When one thinks of cities with top audio post houses, Regina doesn’t usually spring to mind. But then again, nobody would have associated hit comedy productions with the Queen City either, at least not until Corner Gas. And Brent Butt’s smash series about the goofy goings-on in Dog River, SK, entrusts its audio post needs to local shop Talking Dog Studios.

‘The work that we’ve done on that series has put us on the national map,’ says David Taylor, Talking Dog foley artist/recordist/editor. He also points to the shop’s involvement on seven Gemini nominations over the past seven years, including two best sound noms and five best musical score nods for shop president and owner Rob Bryanton.

Talking Dog provides all the audio post on Corner Gas, including final mix, sound effects, ADR and foley. All of the music is composed by Bryanton and his son Todd.

Virginia Thompson, whose prodco Vérité Films coproduces the hit comedy along with 335 Productions, moved to Regina seven years ago to shoot the children’s series The Incredible Story Studio, and has relied on Talking Dog for her audio post work ever since.

‘There wasn’t a lot of choice for audio post when we came to this city – in fact, Talking Dog was pretty much it,’ Thompson acknowledges. ‘However, what really blew us away was how great they were when it came to both audio post and music composition.’

Bryanton’s music credits include Sesame Street, CBC’s Canadian Antiques Roadshow and Terry Gilliam’s new feature Tideland, which recently shot in Saskatchewan. For the latter, he wrote two songs performed by on-screen characters.

In addition to the obvious benefits of being associated with Canada’s top-rated scripted series, Talking Dog’s involvement with Corner Gas has seen it embrace the cutting edge of TV audio. Case in point is the DVD box-set release of the series’ first season last Christmas (which reportedly outsold the simultaneously released Seinfeld box at Toronto retailers).

When told of the intended DVD release in the series’ original stereo mix, Bryanton insisted that it should instead be presented in 5.1 surround sound, according to Jeff Hamon, a Talking Dog mixer who works on the show along with Jay Debienne.

To achieve this six-speaker effect – the same used for major Hollywood DVDs – Talking Dog had to remix the episodes from scratch, which presented various new challenges.

‘If, for example, [a character] walked from the center of the screen to the rear right, that had to be reflected in the 5.1 mix,’ Debienne explains. ‘There were even times when we created entirely new audio tracks for the rear channels, because it was the only way to ensure the 5.1 mix wouldn’t mess up the show in stereo.’

Because the events in Corner Gas take place ’40 kilometers from nowhere,’ many of these extra sounds that had to be added included birds, the wind, and the occasional passing 18-wheeler.

As important as the Corner Gas gig has been to Talking Dog, the studio says that the series only occupies about 20% of its time. The rest is taken up by series including the half-hour APTN drama Moccasin Flats, youth series renegadepress.com (also from Vérité), CBC miniseries The Tommy Douglas Story and Brett Bell’s one-hour CHUM drama Slatland, plus occasional MOWS, documentaries and commercials.

Talking Dog’s facility includes a mix theater, foley and ADR stage, 11 workstations, and a dedicated Dolby Surround commercial production studio. It will be tackling audio for season three of Corner Gas later this year.

-www.talkingdogstudios.com