When the weather cooperates, Instructional Learning Assistant Rick Marrone bikes to work, rolling in with the same momentum he brings into the edit suite. He has only been my mentor for a short while, but I feel like I’ve known him for years. In person he is energetic and informal, speaking quickly and punctuating sentences with an easy laugh. During edits his fingers skate the keys while students drift through with questions. He swivels, sometimes answering mid-thought, a smile always ready.
His office is compact, cozy, and functional. A shelf above his computer holds official Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve certifications. His bookshelf is lined with everything from old versions of Final Cut to collections of essays on economics. While the Mac in his office is relatively new, his personal laptop is a 2014 MacBook. He likes what still works. New software makes him cautious until he can test it on a low-stakes project, then he folds it into the routine. He nearly aced Adobe’s proctored exam, except for two prompts lost to a server crash; he argued for a refund and got it. Resolve certification came from a training trip to Chicago, though he admits it might be time for a refresher. Tools change faster than habits, especially these days.
Rick’s way of working developed early on in our shared hometown of Dearborn. His father videotaped everything, often to the mild annoyance of relatives who were not ready for a camera in their faces. Persistence built a sizable archive that reaches all the way back to a 1959 wedding reel. Rick has since digitized all of it. As a kid he recorded home movies on VHS, cut and dubbed with dual VCRs, and recorded fake radio segments on a home karaoke deck. “This is Ricky on W R I C K Y,” he says with a hearty laugh. Limitations taught him process. He learned to make loops on cassettes and turn a CD fadeout into a sixteen-bar verse. Later he moved to Windows Movie Maker with a dazzle converter. “You figure out how to get from point A to point B with whatever is around,” he says. The habit stuck.
After graduating from the University of Michigan-Dearborn in 2011, he spent five years producing in the advertising world. The work was real, and the hours were long. “We would look up at five and ask if we were ordering dinner or going home,” he says. He left that world and built a media LLC that kept the lights on some months and tested them during others. Weddings, shorts, corporate pieces, meme edits, passion projects: he took the jobs that came and learned whatever tools he needed. When UM-Dearborn posted a part-time role with benefits seven years ago, he was quick to jump.
These days, Rick’s official title barely scratches the surface of what he does. In addition to instructing students, he produces and edits videos, plays bass and drums, DJs auctions and fundraisers, and organizes community events. That’s just a start. “I’m not a jack of all trades,” he insists. “I am a jack of a handful of trades, and I do them pretty well.”
Of course there are edges to the generalist path, and Rick is fully aware of them. He can lead a project without trying to control every part of it. He can produce a band session at home and edit the takes but knows when to hand mixing and mastering off to the specialists. “I know where the limit is when it comes to my skill sets,” he says. “That’s when I send it off to my audio guys.” Collaboration, for Rick, is an essential part of the workflow.
As his reputation precedes him, the gig offers stay steady. He rarely says no, perhaps to a fault, though he does turn down most school dances. “This generation gets demand-y with the short attention spans, and the TikToks, and whatnot,” he says, half joking about installing a request scroll next to the decks. On some nights he drums in a request-only piano-bar outfit that “never” rehearses. They take slips with tips and count down, “one, two, three, music.”
As charismatic as Rick is, not every mentor cheered him on. Once, in college, a professor told him he was “bad at email.” The feedback stung: small, but true. In a field that prizes vision, communication still decides whether a project moves. True to form, Rick made the fix, and today you wouldn’t know it was ever an issue: clear subject lines, swift replies, expectations set early, and apologies when needed. The lesson turned into a practice he now models for students.
Ask him about the future and he keeps it modest. Fame is not the aim. “It is never too late to start something new,” he exclaims; coming from him, this seems like an understatement. But a life where the work feels right and the bills get paid is a good life indeed. Sometimes that’s editing trailers. Sometimes it’s running a church fundraiser. Sometimes it’s making a home movie gift that lands at just the right moment. The thread through it all are the methods he learned early on: use what you have, do what you love, never stop learning. And whatever happens, no matter what, don’t stop believing.