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GearBox has for the last six months operated its Express service from a base within Goldcrest, one of Soho’s largest and most prestigious post production facilities. Goldcrest’s managing director as of March this year, Peter Joly, explained how the strategic alliance with GearBox came about.

“We’ve got a very good long-term relationship with GearBox as – I would say – the most reliable equipment suppliers that we’ve ever dealt with,” says Joly. “They have taken space with us here as the base for their GearBox Express operation, enabling them to respond quickly to the needs of their West End clients.”

“We’re very happy to host them in one of our offices upstairs. Obviously, the relationship works both ways, in terms of us being able to get equipment from them in a short space of time,” Joly affirms. “Fundamentally a facility like ours can only hold a certain amount of equipment at any one time. We spec up our studios as highly as we can but there are always going to be occasions when we need more of something, At times like that, having someone like GearBox on our side – as a business partner in a way – is exactly what we need to get us out of what could otherwise be a sticky situation.”

Goldcrest has been noticeably active in what seems like a continual programme of refurbishments and upgrades in recent years. “I guess what we’re into now is a second phase,” Joly observes. “Over the last few years, we’ve done a lot of actual rebuilding, particularly in the Dean Street facility. We’ve rebuilt the whole top area of the building, put new offices and a brand new apartment up there. And we’ve refurbished all the major cutting room areas.”

Towards the end of last year, Goldcrest turned the basement area of its Dean Street premises – which had several years ago housed the Roger Cherrill studio – back into a dubbing theatre. The new, all-digital studio has a 40 fader AMS Neve DFC 2 console and a 64 I/O Digidesign Pro Tools|HD3 Accel system at its heart, supplied and installed by GearBox’s sales division.

“We’ve dubbed three features down there so far,” Joly is happy to announce. “Hotel Rwanda, which just won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival; The Jacket and Haven. The Jacket stars Keira Knightly, who we’ve recently had in doing some ADR as well.”

The building has benefited from a fair amount of structural work, upgrading the cutting rooms, the corridors and the main areas. Last year saw the introduction of a new ADR/TV mixing theatre on the second floor,Theatre 3, which replaced four cutting rooms. Much of the technical rejuvenation has come about since Joly took the helm.

“It became apparent to me that while a lot of the structural work had been done, we were still lagging behind a little bit in terms of the right equipment for the studios, so we’ve spent a fair amount of time in the last few months upgrading in all the main studios,” says Joly. “We now have Apple Power Mac G5 based Pro Tools|HD Accel systems pretty much everywhere, we’ve also got Fairlights in three of our studios, we’ve upgraded the video projectors and we’ve upgraded a lot of the Lexicon reverb units.”

Goldcrest’s Studio 2 has a recently installed Euphonix System 5F mixing console, which has made a good impression on the facility but perhaps a more significant part of phase two has been expanding the business into new areas, such as games and multimedia, while letting go of the telecine sector.

What was the telecine department has become a new multimedia production suite, which only became operational a few weeks ago but was pressed into immediate, and high profile service. The room, which is equipped with a Yamaha DM2000 mixing console, the ever-present Pro Tools|HD Accel, a mass of Focusrite outboard and a JBL LSR 5.1 monitoring system, has just completed a job for Babel Media. The company is a voice localisation specialist that was commissioned by Sony Computer Entertainment, Joly reveals.

“They were doing all the English language recording for a new computer game that Sony PlayStation are developing,“ he explains. “We also had the privilege of hosting a lot of the games manufacturers and games publishers, who came over from Japan to supervise the recording. So in what was a relatively small studio designed for a mixer and a couple of clients, we had about eight or nine people including voice coaches, directors and people rejigging scripts the whole time. 

“We were also recording two separate non-linear picture sources,” says Joly. “We have our own camera in the booth in order to record faces for motion capture. We were also recording a separate side-on view from outside the booth, recording those to the computer at the same time. All in all it was a pretty complicated setup and it all went very well. It all got finished on time and I think everyone was very pleased with the result. So we look forward to a new relationship with a new client base.”

Goldcrest has also built a ProControl-based studio for creating DVD enhanced soundtracks, having bought out DVD Authoring Company V-Media earlier in the year. The team now divides its time between converting the existing Goldcrest Films library to DVD and servicing external clients.

Joly offers another notable recent install. “GearBox have just completed equipping one of our studios as a demo suite dedicated to showcasing Apple’s range of professional products - dubbed the ‘Soho-X-Suite’, in honour of the Mac OS X platform. It’s good for them to have a sales base here in the West End and it’s also good for us, because the clients they bring in are also being exposed to our facility. It’s really a very happy, mutually beneficial business relationship.”

There seems to be no stopping the on-going developments at Goldcrest Post these days - keep watching this space.

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Goldcrest Post Production