‘Young people today have come a long way from watching Popeye,’ says Roger Monk. ‘They are used to watching pretty fantastic motion pictures in the theatre, so when you see a basic stereo production it becomes pretty bland. They expect it to have big sounds and things flying around the room. Saturday morning cartoons have jumped realms.’

Monk, one half of Dick & Roger’s Studio Sound, knows what he’s talking about. His Vancouver post facility does the sound for ReBoot – the edge-pushing CG-animated series and MOWs from Vancouver’s Mainframe Entertainment. It’s a collaboration that, since the companies first teamed up in 1994, has earned the franchise two Geminis, for best animated program, and a Leo Award for best sound. ReBoot is up for a best sound Gemini next month.

‘It’s very complex,’ he says, ‘not only in its visual concept but also in the sound design and sound requirements.’ D&R was the sound shop for most of the show’s four seasons, and for the Daemon Rising TV movie. Voices are laid down on time-coded DATs and portable disk drives using AMS Neve consoles – an increasingly rare choice in equipment – and AudioFile editors. The audio is cut back at Mainframe, also on AMS equipment, and goes back to D&R for mixing. Foley work comes in from nearby Post Modern Sound.

Marcel Duperreault, an audio supervisor at Mainframe, agrees that advances in home and theatre sound have upped the demands on production and post facilities. ‘When somebody at home buys a [Dolby] 5.1 system, that’s what they expect to hear,’ he says. ‘The shows we’re doing now are very complex. The layers are huge. And as each new director comes in they want to hear a little mini-feature… They want to hear the show like it’s the next Terminator.’

Working under the tight demands of a TV schedule makes a hard job even harder. ‘Usually we don’t have much more than a week to cut all the effects,’ says Duperreault. Monk adds that his film clients are no less demanding.

But speed is one of the main reasons his shop has stuck with AMS equipment for the past 15 years, despite the higher cost and lagging popularity. Monk has been in the business since ‘back in the dark ages’ when sound was edited on film and was among the first, way back in 1987, to go digital when U.K.-based AMS introduced an early hard-disk-based system. ‘It was the wave of the future,’ he says, ‘and it could make our lives a lot easier.’

Monk still prefers it to the more popular Pro Tools systems by California-based Digidesign. ‘Pro Tools has been very successful because of their price point,’ he observes, ‘and they’re in all the schools, so a lot of the kids coming out are very Pro Tools proficient. But it’s my opinion that, once you get some experience on [AMS], it’s a very fast post-production editing system. It’s designed to edit dialogue very well. When we work on Pro Tools, we have a couple of systems in here, we find it more cumbersome.’

D&R’s two suites both have AMS Logic 1 consoles and 24-channel AudioFiles. The 760-square-foot mixing theatre has a Logic 2, a 24-channel Pro Tools Playback and a Sony 3324 Digital Multitrack. A fourth studio is in the works.

Since opening in 1990, D&R has moved from mostly corporate projects to work on feature films, MOWs and TV series – which now account for 80% of its business. The company recently began work on the next 26 episodes of the animated series Yvon of the Yukon, for Studio B Productions of Vancouver, and will also do the post on that company’s new all-Flash-animated Yakkity Yak series. D&R also scored MVP: Most Valuable Primate and Air Buds 3 and 4 from International Keystone Entertainment of Vancouver.

But the company has not entirely escaped the B.C. production slump. Full-time staff has been cut back to four, from a previous high of nine, and Monk relies more than before on a team of freelancers. He is optimistic that things will bounce back, but admits that times are hard. ‘I think it’s going to get better. I think it’s got to or else none of us are going to be around.’

-www.dickandrogers.com