M+E Connections

Like many parts of the media and entertainment ecosystem, content localisation services are being significantly impacted by the rapid shift to the cloud that has only been shifting even faster as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Dave Concors, the former Disney re-recording mixer who was recently named head of sound at ZOO Digital.

“I think we’re seeing the future happen right now,” he told MESA in a recent phone interview.

“With this onset of the COVID virus, so many countries are shut down right now” still to some degree, noted Concors, who was with Disney more than 20 years, exclusively working on foreign theatrical releases, including mixing work on Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Lucasfilm projects. Concors was also an Emmy Award winner for outstanding sound mixing for the long-running NBC show “ER.”

“Talent can’t even get to a studio, nor does talent want to go to a studio, where there’s four or five people waiting around” and people take their masks off, he said. It’s much safer to have the talent, sound mixers and others, work from home, he pointed out.

In the case of ZOO Digital, sound mixers on his team are doing their recordings from home and, “through a stringent” quality control process, those recordings are then sent to him to review from his home, where he’s also working remotely from, he said.

And the mixed recordings he’s been working with sent from his team’s homes are “just as good as the recordings I’ve gotten from the studios” over the years, he said.

“So the future, I think, will be this kind of recording,” which was “why I wanted to join ZOO,” he told MESA, adding: “It’s new, it’s challenging, it’s cutting-edge and that’s what I wanted to be a part of.”

Pointing to the industry overall, he noted how remote recording using cloud services means that “a director can be in Mexico City, the talent can be in Brazil, somebody else can be in Monterey [but] everybody is hearing the same material at the same time.”

Although Concors is working almost entirely from home, he noted that, once a month or so, he will go to the studio and “double check some mixing that we’re doing remotely” as another QC check.

“I really had no idea what to expect” with the reliance on remote work when he started working for ZOO about two months ago, he conceded. However, “surprisingly, there have been no real major glitches,” he said, noting there have been no Internet failures or any other issues that caused any deadlines to be missed so far on the projects the company’s been working on. “It’s surprisingly smooth,” he added.

However, working remotely like this is not without its challenges, he conceded: “For me, it’s a personal thing more than anything else. I like to be working with somebody next to me” — so he can talk to a member of his team while working on a mix rather than having to communicate via emails or text. It’s just sometimes easier for team members to see and hear the film or TV show they’re mixing in front of them at the same time.

It was also somewhat awkward joining a company and working remotely right from the first day, he conceded, admitting he still hasn’t met many of the people at ZOO who are emailing him and doesn’t even know what many of them look like. “We do have weekly meetings with people [virtually] but usually the camera isn’t on because there’s so many people involved,” he pointed out, adding: “It’s new [but] we’re getting there.”

However, it helped that there were a few people at ZOO he knew because  they had worked at Disney also, noting the fact that he was “very comfortable working with” them already was another incentive to join the company.

Concors also “felt that [ZOO] was a really great place to stretch with the advent of all the new technology that’s been coming out – with their cloud platform and their use of the cloud to dub with, I felt like this is a great chance to expand and grow and learn extra stuff before everybody else does. I think this is a real new environment to work in.”

Post-pandemic, it will make sense for his team to continue working remotely, he told MESA. “With the amount of work coming in, I would think that we’ll still have to stay remotely because there’s two main rooms at ZOO” at its Los Angeles facility that mixing is done in, he said, adding: “With the volume that we would be having, we would not all be able to get in those rooms at the same time.”

If Disney is doing  one project in five languages and Netflix is doing another with four languages and “they all have to be delivered within two weeks of each other, there’s no way to meet that deadline if we’re all working out of one or two rooms,” he explained.

Noting that he has a small team, he predicted: “There will be additional clients and additional products coming in, at which point we may have to grow.” However, “as of right now, we’re pretty comfortable with what we have,” he said.