You might think producing audio for a film called Rollercoaster would be a pretty straightforward job. After all, how many ways can you record a rattling track and kids screaming?

Of course, nothing in audio production is that easy. Vancouver-based Post Modern Sound was put to the test when it signed on to produce audio for the feature, which follows a group of teenagers through a day and night at an isolated amusement park.

Mark Scott, Post Modern’s vice-president and director of operations, says the film, which is to be screened at the Toronto and Vancouver international film festivals, and at the Atlantic Film Festival, posed a particular challenge. Head mixer Vince Renaud and sound designer Michael Thomas had to create audio that expressed feelings of isolation central to the film’s narrative.

‘Although it is a fun park and a rollercoaster, you’re not really aware that it’s in a city,’ Scott says. ‘There’s a very isolated feeling and that’s part of the feeling of the show.’

To this end, the team had to rebuild the background sounds and introduced extensive special effects in sound and music. ‘If there are planes and trains and boats and cars in the background, you have to remove them,’ Scott says. ‘So there was a lot of work done in the background effects of that show to give it a really unique feel.’

With 25 years in audio production, Post Modern has seen its share of challenges. Founded in 1973 by David Hoole, a writer and composer of jingles and commercial music, the shop has evolved into one of the West coast’s top tv audio production houses.

‘We began like everybody then with the machines that were available, working on mono machines and two-track machines and cutting everything in editorial with razor blades and tape, like everybody did,’ Scott says.

Today, Post Modern is outfitted head to toe in digital, state-of-the art equipment. All editing is done on digital towers which are hooked into a central machine room. Information is fed to the mixing stages from the towers and from digital tape. All backgrounds, sound effects, dialogue and adr are stored on hard drives.

‘We were probably about the first facility, certainly in the West, to be digital. We bought our first digital machine in 1988 and we never looked back,’ Scott says.

At the apex is one Neve V console with flying fader automation which takes care of all final mixes. Post Modern also sports three older 8000-series Neves in the adr, foley and premix stages.

The move from commercials to tv came in the mid-1980s. After more than a decade producing music for commercials, Hoole and Scott were commissioned to compose and produce the music for the tv series McGyver. It was their first foray in tv audio production.

‘When the post business and the production business began to really take off in Vancouver, we switched over (to tv),’ says Scott, who joined Post Modern in 1974 as a music producer. ‘That’s what we do exclusively now.’

Post Modern recently signed an exclusive deal with Sugar Entertainment, the production company owned by film veteran Larry Sugar.

The shop just completed the audio on two Sugar series, First Wave, a live-action sci-fi series which boasts Francis Ford Coppola as executive producer, and So Weird, which airs on Disney Channel. The team is also working on mows Out of Time and Mermaid, coproductions between Sugar and Peace Arch Entertainment.

Because Sugar has deals with Showtime and Vancouver-based Peace Arch, Scott anticipates a good deal of work coming in. ‘It’s a really exciting thing for us, because they have a lot of work…and they will in the future. It’s a great thing to be hooked up with that company,’ Scott says.

The shop also just completed mixes on 65 half-hour episodes of The New Addams Family for producer James Shavick which will air on Fox Family.

‘I think one of the great things about the Addams Family was the quick turnaround on it,’ says production manager Linda McAteer. ‘Our engineers became incredibly adept at the week turnaround on 65 episodes of a series done in one season. That was challenging.’

Post Modern’s 14,000-square-foot facility contains two adr stages, a dedicated foley stage, nine edit bays, a spotting suite, three mixing stages. ‘We have quite a bit of horsepower,’ Scott says. ‘We can handle quite a bit of work.’ Post Modern today employs 24 full-time staff and approaches 40 employees at times, counting freelancers.

With the success of the shop’s foray into feature films with Rollercoaster, Scott says he’d like to do more feature work and if that goes well, there will likely be an upgrade to the facility.

‘That’s what we’re focusing on now…we’d probably look at another dub stage to take care of that,’ he says.