- Get Educated, Get Connected, Get to Work.
Featured Corp Member: Azur Studios
TUNE IN: Violent Night
December 4, 2022
GOOD NEWS: CCE EditCon – Women In Post
January 22, 2023AZUR STUDIOS
INTERVIEW W/ HENNIE BRITTON
(Owner/Sound Engineer)
"We thrive on making things sound amazing, and want to help you with your next project!"
Visit the Azur Studios website
Tell us a bit about your company, Azur Studios Azur Studios opened its doors in 2007. At that time, we were primarily dubbing Japanese programs into English, for NHK’s “Morning Drama”. Now we do a lot more, including Live Action, Anime, Foley Recording & ADR, and Voice Recording for TV or Radio. We have dubbed over 150 “Dragon Z” and “Gundam Seed” Anime episodes.
We are a small team, but we work efficiently and are dedicated to always delivering our best.
A few years ago, we expanded and branched out more into the Audio Post Production field, where we offer full-service Audio Post including ADR, Foley, Sound Design and Re-recording Mix.
We also host regular training sessions for promising voice artists. Many have been placed in shows we record.
What projects are you working on right now and/or recently completed?
We recently finished a mini-series for NHK called “Teen Regime” and are anticipating another mini-series in the next few weeks.
An ongoing project that we have is recording the Airport Announcements for YVR, Calgary, Prince George & Victoria. The client for this project is based in the Czech Republic. A few years ago, we were asked to record Fijian Announcements for the Auckland, New Zealand Airport.
We have also recently recorded dialogue for a Video Game. It’s always so interesting to see how that world operates. Very different from our “Post World”.
Azur is the designated Studio for Penguin Random House Canada for Audio Book recordings in Vancouver. This project is sometimes read by the author themselves if they reside in Vancouver. We have already covered a variety of titles from Neurosurgeons to Politicians and 2nd Generation Holocaust Survivor stories. Often these biographies are very emotional and heartbreaking.
What is a favourite project that you've worked on, and why? While I was living in South Africa, the Studio I worked at was asked by Disney to Dub the 1994 Lion King into Zulu. Disney has a very high standard, and in 1994 it was challenging to find someone who was a voice artist, and an actor, and fluent in Zulu! We also had to match the voices to the English version, who had used highly trained actors like James Earl Jones and Whoopi Goldberg. We auditioned hundreds of people and were on a very tight schedule as it was one of the first times that Disney Premiered the film in all 8 languages on the same day.
These deadlines also coincided with the 1994 South African elections. I consider it an honour and privilege to have worked on “The Lion King” and a major highlight in my career.
What percentage of your work is with local vs international clients/projects? I would say about 70% of our work is International and the rest is local.
Are you a Mac / PC / Linux shop or all of the above? We are a Mac based shop, but we do own 2 PC’s, one for accounting and the other one for clients use if needed.
What software / hardware / plugins can you not live without? We use Pro-Tools mainly and their Interfaces plus a C24 console. I constantly use the Izotope, Fab Filter EQ etc. plug-ins.
What impact did the pandemic have on your business? The Pandemic slowed us down, and even when we got going again it was still slow, due to social distancing and not being able to accommodate large group recordings. At the same time we had to relocate our studio. In the end it all worked out well. It is still a slow recovery for Japan and the ever-dropping exchange rate is a big factor for us too.
How long have you been a VPA Corporate Member? Azur has been involved for about 5 -6 years now.
Is there anything else about you or your company that you'd like people to know about that we haven't yet asked? Anyone is welcome to swing by to check us out and have some Coffee (we can even offer real “Turkish Coffee”!)
