INDUSTRY NEWS RECORDING Industry Comes Together for Haiti
Audio Institute: We Are the World School of Music and Audio Engineering is the fi rst institution of its kind in Haiti and the newest division of Artists Institute, a free professional college for art and technology in Jacmel. It features a world- class recording studio, Pro Tools-enabled writing rooms, and a technical curriculum based on the use of tablets developed with some of the top audio engineering programmes in the world. Jake Young talks to David Belle, CEO of Artists for Peace and Justice, the non-profi t organisation behind Audio Institute, about what the organisation, its partners WSDG and Nimbus School of Recording Arts, and supporters Vintage King, SSL, Genelec, Sennheiser, and more are doing for the youth of the poorest nation in the Americas.
Who’s backing Audio Institute? I see Arcade Fire are on your advisory board.
T e seed funding for the initiative comes from the We Are T e World Foundation and that was money raised from the We Are T e World 25 For Haiti rerecording song and music video that Quincy Jones and Lionel Richie produced. Jackson Browne was there recently with us and Arcade Fire have been a supporter from the beginning.
What were the main challenges of turning traditional Haitian buildings into studios?
It was all built from scratch. T ey have a design inspiration from traditional rural Haitian architecture and they have the guts of great modern sound studios and recording spaces. We brought in WSDG so that they could take our design vision and campus structure – and most importantly the use of local materials and local builders – and adapt it into something that would meet what was locally feasible and at the same time meet international standards.
POST PRODUCTION From the Cutting Room
Evolutions post production has opened a 13,000sqft purpose-built HQ in the heart of Soho. T e facility features 33 light and spacious suites including two fully equipped Pro Tools audio suites with 5.1/Dolby E capability and HD monitoring. At London’s Factory sound design studio, engineers Anthony Moore, Jon Clarke, and Tom Joyce provided the naturalistic soundscape for the feature fi lm Downhill. T e Factory team worked across sound design, sfx editing, dialogue editing, ADR, plus stereo and 5.1 mixes.
8 July 2014
With the World Cup taking centre stage this summer Grand Central Recording Studios worked on a TV spot created by Saatchi & Saatchi for Visa Europe called ‘Bolt To Brazil’, which features Usain Bolt as he travels from Jamaica to Brazil. ENVY recently completed a project for Minnow Films called My Granny T e Escort, which was self shot by director Charlie Russell and mixed by ENVY’s Bob Jackson. T e team, which also included a fi nal mix by Matt Skilton, said that the audio was particularly challenging and required
much use of noise reduction and enhancement techniques using iZotope RX and Cedar software. Jungle has been busy this month with Chris Turner completing the sound design on a cinema ad for charity Adot and mixing the titles for the BBC’s World Cup coverage. Jim Griffi n and Dominic Dew worked on M&C Saatchi’s online BeatBullying campaign with Dew also picking up some new projects for Low Cost Holidays.
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www.audiomedia.com T e Audio Institute recording studio is designed and certifi ed by WSDG
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Tell me about your working relationship with WSDG.
John [Storyk, principal, designer] was introduced to us via an introduction from Arcade Fire to Electric Lady Studios. He’s been an extraordinary supporter from the beginning. T ey were brought in to do all of the acoustic engineering and technical layout and electrical plans. All of the guts of the buildings as I refer to it.
And your technology supporters.
I think every person involved in this project has committed to getting it done with the best resources possible on a minimal budget. Everyone involved has cut their fees, reduced fees, donated things at cost or below cost, and that’s what’s enabled us to build and create a really quality programme with really quality people and gear for not a lot of money. All of those companies provided gear to outfi t all these diff erent studios at really discounted prices and they did it all at the drop of a hat. T ere was no arm-twisting.
What rooms does Audio Institute feature? T ere’s a very generous, beautiful live room
What is Audio Institute up to now?
It’s the end of the school year so everyone’s in year-end projects, which are thesis projects. One of the things that’s really important philosophically about the education is that we’re teaching people how to work with very simple, locally available resources and tools in addition to learning the A to Z of what a big room looks like. I’d like to have graduates come out of there who can record a voodoo ceremony at the top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere with a laptop and a microphone and be equally comfortable at a big board in the studio.
www.audioinstitute.org
overlooking the ocean and a large control room, purposefully large so that we can hold classes in there in addition to it being a great big room for studio sessions. T en there’s another building that has a smaller recording room and four other rooms feed off that in a honeycomb eff ect so you can have workshops going on. You can have four student groups recording the same thing simultaneously. T en two other mix rooms and two really big, beautiful classrooms.
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