The September/October issue of the Editors Guild Magazine is now online and includes a very interesting article about the workflow and tools of three supervising sound editors of Soundelux: Scott Martin Gershin, Mark Stoeckinger and Mark Mangini. Also there are several comments from Bill Johnston, senior vice president of Engineering and Technical Services for CSS Studios.
“My goal is to establish a workflow that keeps the creative process moving forward.”
– Scott Gershin, Supervising Sound EditorIt is often considered that necessity is the mother of invention. For the motion picture industry, that might be modified to read “Emerging technologies are the mother of invention.” In other words, how we work, and the creativity that results from these endeavors, are highly dependent upon the palette of available picture editorial, sound editorial and re-recording mixing tools.
“As one of the world’s largest independent post-production sound companies, it is important for us to provide a selection of service offerings compatible with the workflows requested by our clients,” says Bill Johnston, senior vice president of Engineering and Technical Services for CSS Studios, a consortium of post-production sound facilities in Los Angeles and New York, including Todd-AO (Hollywood, Santa Monica and Burbank), Soundelux, Modern Music and the Manhattan-based Sound One. “Similarly, it is also important for us to have a perspective on which style of service provides the optimal level of creative expertise, the most complete soundtrack and the best value to our customers.
“We go to great lengths to secure the best possible creative talent and technical environments for our sound editorial and mixing facilities, and to pair each unique project with a customized set of creative and technical resources,” continues Johnston, who is also a Guild member. “In addition, however, our role must also be to listen to the input we receive from our creative partners as we collaborate on an acceptable approach to completing the soundtrack for any project. A key factor in our success continues to be our versatility and our ability to nimbly accommodate all situations.”
They manage to do an entire article on workflow without once talking to an assistant, engineer, re-recordist or mix tech. Though they are quite careful about mentioning the full proper names of all of their facilities, and how they’re the world’s largest sound company, and all of the brand names of the equipment they use and how superlative their setup is (9 Pro Tools systems on a stage! Mercy!). And they manage to distill a topic that fills volumes in two pages.
Note also that the writer of the article is a professional marketing consultant, who I assume has ZERO financial relationship with Soundelux.
Great article.
@Sighing Heavily,
Your point is a bit confusing since you appear to use the terms “they” and “their” interchangably to refer to both Soundelux AND the Editors Guild Magazine.
When your basic premise is flawed, it renders your whole construct flawed.
You are, however, quite correct in your assumption that the writer has neither a direct nor an indirect relationship with Soundelux – financial or otherwise.