we look at a film and we'll have directors and producers and we have a team called physical production. They will look at script, we look at movie scripts and they go ahead and read things and say, you know what we do like this. We were interested in making this. How much is this going to cost? So they have to tell us what location where they want to shoot. Where do we want to have above the line? Above the line is your shooting schedule. You have a prep and a shoot schedule, and that's where you typically have. When you ever go out, out in Hollywood or you go anywhere and you see these big tents and you see big trailers, that's called shooting schedule. So typically you're doing a shoot for anywhere between ten to 18 weeks, depending how big the film is, and you're physically shooting the actual actors. So in this time, they will tell us, we want to do prep and shoot in this location. So we're going to shoot in this location, then we're going to have post and where's post going to be? Are we going to post in LA? Are we going to post in UK? Going to post in Canada? So one of the things is we have these different scenarios, and I just finished one just recently where I had to put up, come up with three different scenarios and how much it's going to cost us if we were to go to all UK, if we're going to do UK, split New York, and then we also have to look into, there's incentives. So a lot of countries give you rebate. We call incentives rebates. So you have to look at their policies and depending on how much money you spend in a certain country, you can get money back. So a lot of the film entertainment is kind of moving away from Hollywood, from California, because our incentives are really strict and it's really, it goes away really quickly where other countries are a little bit more lenient and they have better incentive plans. So Australia is a popular place to film New Zealand, UK, United Kingdom is big. Canada. So you'll hear like a lot of productions going out, even in California. And, excuse me, in the United States, we have a lot of incentive programs, like Georgia is a big one. So if you ever see a film at the end of the film credit, you'll see credits for incentives. And Georgia is a big one. Boston has one, New York has one. There's different places in United States that have Louisiana. They have better incentives in California. So when we, when they tell us, you know, let's look at working in Bulgaria or let's look at working in Italy or whatever it may be, we have to come up with plan. So the director and the producer, they will say, okay, where do you think this movie is going to be, XYz? It's going to be, you know, 15 weeks shooting in, let's say, Hawaii. We have a film that's going on in Hawaii that we just wrapped up. A lot of you aware of, like Lilo and Stitch and Moana. A lot of those places are done in areas where it's tropical. And so they'll tell us how many days, how much time, and then we go in as the finance group and we use a movie magic budget and we go in there and we have to actually set up for where we think we're going to film. And we kind of come up with solutions of how much it's going to cost us if we were to go to UK, if we were to do a split plan, if we're going to do LA, and you get to see, based on these incentives, how some places are more desirable to shoot and work in versus some others. And again, you have to think about if we're going to, if we're going to have our principal photography. Let's pretend in a film that I just finished up. We had it in Vancouver. You have to take people from La to Vancouver, house them there, pay for all that. And it's still cheaper to film over there than to film in California and LA, even with their housing, their travel and all that, because of the incentives that we get going over there and then we have to bring them back. And in our case, we're posting in LA. So we're going to post. And post means like everything after shooting that happens behind the scenes that you don't see but you hear on film and theater is like visual effects, post production, sound, music credits, end titles. Everything that happens outside of the actors is considered pretty much post. And that's the time. So basically, that's how we do our budgets, we'll get different scenarios. We give them numbers and then they decide if they want to do this or not. Sometimes they say, you know, this is too expensive, how are we going to cut this? And one of the big places in a budget that's besides principal casting money is in visual effects. So I worked on Avatar. Avatar is a big, big project, as many of you can know. I've seen it in the box office. And the visual effects is enormous because there was a lot of visual effects in that film. So again, when you're filming shots like this and the movie is going to have a heavy, heavy visual effects, you kind of want to look at what territories best to work in so you can get maximize your dollar as much as you can. It is absolutely fascinating. And I'm going to bring up Avatar because my next question is going to be looking at the budget and how much more is included when you do have something so heavy with visual effects like an avatar or a Spider man, so to speak, versus, you know, your typical. I've always heard of movies going outside of California to film. I didn't understand the rebate or the incentives, and now that completely makes more sense to me. I always hear, like, Star wars is always in New Zealand or filming, you know, somewhere out there and gorgeous. So it makes total sense to me. And the fact that it's cheaper to house and fly an entire crew to a different country, you know, and it still, in the end, is cheaper than filming here, is that really hurting the studios and the, like, the big recording house companies where you can go and film an entire movie? I know there's a few out here in Santa Clarita, but are they completely losing business because you just can't compete with the rebates and incentives like you're talking about? It's hard. It's really hard. You know, small show, small movies, we call them shows, but small movies or tv, you can do some stuff here in California, you'll see that happening. But when you're doing a big tent pole movie and you're spending, you know, you're spending millions of dollars, it's really hard to do it in California because you don't get those incentives. And we have a cap in California of an incentive cap where other countries don't have that. And so that's especially with visual effects. It's very, very big outside of United States. So we, like, when I was working at Sony, I was in the visual effects department and, you know, we moved some of our operations to Vancouver and I was part of that transition and helping them move all of our artists there because we were getting more for our dollar over there. And those artists don't have to be in house in Culver City. They could be sitting in Vancouver. And every time they sit in Vancouver and they're working there, we're getting almost 50% back on their dollar where if they were sitting in Culver City, it would cost us 50% more. So it is, it is. It hurts. It does hurt a lot. And, you know, you have a lot of people complaining, why this and that. So we do do things in the United States. Like I said, Georgia has a good incentive program. We'll do a lot of shooting there. But a lot of the post stuff typically happens outside of the United States because there are a lot of post houses, a lot of the big visual effects houses are, their big territories are elsewhere. They're not only in, they have small hub in California where their primary, maybe their flagship, but all of their workhorse are typically overseas, and you can outsource it. So people are being able to work on these projects virtually from anywhere and everywhere. So the competition as well, um, it's worldwide competition to make these films. So we had, you know, we had entities. When I was at Sony, we opened up an entity in India because, you know, the dollar goes further there. And because you're visual effects artist and you're working on shots and you're working on animation, you're working on lighting, you're working on specific stuff. You can do that from your home. So most people are working out of their home, working on this kind of stuff because you're a creative artist. You don't have to physically be in a physical location, and you can watch dailies, and dailies are when you look at shots. So you're working on 1 minute of a film. Well, not even a minute. It's a 25 seconds of a film. You get into a black room, you look at a screen, and the director looks at it and says, okay, I want to fix this. I want to fix Spider Man's here. I don't like this of his web or whatever it may be. You're fixing it, and you're in a dark room, and that all can be done at your house because you're just looking at a screen. And so that's why, you know, post production, a lot of these places are happening elsewhere outside of the United States. It's amazing. So let me ask, is there a certain program? I know, like, with animation, there's Maya, and, you know, certain things for your. Are you using Excel sheets? What are you using when, you know, to do the bottom line and you're giving three different options and, you know, filming here, finance on our side. So there's two things. There's things that talk to each other. When I was in the Sony world, we had Maya, we had kabuki. We had different softwares that will work with it. We had an internal software team that built a. So if an artist was working on a specific shot and they worked 8 hours on it, it was a specific software that they built in house for that to communicate. And the big one that most financial users use is SAP. So it would communicate to SAP. Here at Disney, we're using SAP as well, which is the big financial software. We use other software, but the big one that us in finance and we do a lot of forecasting, a lot of just analysis is Excel. We're very, very heavy on Excel, but we also use, like, for budgeting, we use movie magic. That's like an industry wide thing that most people use for entertainment. You're using movie magic to do budgeting. So there are different softwares, but I would say in finance specifically, we're really using SAP, movie magic, Excel. So obviously, SAP and Excel, you were doing, you know, when you were doing accounting period, the movie magic is. Was that something special you had to get certified in? Was that movie magic is another software that's really related to budgeting. So people use movie magic for budgeting purposes. And so it's uniformed. All around the world, people use this. It's. It's a program done by EP, which is entertainment partners Entertainment. And we work with, you know, two big hub houses that do all our payroll, which is like entertainment partners and cast and crew. Those are probably two big entertainment companies that most of these actors are getting paid through are these two different payroll companies. And they created a software that's been, been used for a very long time. It's kind of archaic. And they're trying to move into a better world, trying to go more digital. But it is a software that allows you to go in and go from above the line all the way down to below the line. So when we talk about a film script, everything you see on a film, there's. It's so tedious to, like, crafts and services, to makeup and hair, costumes, say, I mean, there's so many different line items that you have designer, and all of those are one line in a budget. So a movie budget could be like hundreds of lines and every line of that. So let's just use makeup artists. You have a makeup artist line, they're above the line. You'll have makeup artists. But now you may have, like 15 makeup artists for this film. You might have some that are in California, maybe some that are in country. So every line item, you have to say makeup artist number one, California. Here's the rate, here's how long we think they're going to work. Makeup artist number two. And you go like that, and then you have. And so this hub of movie magic basically contains all this information in there, and then it allows you to, there's this thing called globals, allows you to put in foreign exchange currencies and all that. So if you want to switch your weeks, how much your start, your post weeks or your above the line weeks, your shoot weeks, you can easily, in this program, say, you know what? I want to shoot in Bulgaria. I want all of these rates to be Bulgaria. I can go into this, into the system and change my rate and tag it Bulgaria, and it'll give me a new cost based on if I was to do this in Bulgaria or whatever it may be. So it try. It's a hub that has all your information in there, and it's easier to manipulate data, but it also calculates fringe like things that you would never think of, like payroll fringes. It calculates everything that you have to put in there. So it comes blank. But you have to go in there and start this whole budget worksheet. And you're going into so much minute details to get to the bottom line of how much something's going to cost. And it's very minute. It's very, very detailed. So part of my passion is as an auditor, as liking numbers, as budgeting. I've always liked numbers. I always like things to foot. Like five plus five is always ten. I always like absolutes. So it's a very detailed program and very detailed, you know, mindset of being into there, making sure things are looking good. I'm absolutely fascinated. So obviously, you've got amazing problem solving and you're great with numbers. You have to, at this point, be a great collaborator because you're working with directors, writers, an entire crew, a studio, you have to be able to communicate to all different departments that are all working together. How many people do you have in your team? How many people work with you? And then when a movie is being made, are you on the set to make sure things are going as planned? Or do you stay at home and watch everything day to day? So the first part is how big is the team? So currently, where I'm at, at Disney, we support Searchlight, we support Fox and Disney projects. So those are the three banners that we support of our team. There's probably about, let's say about 50, any 40 to 50 in house studio workers that were considered the financial people for all of the studio, for only theatrical and only film and streaming. We don't do tv. So this is all film. That's our hub. But then we also have about 30 different post production accountants that are in house accountants that work for us as well. That when a film is done with prep and shoot, once the photography, everything is done, it gets handed over from that production crew to a post crew. And that post crew sits with us. They're the same crew that work on projects after production is done. So anywhere, if you put all of us together, we could be about 75 of us, but it's a big group and in regards to going out, so we do have like an audit team. We have, we do it. We get to go to audit, we get to go to different sites to ensure that we do a quick audit to make sure things are happening correctly on production schedule and fly out there and do some testing. We do that before our in house studio auditors come in. And then we, and so we go to production because we have that relationship with production and we work with them to make sure that they're doing things correctly before they get audited by the studio. And then after they get audited by the studio, the studio will have some things to correct. And then if a third party auditor comes in, then they can audit us and we'll be pretty good because we've already done our audit steps in between. So we do go to sites sometimes we have to deal with like the commissioner, the ministry of Commissioner for laws on incentives. We had a team that went out to go talk to the ministry to talk about, hey, we want to do these projects and try to come up with new ways of seeing if they're willing to increase their incentives. Or like, hey, we give you all this money. We do go out for different things like that in terms of being on set all the time. You have a production crew that's out there. So you have your, your line producer who you communicate very closely with. You'll have your director, you'll have your producers, you'll have your accountants. But a lot of the times since we're studio, we're like, overlook, we're overseeing the project. We don't have to actually be on set at the project, because you have a whole production team that's working on that specific project, but you work with them remotely all the time. Let me ask you, is there ever been a nightmare where you've worked on a project and they completely ran out of money? Oh, yes. It happened. It happens more than it happens. It does happen. And that's, you know, one of the things that, when I was working at Sony, what I enjoyed is, like, because you're so close to working with the numbers and everything as a studio or as a finance person, before you get to the point where you're running out of money, you're looking, you're forecasting, you're looking at things, you're working with the producers, the directors, and you're talking about things, and then we all of a sudden say, hey, you know what? This is what we need. So what's going to happen? What can we do? So there's some things that we can say, hey, let's cut here and let's go here. Or there's some things that we can say, you know what? Let's go ask studio for more money, because we think we're going to do this, but we feel this value added. So in my line of work, in the course that I've done, which I really love about it, is that you're problem solving. You're trying to figure out, okay, let's first look at what we have. How can we save? Maybe we don't need to send these people out to Europe for five weeks. Maybe we can only do two weeks. Maybe we can get the other three weeks done in house. Like, there's all these different ways to think. Maybe we don't need the shot. So I won't tell them to the director, no, the shots not good enough, or, you shouldn't do this. I just give numbers. So they'll say to me, Marissa, how much would it cost me if I was to remove this? How much do I save and how much do I do this? So we'll just give them information for them to make a judgment call and for them to make, like, okay, maybe we don't have to extend or do this kind of stuff. A lot of the times we try to, since we have meetings on a daily, weekly basis and clash reporting is a big thing that happens in this film. You'll hear a lot of people say, cost reports. Cost reports is basically where all the costs live from above the line to below the line. There'll be that budget that we talked about for movie magic, and I'll have all your expenses in there, and then you'll have your forecast in there and it will basically tell you, this is how much your film is costing you. So every week you're able to see all this. And when you start seeing red flags, we start talking about it and work on it. But there's been times where they're saying, like, you know what? If we really want to do this project this way, we need a lot more money. And there's some directors that, like, really, really have a passion. And sometimes you have to tell them, you know what? We can't do that. Or sometimes you can say, you know what? I think we could do that. So our job is to give them analytics and numbers for them to make decisions and to make the decision that they feel it's going to work best. So a movie like Avatar, could you ballpark cost for? I mean, I can imagine these are very expensive films to make. The first one came out, and many years later the next one comes out. And I imagine there's lots of advances in technology and visual effects that make things a lot easier, probably more expensive. Yeah. Ballpark idea of cost of an avatar? I can't. It's sensitive information. I can't. Never mind, never mind. All good. No, it's okay. I can't talk about how much things cost. But what I could tell you is, you know, from Avatar one, you know, we did Avatar two in public. News is we're working on Avatar three. So if you can just look at the box office how much it did, how well it did, you can just imagine how expensive this movie could be because, you know, it did over a billion dollars. Like, we're. And so it is a very expensive film. Unfortunately, I can't talk about numbers on that. All good. I heard maybe a possibility of an avatar ride at Disneyland. I just think it will just keep the frame, that franchise growing and popular and I love it. Yes. They have an avatar ride at Walt Disney world. Already got it. So maybe California. Which avatar? Avatar. They have an avatar. Avatar land in Walt Disney animal kingdom. Yeah. Well, it's. It's called. It's called Pandora. Yeah, it's. Yeah, Pandora land. Exactly. They're. They're a little excited. You can tell the avatar. So the Avatar with the blue people. Yes. The cartoon series is Nickelodeon. Disney can't use that. Right, right. Guys, guys, guys. You can do questions at the end. Save all the questions for the answer. It's okay. It's totally okay. Yes, Avatar, blue people, they have a Pandora world at Walt Disney, and it looks like Disneyland had just got approved to expand their parks and it looks like they're wanting to put a Pandora world there as well. That project will take a very long time, but we do have Avatar sequels coming on. So Avatar three has been greenlit to work and that's we're working on and there's talks about four and five, so it's a big, big series and you can just imagine how much work and how much goes into that. And James Cameron, as a lot of you guys know who James Cameron is, he's very detailed. He's very, very, very particular to work with, but he also makes the top three, most biggest blockbuster movies ever, Titanic, Avatar. So I will not ask any questions in that realm. I want to ask my next question, too, is obviously you are very seasoned. You know exactly what you're doing. You're working on multiple different projects. And I imagine people come to you for mentorship to figure out how to grow in this field and how to make the right moves and budgeting. Was there someone for you who was an amazing mentor? Was there someone before you who was holding it down at all these different companies that kind of passed the torch along to you? I have to say. There's two people. There's a personal mentor and there's also a work mentor. So personal mentor was my mom. She was really into numbers. Always told us, like, likes the budget, likes, you know, money and all that kind of stuff. So as a young kid, I had to learn how to count my dollars and I have to buy things with, you know, with my own money if I save money and so forth. So she kind of taught me how to value money and not just spend money. And a small funny example of that is when I was a young kid, Nintendo was big and I wanted to buy my first Nintendo, and I collected enough money to be able to buy Nintendo, and it was $999, $0.99. So in my mind it was a $100. So I go up to the teller to go buy my first Nintendo with my money. And then they told me it was $107 and I did not know there was tax. So that was like a. A way of learning. My mom's like, well, you have to collect another $7, like, in order for you to do this. So as a way of, like, learning, like, oh, I can't just buy what I want. I have to, like, think about it and really earn the money to do that. But my career mentor, I would say, is this gentleman named Jerry Calixto. I met him in my auditing years very, very smart gentleman. He works for Take two entertainment, which is a video game company. Most people know that they make the grand theft auto. That's the company that makes grand theft Auto. Now you're seeing a whole bunch of excitement now, you say. And he's a vp of revenue accounting. And so I worked with him in my first years out of college at the accounting firm, and he taught me a lot about the financial statements. And he taught me, like, what to look for, how to look for things. And one of the things that I would express to all graduates coming out is to work for a company that you get to see the top to bottom, you get to see the whole financial statement, really understand how a company works. And to me, that was a really, it was a lot of work. It was long hours, it was long weekends. But at the end of the day, I was able to see how a company functions. And there's where I had a lot of learning. I learned so much about finance in the industry, and I was able to figure out where I wanted to go. And a lot of people either go the CPA route, a lot of people go into the finance route, and it was an avenue for you to have your, like, light bulbs open to see what's going on. And he was a great mentor because he helped me through that way. And we are today, we're still great friends. And, you know, he's blooming awesome at take two. And here I am at Disney. So I would say, like, at an early age, he was a great mentor. I love your story about your mom and the Nintendo. It's absolutely staking me back to when things were somewhat affordable, like a $100 for a system. Sounds like that's what it should be. It's interesting that you said that. I was just taking my daughter to a doctor's appointment, and the lady checking her in was like, oh, my God, you're so sweet. You know, you're, you know, how old are you? And she said, oh, I'm five. And then she goes, well, I'm teaching my daughter Robin Hood right now. We buy stocks and we trade stocks, and she has to follow her numbers. And I was like, wow, at five? And she's like, well, you have to teach them very early to understand money and how to invest money and when it's time to let things go. And I was like, that's absolutely fascinating. And I thought about it. I'm like, we don't even teach kids how to write checks anymore or how to handle a checkbook. There's just certain things that are, are not taught. And so I love the principle. And, yes, you need $7. I remember in high school getting a McDonald's meal for $2.99, and the tax was, it would come to $3.24. Well, I only needed $3 and a quarter to get that Big Mac, french fries and a drink, and I was covered. So I love going back. So you just made me reminisce. I want to ask you, how important has networking been in your success? I think it's really important. You know, I was very lucky where I started. And based on, just to give you a little bit about my background, after college, I worked in this accounting firm, and then I had an opportunity to work at Disney. And this was a long time ago, so I worked for Disney about five years. And at that point, I was looking for another opportunity because what I was doing was great. It was fantastic. But it wasn't exactly what I wanted to do. It was more on the back end, like close, like more of a, closing the books, doing the financial accounting and financial recording and all that stuff. I wanted to get more with the creative, more with the content, more with the people who are making the films. So I had this opportunity to jump to Sony, and I was working at Sony for a very, very long time, and I was in the visual effects department. And at that point is where I probably had a lot, a lot of networking, and I met a lot of amazing people. And I was there for, you know, I would now was working with the talent, the people that are creating the films. I am working with them on the visual effects. So it's only one little part of that big, big budget that we talked about. Visual effects is one line item, but it's a huge line item with multiple, multiple facets. But there, you know, you get to meet a lot of people from the industry. And, and then from there, I took some time off to raise my boys before they went to school. And then I had an opportunity again at Disney. And that's how I came up here. Someone knew me, they knew my number, they knew my resume, and they called me and they said, hey, are you looking for a work? I was like, well, let's look into it. And luckily, it was through networking that got me the job where I'm at now. And so I came back to Disney from years, and we're talking 20 plus years ago. So networking, you know, just keeping your doors open and always being positive, always trying to, you know, be kind, be generous, be nice to people like, don't you know, just understand that everyone has their ways of doing things, and if you can just continue to work hard and do what you do best and be positive about it, I think, like, it opens up a lot of doors because you don't want to be unkind and ruin bridges and break bridges and things like that. So I felt like they found me and they said, why aren't you working? I said, I'm taking care of kids. And, you know, and then they wanted me back. So it was really, I was very lucky for that opportunity, but it's all because of networking. I think we should all, we, we all wish to be so lucky enough to have somebody go, hey, are you, you know, not working right now? Because we'd like to swoop you up like that. Yeah. And I had a, I had a special niche, which is visual effects. So my background was very, very visual effects heavy. And for Avatar, they actually hired me for avatar, and they said, we need someone who has visual effects background and expertise, and you'll be the perfect candidate for this because we need a lot of help in this department because there's so much going on. And so because I have experience and not many people, it's a small market for visual effects, not many people have the background. I was very lucky to accept this opportunity, and it made me feel like I was transitioning back from being a mom, which I'm still a mom, but going from motherhood to work, which was great because I came from, I went into an industry that I really understood and knew a lot, and I was a very big asset guy. I work with John Landau a lot, and they appreciate my work. And it's been a really, really great journey. A lot of work, but a great journey. I love the networking example. I love having an understanding that we all have our little niche and our little specialty things that we're passionate about. I love how it comes full circle for you. Most people don't understand that it's very hard to stay with a company for 20, 30, 40 years. We always have guest speakers like yourself talk about that. It's a gig economy that, you know, for example, maybe you're working on Avatar, and when Avatar's done, you need to have the next project. Obviously, when you, you're at your level, you can stay with Disney and go from projects to projects, and they kind of keep you there. But would you say it's safe to say that maybe some of the individuals underneath you who are not permanent structures of Disney go on to work on, you know, maybe with Nickelodeon or Paramount in other studios. So I would say, like, in the studio side of things, production finance is a need. Like there. We need more people who have production background and production background. But it is a niche, like, a lot of the people I work with here at Disney, like, our big leader has been here for over 40 years. That just tells you the retention, how long they keep them. My particular boss has been here for 25 years. So there's definitely a longevity of people being here. I was here five years ago. I mean, long time ago for five years, and now I'm coming back. So there's, there's definitely people have been here for a very long time because they love the brand, they love the movies they're making. And it just shows that there's a lot of leaders here who've been here for exponential time. Now, in the production world where you saw when we had the strike and people did not have work and all that, that world's a little different because in that case, you have to go to project to project. In my case, being in studio, like you mentioned, I'm on Avatar. I just finished wrapping up Tron. I'm sure everyone knows that tron three is coming out. So the film that I'm working on, but the people who are in production, the people who were on set working for those 1516 weeks, those are the people who have to go to project, to project a lot, because now they have to find out what project am I going to go to next? Who am I going to work for, what director? And those are the people that, it's a lot of networking in that business because it's who you know. And we, as a studio, we're like, oh, we know. We like that accountant. So we're going to hire that accountant for our next project. We know we like this person. We like this person. So we build these relationships with these people on the ground who we work with very closely, which are, they're called the production accountants and the controllers. We work with them closely. We know who we want to use for our next project. So studio will say, hey, we have Tron. Do you mind coming on Tron? Now that this one has wrap? And most of the time they're like, absolutely. Or depending on what they have in terms of the studio side, we've been blessed and lucky to be home, you know, to stay stagnant and just go from project to project within the studio because we are studio employees. You also brought up something, and I'm so glad you said it. You look for people, people you enjoy working with you go out and you search to make sure that you can continue. You create those natural relationships. When you see someone who works hard, goes the extra mile and you know is an asset, that's somebody that you are going after. And you mentioned, when they're nice, when they're enjoyable, when they're good to work around. I just want everyone on this call to understand that people do take notice of hard work. People do take notice of the people that are smiling, that are friendly, that are not grumpy, that are not looking at their phones, that are going above and beyond and saying, what else do we need to do before I leave? I think that's very important in the grand scheme of things. When we talk about networking, we had an individual who was on last month, and he said, you live your life, you are always on an audition, you are always on a job Interview. How you conduct yourself, people notice and people watch and see. So it just kind of goes, it reassures that people really do try to make sure they're working with the people that they know are going to do a good job and are enjoyable to work with. Do you ever go to, I think it's Company Three. They do special effects. Are there certain special Effects houses that you work with with directly? They've been amazing in mentoring students from YIC. Yeah, great. Yeah, I used to work at Imageworks, which is a Visual Effects house that's at Sony. Another big one is ILM, that we, that Disney owns. Weta is a big one. That's what we use for Avatar. And they're in New Zealand, company 3d Neg. There's a whole bunch of different visual effects houses, but the big ones are pretty much ILM. Weta, you know, image works. Those are the day do the Spider man, those big, heavy visual effects movies. I do get to go to screenings, actually. Today was interesting. We had a casting director come to us and we had a little talk, and we were talking about pretty women. And he was giving us an example, one of the examples of being kind and hard work. He was an immigrant from Argentina, and he was working at an auto body shop when he came over. And he ended up was working at an auto body shop that had a lot of specialty cars. So it was a lot of the movie industry, actors cars, very expensive Ferraris. And Steve McQueen came in and had injured his mini Cooper back then. And the auto body shop, he was one of the workers, helped it. Then they had some race, and he got tickets to go to this race, and it was like a big, big race. And he was just a guy that worked at the audibotti shop. And Steve McQueen sees him at the race and says, hey, here's my card. Can you seem like you're a very hard worker? Here's my card. Contact me if you have any work. And now this guy is, that's how he got his. Like, it was all about networking. He was kind, he was great, and he became, you know, one of the big, big directors of pretty woman, you know? And so it was, it's just like, it's who you meet, and it's just being genuine and being yourself, and people will take notice, and everyone wants to work with people who are nice and kind. You don't want to work with someone who's not nice. So it does bring you joy when you're working with people. And when we pick people to work with, you want the people who are smart, who understand it, but they also have to have a good rapport with others, and you have to be able to work with them, and they have to be able to understand, like, there's a two way street. It's not only the studio way, it's both ways. So as long as you work together as a team and collaborate, like, that's really important. And those are the people you want to keep as your team, because you can work together and get results done on a timely manner. Love it. I have a few more questions, then I'm going to turn it over to the, to the crew here, who might have some questions. How do you balance personal and family time and work? I imagine, like, you're getting phone calls 24/7 putting out problems and issues. You know what? I have to say that Disney does a really good job of a work life. Well, they try to do a really good job of a work life balance. And I think it all depends on who you work for and how do you work. I'm a person that I like to work smart and efficient. So there's been times that I need to go to my son's baseball game. I will leave work, go to the baseball game, but I'll get back on the computer and continue working just because I have to get something done. So I would say that, you know, I try to prioritize the both family and work aspect, but I also feel like it really depends on, you know, who you work with, too, making sure they prioritize that. And Disney tries to work really hard to do a work life balance. They allow us to work from home one day a week, which has been really nice. And during the pandemic, we were remote working. So it's a, you know, you have to set those boundaries yourself, and you can't let people, you know, walk all over you. I don't work weekends. You know, I tell, I mean, if I have to, it's very, you know, limited, but you have to set your boundaries, and people understand that and they respect that. And if I have to work from home, I'll go home and work. If I have to make a baseball game, I'll go make the baseball game. So it just depends on how you create your environment. My next question. During the strike, were you looking at numbers going, hey, if we get back to a normal schedule, we have to put these out, or were you going, hey, we can't make this movie do? What did the strike look like on the financial end? It was a tough time. It was a really tough time because the strike basically pushed all of our production schedules. And when there's a push in production schedules, there's also a push in employees, which means that you have to downsize because you don't want to work for them. So that was a hard time because there was, you know, a big layoff that happened prior to the strikes because they were, they were looking at future work. And also during the strikes, a lot of the post team on some accountants that we had to lay people off because they were going to be not doing anything for nine to ten months. And so as a financial person, we had to do a lot of analysis to tell the studio how much this is costing us every week as time went on. So Tron was in, in that pickle where we had production, and we're about to start. Luckily, we were not on set. We were going to start production, but because now our production schedule pushed, you can just imagine everything. Think about a wedding. If you have a wedding venue date, and you have the venue, everything going, and all of a sudden something happens, you have to push that. You have to push everything in the back end. You have to make sure your director's available. You have to make sure that your cast is available. You have to make sure that everything is available. The venue, the locations that you scouted, the house that you're filming out, or whatever it is that everything's available, and we don't know when. And that was the hard part. So what we had to do is track our cost and look at how we call them the strike cost. Like, how much is this costing us? Week by beacon, every show that we have. And then at one point in time, you have to, you know, keep the people on, then you let them go, and then you say, okay, since we're in a strike for longer than x amount of time, we'll bring you back on to work on the project when the strike is over. Well, when you bring someone back on for the project, you have to do prep again. So you may have done prep originally for four weeks, so now there's a strike. Now you have to prep again because now that prep that you did is not prepped for the shoot. So then you have to bring the crew back on. If they're available, then you have to, you know, do the prep time. So obviously, the budget became bigger. Now, if we say we're going to spend x amount of money on this budget, now we have to. We have a budget with what we anticipated and a budget with strike cost. So we track here the strike cost, and this is whatever. So, you know, we had that problem with COVID as well. We had to pay for a lot of COVID lost and so forth. So that's what we get to do on our end, is tracking and trying to figure out how much these things are going to cost us at the end of the day. It's amazing. Absolutely amazing and fluid. It's changing daily. It's so impressive. My last question to you is, if you could go back and talk to a younger Marissa, you mean maybe like 10, 10, 20 years ago, what would you, what would be the biggest piece of advice? If there's anything you could change or, you know, I'm just curious. Yeah, I would say, like, be yourself, you know, like, I really feel like, be who you are. Work hard. Don't be embarrassed to ask questions. There's no dumb question. You know, every question is valid. You know, I was very curious. I always ask questions. I feel like, you know, you work as hard as you can and you do your best, and people will notice your best. And I feel like, you know, try. Try asking questions. Like, don't be afraid to ask questions. I feel like that was huge in my. I would ask if I didn't understand something and people did. I wasn't embarrassed to say, I'm sorry. Can you please explain that? I would ask questions because at the end of the day, it's, I'm learning, and no one can take education away from me. So I'm learning and I'm learning, and that's how you continue to grow. So that was probably one of the big things that I did, was just, you know, continue to work hard and just always ask questions. I think that's how you figure it out. And there's been no one who's been successful, who has not made mistakes. That comes with the, you know, you have to learn from the mistakes. But asking questions, I love that. I think that's the little special nugget of information that's so needed. I'm going to turn over to questions and I'm going to be respectful of your time. I see Presley's got his hand up. Go for it, Presley. And then I'll come to Matthew. Hi, Marissa. I just want to let you know I am working on a screenplay right now, and hopefully it will be made in a few years from now. I'm planning on crowdfunding it, too. So I just need some tips, you know, because I, you know, just being a first time filmmaker and I just want to know, you know, just like, what are the pros and cons? And I know you talked a lot about production, you know, and what, what it's like to film in California because they have like, a little strict law and just basically, you know, just like, what are like some tips to make, like a crowdfunded movie. I would definitely make sure you have your synopsis, your plot, my understanding what you're going to make. And then the biggest thing, I think, is having a budget, making sure you understand what you want to film, how much it's going to cost you. If you were to do visual effects versus non visual effects, let's say it's a small budget. And a small example is I'm going to go shoot at my friend's house. It's going to cost me dollar zero because he's going to be very nice, let me borrow his backyard versus I'm going to have to go to a park and shoot and I have to pull out permits. So in like, my line of field is understanding your script and understanding what you're doing and pull out those elements of what it's going to cost you to ensure that you have the funding available to make your film. And always have a contingency, always put a little padding in there because as everyone knows, we never come in budget. We always go over budget and a lot of films. So if you have a little bit of a contingency in there that would help you make sure you get yourself to the, the end goal. Perfect advice. Great question, Matthew. Paul, go ahead and ask your question. Hello, Marissa. So I'm looking to get into onset production, and I noticed what you said. Of course, you always want to be nice. You want to be kind to people, but it just doesn't seem like a very polite industry. So would you say that just always be nice, no matter who you're working with, even if they're a little snippy with you? Yeah. You know, you do. You deal with a lot of arrogance as well. But I feel like, you know, one of the things that brings you above and beyond is when you're kind and nice and you work hard. If, you know, you work hard and you show people that you can do something, and so there's no small task and you'll do whatever they ask of you, I feel like they'll have more respect for you, but they may not show it right away. But once they say, hey, Matthew, I want you on my next project, you know, you earned their, their earnings, and they, they're like, okay, I really like to work with Matthew. He was great. They may not tell you, Matthew, you're fantastic, but they may be arrogant, but they're going to ask you to come back to the production because they saw that you worked hard and that you were a. You were, you were a team, a team player. And I think being a team player is really important. Make sure you go to all of those premieres and then. And soak it up. Marissa, what an amazing industry and team that you're working on. Like I said, good health and continued success. Thank you, Brett, for having me and team, I appreciate it and wish you guys all the best, and I know you guys will find your passion and you'll work really hard and you'll get there awesome. On that note, everyone, have a fantastic rest of your evening as we conclude another enriching episode. We hope you found inspiration in the stories shared today. Let's take a moment to honor Yes I Can's role in bringing Breaking the Biz to life. Yes I Can's commitment to empowering young people with disabilities through education, advocacy, and mentorship shines brightly, paving paths of opportunity and dialogue. This podcast celebrates the organization's dedication to nurturing talent and facilitating impactful discussions. Breaking the Biz is more than a podcast. It's a part of Yes I Can's broader mission to amplify voices, dismantle barriers, and craft a world thats more inclusive and accessible for everyone. Each episode is a chapter in our shared narrative of progress, education, and empowerment, driven by the spirit of Yes I Can. Thank you for spending your time with us on Breaking the Biz. Continue to challenge the status quo, and share stories that resonate until our paths cross again. Lets keep transforming aspirations into achievements and infuse every endeavor with optimism. Here's to advancing the landscape of the entertainment industry, one episode at a time. I'm your host, William Felber. See you next time.