Montreal-based CineGroupe recently announced the opening of its new digital sound and dubbing studio. The company, which specializes in animation and family programming development, production, post-production and distribution, spent $400,000 on the expansion.

‘The reason we created our new studio is that we were using outside studios so much for recording that it was becoming uneconomical,’ says Marie-Christine Dufour, CineGroupe’s vp communications. ‘We figured with all the money we were spending outside, if we built our own studio we would gain back our investment within 15 to 18 months. We’re now one of the only post houses offering full sound and video.’

Dufour believes the gear with which the audio studio is equipped makes it a state-of-the-art facility. She says CineGroupe chose hardware from manufacturers including AMS Neve and Akai ‘for their reputation, quality and adaptability.’ It also uses the Pro Tools audio editing system by Digidesign, a division of Avid Technology, which is compatible with other machines the company already has in place.

CineGroupe now boasts two sound recording suites, two mixing suites, five sound editing and four video editing suites, linked by a fiber network for increased efficiency. The animation division, CineGroupe Toonteck, is comprised of 40 2D digital colorization stations and one 3D animation studio.

The company has 45 staffers in its post services department, with the audio expansion necessitating the hiring of one new sound engineer. Sylvain Bourgault, a 12-year employee, functions as sound supervisor. CineGroupe’s recent projects include Mega Babies and The Kids from Room 402 for Teletoon and Fox Family, and the 2D/3D feature Heavy Metal 2000, coproduced with Lions Gate Films, Helkon Media and Columbia TriStar.

CineGroupe’s one-stop post facility will attract service work for the company, but even more importantly it will help with its in-house productions.

‘We’re an animation house,’ Dufour says. ‘We have all the creative [infrastructure], but in animation there are a lot of technical services attached, whether it’s computer animation or ink-and-paint. For us it makes sense to have the full package, because that way we control the production costs and time management. It’s a very competitive world in animation, so you have to do high quality, but you have to deliver on time and on budget. For us to be integrated this way allows us to do that.’

Interactive division

CineGroupe also has offices for project development in Los Angeles and Toronto, with a Toronto production facility in the works.

The Montreal base also has an interactive division with 35 staffers who produce animated webisodes for outlets including Pirat.Net, TF1.com and Teletoon.com. It also created games aimed at young girls for the Radio-Canada website’s youth section, and Dufour reports that it is one of the most visited Internet destinations for that demographic. The company’s new media animation tends to be an extension of tv programming, as with its own Princess Sissy, a popular show in French Canada for which it produced two cd-rom-based games which sold in all the major broadcast territories in Europe.

‘We look at each of our products for an added value, both when we sell them as a tv program or when we sell interactive products in order to make tv series out of them,’ Dufour explains.

While some companies choose to define themselves as either tv producers or dot-coms, Dufour believes the best strategy today is to have a finger in both pies. CineGroupe has invested in the interactive field for the past couple of years, starting with the purchase of Pandora, a small Quebec-based mutimedia company, in 1998. After embarking on substantial r&d and a steep learning curve, Dufour reports the new media division has begun to record a profit.

‘We found at the last mipcom that the fact we could talk about both applications opened a lot of doors, and kept us inside longer,’ she comments. *

-www.cinegroupe.com