Having turned Toronto’s 80-year-old Regent theater into a digital post house by day and local movie house by night back in 2002, Theatre D Digital recently made a similar conversion at The Royal, in the city’s Little Italy area.
In December, Theatre D, which provides audio and picture post services and facilities, was ramping up for its first sound mix in its new digs, on the experimental low-budget Bruce McDonald feature The Tracey Fragments.
The Royal was one of four venues in Toronto’s Festival Cinemas rep house chain that shut their doors last June due to dwindling attendance. Theatre D stepped in during the summer and bought The Royal for $2.2 million. The art deco theater relaunched its evening film program on Dec. 15 with a screening of Reg Harkema’s Monkey Warfare.
‘It was kismet,’ says Theatre D cofounder Dan Peel of the timing of events. ‘We’d found that filmmakers love working in the Regent with its big screen, movie house setting and ‘happy ghosts.’ So when The Royal came up for sale, we jumped at the chance.’ Peel’s partners are John Hazen and Carlos Herrera.
Toronto had a slow production year in 2006, but Peel says that Theatre D was ‘busy enough both to afford this expansion, and to add this extra capacity and staff for the new year.’
As with the Regent, the setup at The Royal allows filmmakers to mix their productions to an image projected on the theater’s 30-foot screen. But, unlike the Regent, The Royal doesn’t have a balcony, so its digital production station is located instead amid the main floor seating near the back. Both facilities are equipped with Avid Symphony Nitris finishing systems as well as Avid Media Composer Adrenaline and Apple Final Cut Pro editing suites, and Pro Tools sound mixing systems with Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound capability.
As well, to ensure the most crisp image quality possible, Theatre D has added a $120,000 Christie CP2000 DCI-compliant digital cinema projector. ‘It doesn’t get any better than that,’ says Peel.
In addition to providing post services, the shop is also a favorite spot for freelancers such as award-winning sound mixer Daniel Pellerin (Where the Truth Lies).
‘With the advent of larger, more complex formats, there’s a need for facilities that can provide higher quality, more technically advanced services,’ Pellerin says. ‘Theatre D, with the Regent, has become that facility. And now, with the addition of The Royal, it’s proven again that it’s at the forefront of post sound in Toronto.’
In addition to renovating its newly acquired space to make room for four edit suites and a new projection booth, Theatre D has also upgraded the acoustics to 5.1 and restored the lobby to its former glory circa 1939.
Along with a terrazzo floor buried under tiling, the renovators uncovered the in-concrete footprints and signature of Anna Neagle, a British actress who played the queen in the 1937 feature Victoria the Great.
‘She was quite a star in her day,’ Peel says. ‘We plan to set up a plaque to tell people about her.’
Stacey Donen, a longtime Canadian film programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival, will oversee The Royal’s evening screening schedule, where variety will be the order of the day.
‘Our philosophy is to celebrate the experience of cinema-going by presenting the finest in international, documentary, animated and independent film selections and series,’ says Donen.
The focus will be on homegrown features, some of which will have been posted at the facility.
‘Canadians make some of the best films in the world, and it is our intent to use The Royal as a premiere exhibition site to showcase these films to our audiences,’ Donen adds. ‘One of the special features of The Royal is that it encompasses every aspect of the cinema experience, from the making to the presentation of films and digital works. It brings back a wonderful grassroots sensibility to Toronto’s filmmaking and film-going community.’