Evolution of an industry

There has been a very harsh recession in the sound post industry in the past few months, at least in Toronto. All of us freelancers and owners of small companies have felt the shockwave of an industry shedding its skin, transforming into something that, frankly, many of us find scary.

Some say that it is just the local economy shifting, with the value of the Canadian dollar going up and American production companies deciding it's best to stay south of the border. But even many Canadian producers are wary of spending their money on sound post, tax credits or not. I personally feel that, like global warming melting the ice caps, this change is a process that has been happening for a while, but we're starting to feel its effects now.

What I believe is that many medium-sized production houses (our bread and butter) have come to the quite erroneus conclusion that hiring a dedicated sound post facility is an overrated luxury. They have started to set up their own small in-house sound post studios, run by engineers that, for the most part, don't have a lot of experience – meaning that these engineers can't charge a lot of money, which is exactly what these companies like. Or these companies have bypassed that option completely and just assigned the title of 'mixer' to their in-house picture editors, with the results that I have explained in previous posts. So getting a master videotape bounced back from a network because the sound mix has mistakes is just another part of everyday life - they just fix it until it's good enough to broadcast.

In the shallower end of the pool, many starter production companies are putting out movies on a tiny budget that gets blown away before even getting to post. Then they resort to placing ads on Craigslist and Kijiji looking for a 'sound designer with his own rig that can edit dialogue, sound effects, do Foley and a surround mix', all for a screen credit and a copy of the film on DVD. And many kids do respond to these ads because its their way of getting credits and their 'foot in the door'. The sad truth is, even if one of these films got bought by a distributor, the chances that the sound mix were to pass Quality Control when being encoded for printing would be slim to none. This would mean, yes, a remix, and possibly a re-edit of all the sound. So the poor guy who spent countless hours slaving over the sound edit and the mix as best as he could would end up seeing someone else's names on the DVD credits - a team of sound professionals hired by the distributor to fix the sound.

As bleak as this landscape seems for many of us, it is what it is, and it won't change just because we will it to change. The only solution is to adapt. Some sound post facilities have done this by diversifying and offering packages that include everything: shooting the project, doing the picture editing, sound post, visual effects, packaging, the whole nine yards. The problem with this approach is that it opens up a massive can of worms. It becomes exponentially harder to keep track of every part of the process, and hiring supervisors is the only way of doing it, which turns into one more big expense to the company. The other way to tackle it, and this is what I currently do, is the exact opposite - eliminate the overhead as much as possible, and specialise. That way, the company is not bleeding cash, and the effective allocation of every resource is much simpler. Although you can't compete with 'free', you can get closer to something clients can afford, without selling yourself short.

There will always be the undercutters and the undercut. But there will also always be quality and mediocrity. If the sound post industry is to subsist, it will need to do so based on selling high quality, not the size of its tools.