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Featured Corp Member: Vaudeville
Mirko Vogel
Your company motto is…
Enabling storytellers to create and share their dreams with anyone, everywhere.
Tell us a bit about your company.
Vaudeville is a leading-edge international sound company spanning 3 countries and housing some of the world’s most talented and innovative audio specialists, including: re-recording mixers, sound designers, programmers, editors, sound recordists and foley artists. We create and facilitate incredible immersive worlds of sound, develop new technologies and techniques that enhance the human sound experience in everything from Cinema, Television, 3D worlds, HMD’s, living rooms, apps, games, browsers to large scale real world experiences.
How many staff members / freelancers do you employ?
Globally Vaudeville Employs 50+ full time and freelance talent.
Our Vancouver studios has between 5 and 25 full time and contract staff.
What are you working on right now?
Animation projects for Netflix and Disney
Google’s Spatial audio products
Meta – Mixed Reality Games
Feature Documentaries for Netflix, Apple+ and Warner Discovery
What is a favourite project that you’ve worked on, and why?
Vaudeville was recently announced as the creative launch partner globally for Google’s new spatial audio product IAMF (Immersive Audio Models and Formats) We have built some super fun projects with the team there across the US, Sweden, Germany, Japan and Korea to demonstrate how immersive audio can enhance the future of in car experiences, lounge rooms, HMD’s and browsers across all genres of content.
This larger project was launched with Vaudeville, Google and Samsung at CES2024 and continues to grow in really exciting ways.
We have a lot of really exciting projects coming up. Not many we can talk about here yet but all are pushing the boundaries of what has previously been possible with immersive sound.
We take this high resolution approach into everything we do.
What percentage of your work is with local vs. international clients?
40% local
60% international clients
Are you a Mac/PC/Linux shop? Or all of the above?
All of the above
What software/hardware/plugins can you not live without?
Avid – Pro Tools
Resolve
Many many plugins : )
Are Dolby Atmos/Dolby Vision capabilities something you have or are looking into?
All our studios are Dolby Atmos configured rooms. We have 3 Atmos rooms here. 2x 7.1.4 and 1x 9.1.4 We fully support HDR 10+ across all our displays and believe that, as an audio company, the visual experience should meet the same high standards as those found in final picture finishing processes
How difficult has the pandemic been for day to day operations?
We opened our studio 3 days before the lockdown.
The first thing we did when we returned back to work after the first weekend was to call our clients at Netflix, Amazon, Disney and Apple+ to see how we can help them.
Very quickly we built new workflows and systems to help with a new remote ADR system requirements that can be quickly deployed anywhere in the world.
Over the first 2 years of the pandemic we completed close to 500 remote ADR sessions for major feature films and distributed over 200 Vaudeville Remote ADR kits to 18 countries.
There were weeks where we were operating 24 hours a day.
It was proof that if you can think outside of the box (literally) you can continue to grow and help your clients make amazing things happen.
Our team grew to almost 20 full time people in 2020/2021 as we serviced the remote needs of our clients and started the development of the worlds biggest immersive audio library for Shutterstock.
Any workflow improvements brought about by the need to work remotely?
Vaudeville has always worked and built its projects on remote workflows. Largely so we can take advantage of great talent no matter where they might be. We build some of our own tools during the pandemic, but mostly relied on the robust and tested systems we have always used and that enabled our company to grow and scale across multiple continents all working together on a single project, essentially offering a 24 hour workflow for our clients.
While the TPN workflows makes this a little tricker for our high security projects we have incredible inter-site infrastructure. Our security teams and processes are at the very core of this remote success.
What do you miss most about “in person” client sessions?
We have always worked with in person and remote reviews for our projects dating back to 2016/17.
All our studios in our Vancouver facilities as well as LA and the UK are able to be linked together when needed so we can have clients in 1 and re-recording mixer in the other on separate air supplies, or physically separate when needed during the pandemic.
If anything the change with more people working remotely enabled more participation during mix reviews and opened our studio up to working with a greater international footprint than ever before.
We love having people here. But we also like the convenience of remote workflows.
Both are great : )
How long have you been a VPA corporate member?
Since 2019
Is there anything else about your company that you’d like people to know about that we haven’t yet asked?
Vaudeville has been operating in Vancouver for four years, and we’re fortunate to have built a remarkable community of talented individuals from this city. Their contributions have allowed us to expand our work globally, showcase incredible projects, and proudly share Vancouver’s exceptional talent on the world stage.