Masters Workshop has been supplying big sound for the extra big screen since the early ’80s and is now turning its attention to location-based entertainment.

Around 20 years ago, when large-format films were still in their infancy, Masters got called on to handle the audio for Skyward, an imax film about flight.

At the time, the Ontario Place Cinesphere was the only facility in Toronto housing six channels of audio, so the crew headed down to the large round building, ripped out a few rows of seats, set up the console, and did the mix right there in the theater.

Masters was the first to do an imax mix inside an imax theater, and in 1986 unveiled the first imax mix theater which allowed them to mix in-house with the same results they got at the Cinesphere.

The audio shop was founded some 27 years ago by Doug McKenzie. It was later purchased by Maclean Hunter, which was taken over by Rogers Communications, and in December 1997, went full circle when McKenzie and creative director Tim Archer took back the reins of the shop.

McKenzie is spearheading digital tv efforts through The Advanced Media Group, a company he established a few years ago to facilitate the development of Canadian digital television. The plan is for Masters to migrate into the amg center.

While the bulk of business at Masters comes from large-format producers, the facility provides sound consultation and design, recording and editing, automated dialogue replacement and narration, foley recording and editing, music composition and recording, final mix, and foreign-language versioning for features, music recordings and, increasingly, for location-based entertainment.

With many new theaters and malls, as Archer puts it, ‘theming themselves’ these days, the master mixers are constantly coming up with new ways to make the sounds work in different venues. To accommodate the theming trend, the shop is converting the space once dedicated to television mixing into a ride film theater.

‘We are gearing it up so it is equalized and treated so it can sound like the ride simulator platform,’ says Archer. ‘More speakers and digital cues are needed to create that environment in a theatre.’

One such location-based entertainment project was Monsters of the Deep, an interactive large-screen, undersea, edutainment adventure produced by Immersion Studios and located on the grounds of Toronto’s Canadian National Exhibition, for which Masters supplied the spatial soundtrack music and sound effects.

According to Archer, foreign-language versioning has become a ‘staple’ at the audio shop, which he says has become ‘sort of an international centre,’ dealing with large-format film producers from Denmark, Japan and often Korea.

One of the more elaborate jobs to pass through Masters lately was a Saving Private Ryan-type short graphic signature film for an Iwerks theatre in Singapore.

Vancouver-based Vista Collaborative Arts was commissioned by the Singapore government to produce the film, which features a 25-minute war scene with tanks, guns, battleships, missiles and lots of explosions and is designed to give young soldiers a realistic taste of battle. Masters provided full spatial surround sound in 5.1.

‘It was a phenomenal piece of film work,’ says Archer. ‘It is a hard format to do drama, and this film, in my eyes, proves that drama in large format is not only possible, but it’s wonderful.

I hope we will be seeing more of that.’