If only every aspect of filmmaking in Canada was as potentially painless as adr is turning out to be. With a little help from Chris Miles and Connie McKinnon, the two players in Toronto’s Vagabond Studios, a high-quality adr studio can now be driven right to an actor’s front door if need be. The two have successfully crafted Canada’s first and only mobile adr studio, currently serving the production community of Toronto.

This handy-dandy, movable, fully operational adr unit can be wheeled virtually anywhere to record lost dialogue for film and television productions. The trailer itself is 20 feet long, 11 feet tall and eight feet wide. Inside can be found a Sony 9850 3/4-inch picture playback, a Tascam DA88 record machine with time code and a Tascam DA-30 MKII dat machine, with a Track 2 T/C backup. For those without a manual handy, all you need to know is that this buggy is capable and ready to go.

‘It was difficult at the time that we were making this trailer,’ says Miles. ‘We spent so much time and research trying to get this thing together. We were looking forward to having it done, but at the same time we didn’t know if anybody was actually going to use it. We were thinking that we were going to have to move out of our places and live in here.’

Not the case. In fact, since the trailer officially launched Sept. 20 it has been in high demand, with the bulk of its time monopolized by the Fireworks Entertainment/Gaumont Pictures action-adventure series Relic Hunter, a $1.5-million per hour Canada/France coproduction currently in production in Toronto.

McKinnon explains she and Miles first sensed the need for a mobile facility of this sort on the Alliance Atlantis series Little Men.

‘On Little Men, our lead actress was in every scene and her time was very valuable, and because we were shooting north of (suburban) Pickering, bringing talent downtown was not practical,’ she says.

The post team on Little Men set up a makeshift adr shop in a room on the set, but it was not as complete or efficient as Miles and McKinnon would have liked.

To combat this, the pair set out to create the mobile adr trailer.

They purchased the shell of a trailer and insulated the floor, ceiling and walls, making it completely soundproofed. They also installed heating and air-conditioning units, which are never turned on during a session. Extensive steps have been taken to assure that no extra noise leaks through during recording. The monitors in the studio have cloths over them to reduce the low hum from the units.

The entire trailer can be powered by an extension cord plugged into any socket, allowing Miles and McKinnon to pull up to an actor’s front door and plug the trailer into their front hall or garage outlet.

‘Most of the equipment doesn’t take up too much power,’ explains Miles. ‘It’s so well insulated that we don’t have to worry too much about heating – the equipment does a pretty good job of that right now.’

Aside from the comfort of being able to get anywhere in the city to handle a production’s adr tasks, the trailer’s innards are quite cushy, with carpeting, a sofa and lamps. It almost looks like a living room.

Miles and McKinnon admit, now that the machine is alive, that they couldn’t have done it without the help of friends and colleagues who realized the need for this kind of rolling facility. In short, a lot of favors had to be called in, the early going, to ensure the trailer could be equipped.

‘This is something we couldn’t have accomplished without all of these other people coming together for us, with advice and equipment loans,’ says McKinnon. ‘When you have a new business and you are trying to get it off the ground, that’s when you find out that suppliers don’t always deliver when they say they will and you’ve got a session the next day.’

Despite their initial worries, demand for the trailer and their services has been steady. They say they understand the demands of the talent on the set so they are constantly poised and ready for a quick session when an actor has a few seconds to throw off a few lines here or there during breaks or unit moves. In a couple of instances, the unit move sessions proved a bit of a problem.

‘The only thing we’ve had to deal with is the fact that sometimes people on set might take the power off you without realizing you’re still working,’ says Miles. ‘I’ve got a huge battery backup just in case somebody does that kind of thing to us, so we don’t lose anything.’

Is there room for growth in the mobile adr business? Vagabond sure hopes so. Miles and McKinnon plan to have a second trailer completed and operational by the end of the winter.

‘It really depends on how much the demand is for this right now,’ says Miles. ‘If things continue like this, we’d love to be able to do this. We really haven’t spent that much time not working since we’ve had it ready.’

McKinnon agrees with her partner.

‘I think in three years we’d love to have a trailer in Nova Scotia, one in British Columbia, maybe three trailers here [in Ontario],’ she says. ‘It is certainly something that we’d like to keep growing.’