Wednesday, 15 June 2016

JW at the Media Production Show


Last week a couple of the JW Media Music gang, including myself headed off to the Media Production Show held at the Business Design Centre in London. The show is two days of exhibitions, demonstrations and over 60 seminars dedicated to the subjects of production, post production, VFX and content distribution. The event was extremely well attended and attracted people from all over the creative industries, including television, film, advertising and music.

The event began with a lengthy queue in some rare English sunshine along with a bit of minor - celeb spotting (Geoff Shreeves was there). After we had battled through the queues and collected our visitor’s badges, we proceeded on to the show. As soon as we arrived we headed over to the Avid Post – Production Theatre where we watched our first seminar, ‘Post – Production: State of the Nation’. Despite some unfortunate microphone problems, this proved to be a really interesting talk, which included speakers from three major post – production houses including The Farm, Goldcrest and Rushes. Topics included the benefits of tax breaks, the future of Soho for post - production and what effects the EU Referendum could have on the industry. 

After this we headed over to our next talk, which looked at the art and technique of post – production sound. It was really interesting to hear the trials that some sound editors and mixers face on a daily basis. The biggest surprise for me was to hear that more and more people are supplying low quality sound recordings, many even recorded on smart phones. This obviously causes a massive headache for anyone working in sound as it means endless hours of fixing the audio to get it to an acceptable level. If the audio cant be fixed to a high enough quality then it could mean re-shoots or more likely, ADR (Automated dialogue replacement). ADR is something that is a very common within the production process and shouldn’t be a problem, providing you have an Actor or Actress who can replicate their performance that they showed on camera. Unfortunately though, this is not always the case and a bad performance in an ADR session can result in sync issues. We were informed that this is apparently not an issue for Idris Elba, who is an absolute pro at replicating his performance (not surprised).

After a few seminars we headed in to the pit where various companies were showcasing their latest kit and equipment. It was also a great place to chat to some familiar and not so familiar faces. As the morning drew to a close we headed off with our endless goodie bags, I have to give top marks to Jigsaw24 for their retro pick n mix selection.

Overall the show felt like a great success and one that I’m sure to be going to next year, for the pick n mix if nothing else.


Charles

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