Professional Lighting & Production - Winter 2017 | Page 43

Phil Cane
By Andrew King
F
rom stacking projection televisions atop one another and
feeding them with a controllable scaler/router to working with
some of the thinnest, lightest, highest-resolution displays cur-
rently on the market, Phil Cane has been at the leading edge of
video technology for live events for close to 30 years.
Now, Cane is a senior technical director with Toronto’s MultiVision
Inc. (MVI), one of Canada’s leading suppliers of video display equipment
and services for a variety of applications. Over the years, he’s been all
across North America and into Europe and Asia for a myriad of events
and installs – awards shows, corporate events and product launches,
major festivals, and more – as part of a long and accomplished career
rooted back in rural Ontario.
“I was born in Cobourg, ON – that beautiful small town upbringing
you see on TV,” Cane shares before joking, “Of course, we couldn’t wait to
get out of there.”
He says he benefitted from a robust technical education program
at his high school, which offered courses in electricity, electronics,
broadcasting, drafting, machine shop, woodwork, and welding – all
of which he’s put to use to some degree throughout his career.
“Remember when you complained to your teachers that you would
never need to know this stuff?” he asks rhetorically. “Well, I use it all the
time. Ohm’s Law still applies.”
Cane then went to Toronto’s Humber College and studied film
production. Part of his studies included two hours of TV production
instruction each week. The first job he applied for out of school was in
TV production, and he’s been “on the edges of it ever since.”
After working for a few years as a program manager with now-
defunct communications company Maclean-Hunter in various markets,
in 1989, Cane took a position with Multivision Electrosonic – the
predecessor of MVI – as a project coordinator. At the time, the company
had both rental and permanent install divisions, and Cane was involved
with the latter, working on boardroom, theatre, and museum projects.
“Some of my personal highlights were the Saturn V Visitors Center at
Cape Canaveral and the Southampton Princess Hotel amphitheatre
in Bermuda,” he shares. “Both were long-term projects that were very
cutting edge at the time.”
In 1995, he moved over to the rentals division, which specialized
in video walls using the aforementioned TV stacks. That brought Cane
and his colleagues all over the world for virtually every type of event
imaginable. “We had the world by the tail,” he fondly recalls. “I did many
jobs during that time – video wall programming, engineering and sales
support, staging… I have quite the collection of past business cards that
trace what the emphasis was at the time.”
In 2000, MVI split off from Multivision Electrosonic and invested
heavily in LED screens. “That put us on the leading edge again,” offers
Cane, “and since then, we’re doing similar shows – just much bigger and
much brighter.”
Some of his more current projects include work on the new set of
CBC’s nightly newscast, The National. “It was a month-long project with
a variety of LED screens in different configurations, all controlled by an
integ