Femenella makes television career a ‘reality’

Photo by Matt Terrell
Marc Femenella (B.F.A, film and television, 2005) edits nonfiction television shows at BBC Production USA.

By: E. Christina Spitz

Published: Friday, December 8, 2006

The summer after Marc Femenella (B.F.A, film and television, 2005) graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design, he posted his résumé on the SCAD Job Magnet site “just for the heck of it,” he said. At the time he didn’t know where he was going to end up.

Out of the blue, he got a call from a producer for a television documentary called “Pageant Perfect.” The producer saw Femenella’s résumé on the SCAD Web site and offered him a job as a production assistant when the film was shot in Savannah.

“I was pretty nervous about my first real production job,” Femenella said, “and I became even more so when I learned the producer I’d be working with was an Oscar-winning documentary director.”

Despite Femenella’s initial uneasiness, however, the experience was a success — leading to a job after he moved to New York City. He worked as an assistant editor on a new TLC show, “Ice Diaries,” about figure skaters working to make it onto the Olympic team. That was the beginning of Femenella’s thriving film and television career in the Big Apple.

These days, he spends most of his time working on a reality TV show called “Honey, We’re Killing the Kids!,” produced by BBC Production USA for TLC. (BBC Production USA produces content for TLC, the Travel Channel and other networks.) “Honey,” based on a United Kingdom show of the same name, takes images of unhealthy children and enhances them with a computer to show what the children will look like as 40-year-olds. The images are shown to the parents in a studio “reveal” scene to shock them into changing their family’s lifestyle.

Femenella edits the opening and closing studio reveals for the show and assists in the overall editing of the episodes, as well as managing the show’s elements — such as graphics and music — and being the go-to person for technical issues. Between “Honey” seasons, he worked as assistant editor for “Decoding Disaster,” a show for the Discovery Times channel.

Through working on “Honey” for the BBC, Femenella became acquainted with the online editor for nearly all of the shows produced in the building for TLC and other networks. An online editor adjusts color and brightness and makes last-minute tweaks so the show is broadcast-ready.

“He had a lot of work on his plate, so he started passing on certain tasks to me,” Femenella said. This resulted in him doing online work for shows like “What Not to Wear,” “While You Were Out,” “Moving Up,” “One Week to Save Your Marriage,” “A Baby Story” and several more.

“Basically, my job is to be super anal, because all the shows have to pass network QC — quality control — and the buck stops at me,” Femenella said. “Colors have to be within ‘legal’ limits for broadcast. Graphics and effects have to be smooth. Touch-ups that I do can be as simple as changing a font or as involved as replacing shots. If anything is wrong, it gets kicked back to me to fix. Oh, and I almost forgot the most glamorous part of the job: I blur all the private parts.”

Femenella didn’t expect to be doing any of these tasks so quickly.

“When I got to New York, I assumed I’d have to work from the very bottom up. I thought I would be fetching a lot of coffee and getting paid with a free cold-pizza lunch,” he said. “What I discovered was that SCAD had given me an industry-experience level that surprised my employers. SCAD’s film and television program really provided just the right balance of technical training and creative encouragement.”

While at SCAD, Femenella acquired experience in telling nonfiction stories through working as arts and entertainment editor at District, SCAD’s student newspaper; filming a documentary called “Seeker” for his senior project; and serving as general manager of SCAD Radio.

In addition to his “day job” as an editor, Femenella is working with classmate Tom Caruso (B.F.A., film and television, 2005) on a documentary called “A Candid World.” The film is about the New Hampshire Free State Project, a movement whose members have mixed approaches to reducing government in their lives and obtaining a higher level of personal freedom. The film primarily will explore the effectiveness of civil disobedience in working toward political change, compared to more mainstream catalysts, such as running for office.

Though his varied projects and responsibilities make him feel a bit “Jekyll and Hydeish” –– as he switches from creative mode to technical mode and back again — Femenella said he likes wearing many hats.

“Right now, I am enjoying the diversity of my jobs and how the skills I learn from one help me on another,” he said.


Spitz is senior publications editor.