Malvika’s Ramblings

Today I went to Technicolor as part of my film workshop classes. Its a company where film-makers, people who shoot TV commercials and music videos leave their tapes for post production services.

Some of these services are film processing, tranfers to better video quality, editing, printing, digital imaging, dvd authoring and audio solutions.

Parts of movies like Ocean’s 13, Spiderman, Miracle, Chicago have been edited there.

It was like entering the NASA of film. A lot of their equipment was the best in Canada and they boasted of technology which no one else could use in the world, as no one else had it.

They had facilities to have the director in Los Angeles and the actor and editor down in Technicolor, Toronto.

IMAX technology and all..

One of the rooms was going to be used as a storage room until they realized that it was a very special room – a floating room. This means that it was not connected to the rest of the building by any walls. It was totally separate. No vibration from anywhere would travel to it and disturb the sounds created in that room. Left alone, it was deathly silence. So they converted it into a large scale recording room. And here is a bit of history associated with the room. A music band was recording in that room and when they played what they had, they got a constant ting-ting-ting sound in the background. They were unable to eliminate that sound. Ultimately, they said that it was in sync with the beat of the music and they did not get rid of it after all. So what was it – that sound ? Rumour goes that the room was built over an old blacksmith shop and sometimes one could hear the ghost of the blacksmith beating the hammer upon his anvil!

In other rooms, wires were hung on hooks the way belts would be hung in your wardrobe.

The guy - James who showed us around was soft spoken but had lots to tell us. Few jokes and many ‘So, any questions?’

There was no apparent madness of film-making. It was all neat and so organised that it seemed like everything was in control, no madness needed.

jams said there was no money in making music videos - they were just a montage of arbitrary footage. Sometimes they started editing a music video at 9:00 p.m and by the same time on the next day, it was already being aired all over by MUCH music !

One of the rooms had a wall that was just equipment - a lot of ports for plugs to go into. It was mind boggling to think that each port had a meaning and was meant for a particular connection. A woman came around and put a plug in one of them, How did she know thats exactly where it went!?

One of the students in our team asked what the educational background of the people working there was. James said most of them were ex film - students but really came there knowing nothing. It was all learnt as labour of love.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 at 6:32 pm and is filed under Films, Traveller. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.