Rising Stars: Meet Caleb Mose

Today we’d like to introduce you to Caleb Mose.

Hi Caleb, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I was born in Barbados almost 62 years ago. Growing up without siblings for the first nine years of my life on an island meant that books became my lifelong companions. With them, I became an explorer, veterinarian, hero, writer, actor, and professor. I was raised by my maternal grandparents and my aunt, while my parents sought greater opportunities in New York. When I came of college age, I moved to Long Island. New York to go to Long Island University’s C.W. Post campus, where I got a degree in Psychology and Philosophy. I then went back to Barbados with no plan for future employment. The Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), the regional Television station, gave me a job to anchor their fledgling early morning news round-up program. This I did (along with anchoring the prime-time news broadcast) for just over a year. I then returned to New York City and continued to work in broadcast television, commercials, and feature films as a location sound mixer. Along the way, I got married to my Swiss-French wife and now live happily in Los Angeles with her and our cat and dog.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It’s not been a smooth road, but neither has it been tragic. Perhaps just bumpy enough to build character, but seeing as it is not yet over that answer is ongoing. My parents left me to be raised by my grandparents and aunt, and while I never lacked for love and protection (sometimes too much), I do wish they had stayed.

Within the first two years of my wife and I moving from New York to Los Angeles, my father died in a car crash in Freeport, Long Island. My mother was driving the car. Luckily, she was not badly injured. She has never forgiven herself for that.

I have never been good with money had to file for bankruptcy twice, the second in an ill-advised and ultimately futile attempt to save the house that we had gotten a mortgage on less than two years before. It seemed as though we signed the papers, and then the financial meltdown started, and I lost about a third of my jobs. So we sold the house, staying half a step ahead of foreclosure. It has taken most of the past few years to emerge from bankruptcy restrictions, but now the past four months of this year has been a true “annus horriblis” in terms of work, and I have to try very hard not to feel shell-shocked and overcome by a fear of belt-tightening once again.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Nothing sets me apart from others; I am not sui generis, just trying, like most middle-class folks, to make a comfortable living and at the same time not be seduced by the siren of acquisitiveness.

I am a location sound mixer, I travel to narrative, commercial, and documentary film sets, and I record dialogue and sounds that will be used to help the director tell the story they are trying to tell in a more complete way. Over the years, I have worked on a number of music-based documentaries about many famous musicians and performers; Whitney Houston, Tina Turner, Bob Marley, Roberta Flack, Michael Jackson, Peter Frampton, etc. But one of the most memorable experiences that I have ever had on a project was on a film where we went to the Mississippi Delta to record a film about obscure Blues musicians who never gained the type of recognition that they deserved. These were folks who Clapton and Richards would say taught them what it means to play the Blues. But the film was never finished. I wish I had made copies of the audio.

I am also, with a dear friend who is a documentary cinematographer, co-authoring a book that describes in detail the relationship that exists between a documentary cinematographer and a sound mixer. It is our contention that this relationship, at its best, is like a dance, a pas de deux that elevates our participation in the process beyond technicians to that of storytellers in our own right.

Risk taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
I like to think that I have a higher-than-average tolerance for risk. It has helped me to, for example, move from the comfort of Barbados to New York City and live there for 25 years… and then, in 2006, to give up the professional connections and security that I had nurtured there to move to Los Angeles where I knew almost no one.