As always, we at Spectrum Fusion continue to follow our Reactor Room participants long after their main Reactor Room event. We continue to aid our participants in finding work opportunities, developing life skills, and nurturing their talents as they continue working towards their ultimate goals. This time we’d like to take a look at Matthew Curran.
Matthew is a 24 year old young man with ASD who recently graduated from college with a degree in media and video editing. Matthew hopes one day to work in movies and television, not as a movie or television star, but as one of the people behind the camera. He’s very passionate about media production and displays a considerable talent for it, able to edit together large amounts of footage quickly and efficiently. Despite his talent and a natural charisma and sense of humor, though, Matthew found himself in a rut.
Before joining the Reactor Room, Matthew was not doing much. After graduating college, despite having numerous project ideas that he wanted to pursue, nothing was really working out for him. Living at home with his parents, he had difficulty finding a job, and no real luck finding any sort of job that would allow him to pursue his passion. This was exacerbated by the fact that he was severely lacking in several basic life skills.
Since joining the Reactor Room, however, his life has started turning around quite rapidly. Matthew has made numerous connections in the media editing field who have been able to help him learn even more about his chosen field and allowed him to improve his already natural talent even further. He’s learned more about not only the editing process, but also the filming process as well, having worked with cameramen and sound techs to properly learn how to film and record footage that he then proceeds to edit.
Perhaps the most notable and tangible accomplishment of Matthew’s, however, is the release of his own Youtube show, “Can I Cook It?” Matthew’s show was created with a dual purpose in mind. Primarily, “Can I Cook It?” is meant to show off Matthew’s ability to smoothly edit video and audio in an easy to access format for future employers to look at. As a showcase of his talents, the videos are quite impressive, averaging between 7 and 10 minutes each, all with smooth visuals and audio mixing. It’s also quite impressive to watch him work behind the scenes, as he’s proven capable of fully editing these episodes in only a few hours after the filming takes place, sometimes even posting the videos on the same day. Most excitingly, Matthew has already been contacted by industry professionals complimenting him on the quality of his work and giving him advice for how he might improve even further! The eye of the industry is now on Matthew and he's incredibly excited to do more and more with his platform.
The show’s second purpose, however, is to help him learn a necessary life skill. Matthew was adamant that he needed to address his lack of basic life skills, and so decided to kill two birds with one stone by using his new platform to learn how to cook. So far, he’s already learned to cook four dishes, with a fifth one soon to be learned and filmed.
Already Matthew’s talents have picked him up some attention. Though nothing is confirmed yet, he’s already been contacted by several media professionals who are interested in working with him. In the future, Matthew has a number of big plans. Matthew has expressed interest in creating a vlog for Spectrum Fusion, helping to further spread news about what’s going on in the company and what we plan to do here in the future. One of his most interesting plans, however, is that he’d like to use his new position to take his talents abroad. Matthew has expressed interest in working in Japan or South Korea, where he would like to use his success to become an autism self advocate in the East. Matthew has an incredibly bright and interesting future ahead of him and we look forward to helping him reach his full potential as best we possibly can!
