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Featured Corp Member: Elemental Post
Matt Drake & Dave Tomiak
Your company motto is…
“Post, perfected.”
Tell us a bit about your company.
Elemental is an end-to-end full service post facility specializing in long form, live action narrative and documentary. Our services include colour grading, post sound and finishing all under roof, something not entirely common in Vancouver.
We’re a boutique shop based in Railtown servicing productions of all budget ranges and sizes with a mandate to prioritize the creative experience.
How many staff members / freelancers do you employ?
Our team scales up and down depending on how many projects we have in house at any one time, or the demand for a particular project.
We are a core team of 6 full time, with an additional 4 freelancers in house and expand to another 5-6 people depending on the production.
What are you working on right now?
Currently we’re working on a handful of narrative features all in different stages of production, which range from local Canadian films to US studio indies. We also have two exciting US features in production at the moment slated to post in the fall.
What percentage of your work is with local vs. international clients?
I’d say we have close to an even mix of local clients vs international. Probably 60% Local, 40% International.
Are you a Mac/PC/Linux shop? Or all of the above?
All of the above. Our main day to day workstations are mac, with our film restoration suite being PC based, and our network infrastructure being linux based.
What software/hardware/plugins can you not live without?
Picture: Davinci Resolve, Neat Video
Sound: Protools, Auto-Align Post & Cedar.
Are Dolby Atmos/Dolby Vision capabilities something you have or are looking into?
We are a Dolby Vision capable facility and will be upgrading our theatre to Dolby Atmos later this year.
What do you miss most about “in person” client sessions?
We actually do more in person client sessions than remote, even in this day in age. When we have clients from the US or internationally, we’ve been lucky enough to have them travel to Vancouver for most colour and mix sessions.
We love connecting with people and getting to know them while working on their projects, why they are making the films they are making and learning about their creative process. There’s an intimacy that gets lost with remote sessions, so whenever possible we always prefer to work in person.
How long have you been a VPA corporate member?
We finally just joined the VPA as a corporate member a couple of months ago, although a lot of the folks we work with have been members for many years!
Is there anything else about your company that you’d like people to know about that we haven’t yet asked?
With the popularity of shooting on film growing massively over the last few years, we’ve added a suite of tools to our facility allowing us to offer film restoration and clean up services to productions shot on film. This allows us to clean up hairs, scratches, dust particles, and other larger issues in a more cost effective manner, where previously would require VFX work.
