Deluxe Wows Me

On Tuesday March 17th our class went to Toronto to visit Deluxe, which is a house for film, video and audio production for big budget television shows and movies.  The studio has won ten Academy Awards for technical excellence - and let me tell you their studio is impressive.

The day started off in the Deluxe boardroom where we were greeted by three high-ups from the studio.  These guys were pretty funny - all really into what they do.  I found it pretty interesting how two of the guys weren't really much older than I was, but I was blown away by how much they knew and the advice they had to give to amateurs like the class.

From there we checked an isolated sound booth where actors come into the studio and do voiceovers and replace audio that wasn't captured great or doesn't sound great off the original take. The head guy, I think his name is Paul, was saying that actors hate doing this sort of thing and many have a hard time getting into character to re-enact the voices and such.

We checked out several things inside the studio but I'm only going to talk about a few of them. We were allowed to enter what they called the Foley Room, I believe, where diegetic sounds are produced in a studio to make them sound much better than if they were taking organically from the original film.  This sound-proof studio they had set up was amazing - it was actually littered with ordinary and bizzare objects and items that the sound artists use to make audio. Several different types of doors were on one portion of the wall, different floor types on the ground, sand, water, bathtubs, toilets, guitars, shoes, an old car, chairs, anything and everything!  In my opinion this was the coolest studio in the Deluxe house.

One of the last rooms we checked out was the room where they convert and copy film and video.  This room was crazy! Definitely a few million dollars worth of equipment sitting in there.  Paul was saying that older copies of movies and such are copied in that room, and there was tapes everywhere.  The room house many machines which also meant a lot of people, it was the busiest room in the house.

What I liked most about this trip though were the three people that gave us the tour of Deluxe. They were young, extremely knowledgeable, and most importantly, they are pretty similar to what I'm like - well at least I think so anyway!  It was really refreshing to hear people talk about their work with such enthusiasm.  Great trip.