Production Notes - Film Work

I'm going to talk about something other than Rock and Roll. This time it's Some Interesting Stuff A Studio Gets To Do Besides Rock And Roll To Pay The Rent.(Or SISASGTDBRARTPTR for the acronym minded.)

It's hard for many studios in LA/New York/Nashville to make it. And there are several reasons why. First off, many successful studios are niche studios. Not real specific, like hardcore/metal versus speed/metal; but more styled for certain kinds of industrial clients. There are music studios like the Plant and Westlake, and there are scoring studios like Capitol for orchestras. These studios are booked well into the next century. There are also private studios that for complicated zoning reasons cannot be booked for commercial purposes and therefore never really have to deal with big league competition (these are the price war victims in phone calls that refer to the LA studio that goes for $18 per hour.) There are also Foley studios where they punch sides of beef for sound effects on film. And there are ADR (Automatic Dialog Replacement) studios where they replace dialog that wasn't recorded very well in the field. Each of these places serves a particular purpose.

In fact, Surreal has been each one of the above studios at one time or another. In being one of the only studios out here in the boonies we get to be "All Things To Everyone." We do our fair share of metal, country, television, Karaoke and jingles. We also have had to do automatic dialog replacement (ADR) work for film.

Most recently we did some dialog replacement for the Steven Segall film "On Deadly Ground". (not a very good movie - I now call it Dances With Walrus.) That was a very intense 19 hour session with no fooling around. The ADR producer Holly Huckins was flown up here to oversee a ten actor Yup'ik session. It was less expensive for Warner Brothers to do that than to fly everyone down there. We had Sunday only to do this and preparations took amost all of Saturday. Warner Bros. sent everything I requested in the way of video tape and scripts within one day of my request. You could tell that there were a lot of people working overnight on getting this stuff here.

The session was run without any hitches. Holly kept an endless stream of actors working on lines, making sure nobody got too tired. She dealt with all the SAG forms, kept union worksheets and came in and finished on time. I was kept busy moving mikes, mixing playbacks, keeping levels above the noise floor, tempting fate by nailing levels onto tape, and praying I didn't get lost. One lunch break was all I got. Maybe I should join the union.

The bottom line of this story is they expected a lot out of me and would have been within their rights to strangle me with the tape if I screwed up. Now an ADR studio in Hollywood charges over three times as much as I do for the same service, but they take about half as long because they are set up for it. And they have two engineers doing what I had to do, A tape operator/logger and a mixer. Of course, no one told ME that until later.

The amazing thing is that these people do this every day. Hollywood may be the land of hype and bullshit but when it comes to actually doing the work, the production people are pros.

Kurt Riemann secretly dreams of a steady job.