Melina started out in audio post-production by creating sonic link effects for the documentary The Bluenose Legacy (2011), which aired on CBC's Absolutely Canadian. She was later selected to take part in the Screen Composers Guild of Canada's Apprentice Mentor Program (2016) and studied under two professional film composers. The following year, Melina earned her first IMDb credit contributing score for the online sitcom Borderline. She also had the honour of contributing supportive research for the SCGC subgroup Women Composer's Advisory Council's study, Gender In The Canadian Screen Composing Industry.
2017 also saw Melina complete her co-op in music supervision and post production for animation and an internship in radio. She then started freelancing as an audio/visual media associate, creating digital and radio ads. A couple years later, she was working full-time as an audio engineer with a post house. There, she contributed towards the dialogue editing, mixing, stem-scoring, composing and performing sound design for a variety of productions such as television series, podcasts, video games, audiobooks, voice-over demos, promos, stock music libraries, and described video for animation (all uncredited).
Melina recently completed participation in the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television's third cohort of Women in Post program presented by Netflix. Read more about it here.
Currently freelancing, Melina recently wrapped up sound design for three films (two of them holiday Hallmark films) and the edit/mix for a podcast. (For a complete list of media credits, visit her LinkedIn.) If you are interested in working with Melina Coolen for your production, please reach out to her at:
melinacoolenproductions(at)gmail.com.
And if you are looking for royalty-free music for your productions, Melina has recently started populating her own Pond5 account with the goal of uploading her hundreds of pieces she has composed over the year plus arrangements of popular public domain tunes.
Background photos taken from lyric video made by Chris and Sophie Purcell
Portrait by Max Denley