Excited to see after a lot of work and patient waiting that Chinese film by Canadian director Neysan Sobhani ‘GUIDANCE’ which was another project we worked on that kept us going during the 2020 pandemic territories is available worldwide on all major platforms: Apple TV/iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, & more.

Even better, it has been getting fantastic reviews both in China and overseas, even by the elusive New York Times which voted it one of the top 5 sci fi movies to stream! And 88% on Rotten Tomatoes (which is based on reviews by professional film critics)

As supervising sound editor for this sci fi drama, I was involved in the sound design, foley, audio editing, ADR, music score coordination and 5.1 mixing.

One of the reasons I enjoyed working on this film is it’s unique story that asks the question, what if you could turn your body into a quantum computer that could tell if someone was lying how would it affect your relationships? Would it make truthfulness pervasive?

Based on the key Baha’i principle that Truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtues, It’s unique these days to see a film based on the idea of virtue, even more so how we can use technology that is real and actually being developed to help humans more easily be ‘encouraged’ to live by virtues such as in this case truthfulness. We always want to know if there is a way to ‘cheat’ to allow us to become better. The interesting question this film asks is ‘would it work’? Once someone could tell you were lying, you would probably feel obliged to acquire the same ability to level the playing field. What is even more interesting is that this is a Chinese film from a Canadian director. As someone who has lived in China long enough to experience how white lies are a very pervasive and acceptable part of the culture, it poses an even more interesting question to an audience that may be most intrigued by this idea. However, when you ignore the language of the film, it could really be set anywhere and it still provides thought provoking ideas. That being said, this is after all a ‘relationship drama’ set in the future, so if your curious about the idea of acquiring virtue by turning your body into a quantum computer aka ‘NIS’ and running an app called ‘Guidance’ to give you an advantage in negotiations / relationships you may be let down by the fact that this is a film about conflicted characters in flawed relationships. But maybe even if that is not really your thing you will appreciate the film for its unique scenery of China, a glimpse into a possible near future, and an unpredictable ending that is sure to catch most off guard.

Get more info and see the trailer on the Pro Soul website here or the official website here. Full reviews on IMDB page

I am proud to announce cooperation with Audi China to provide official theme music for the Audi e-tron series, under my EDM acronym JAMA Z! It started with a viral video introducing the robot in Shanghai:

The second video in Audi China’s e-tron campaign featuring a flash mob of dancers in Beijing’s famous Sanlitun TaiKoo Li area! See if the e-tron robot can match the dancers moves…

Later, videos were posted to teach you how to do the dance moves, and of some well known Chinese dancers here & here, creating their own dance moves to the music. Take a look and keep your eye out for surprise appearances of the robot!
(Note: These videos will load very slowly outside China and will have advertisements before)

We recently did Audio Editing, Sound Design, Music Recording, and the Audio Mixing for this short film to promote the launch of the X1 media pad, a new phone meets tablet computer by Huawei. It’s a colourful and glamorous piece of work that follows a man and a woman – the titular Mary Day – who have accidentally swapped luggage and work out the issue during an internet date.
We were able to get the real sound of the car used in the shoot for authentic feeling!

Huawei presents: Mary Day from Goodstein

Viewing from within China? See low quality version below.
We welcome you to visit our new Sound Design page to see more examples of our film and game work.

.

As i mentioned in my last blog, I’m moving to Beijing China, and setting up a fantastic, world class studio there.
It will be called Pro Soul Studios Beijing, in affiliation with my record label, Pro Soul Alliance.

It’s large a 3 room facility, professionally built by foreign expertise flown into the country along with specialized materials to soundproof and acoustically treat the rooms properly. It has full false floors and walls with large air spaces for soundproofing, but still lots of light from tall windows.
There’s even a built in guest room and kitchen/lounge in the middle.

Here are a few photos, then I’ll get into the technical details below for the gear heads…

The studio is in a building in an area that is a cool artist live/work residence neighborhood with art studios, restaurants, a French bakery, and a nice lagoon:

The studio has a funky traditional Chinese courtyard style entrance:

The largest recording room, Studio B.
Tall soundproofed windows allow lots of light in, but no outside sound.

Entrance to control room and studio A

The control room, below, has a custom desk with outboard gear rack panels on the left and right, and a Mackie xBus 200 touch screen console. These photos are old now, fabric on panelling has been replaced:

Control room window with Mackie xbus console

Unfortunately I don’t have a great photo of Studio A, the main recording room, but it is a nice spacious room with lots of light from windows on one side:

The studio even has a guest residence upstairs, a kitchen, and large outside patio if you want to visit China to work on your music project:

On to the studio equipment setup. In addition to my existing range of classic analog and cutting edge digital equipment, the new studio in Beijing will have the following new equipment that will make it the most powerful, highest quality studio I’ve had in my 20 years as a music producer and audio engineer:

• A Mackie xBus 200 HD touch screen mixing console and computer controller capable of 192kHz resolution, configurable I/O via rear panel cards, penny & giles motorized touch sensitive faders & surround outputs.
• 2 RME Hammerfall PCI cards allowing 32 channel high quality digital audio /MIDI channels between the computer and the console with zero latency (no delays!)
• Apple Mac Pro 2.66 Quad Core Intel Xeon computer with 1.5 Terrabyte drive and 8Gig ram
• 2 LCD computer monitors, 22″ each
• Enhanced surround monitoring system with new mogami cabling and other small additions.

Mackie Xbus 200 mixer console and computer interface

The hardware mentioned will allow an incredible amount of flexibility in input and output routing, monitoring, and expansion as needed.
I’m arranging all the special cabling and other details required, and bringing equipment to Beijing from Canada to get the studio operational in the next 2 months.

I’ve put a huge amount of time, trouble and great expense to make this one of the best, top quality music and sound design studios in Beijing.
It wouldn’t have been possible without the generous support of some of my Beijing friends, you know who you are, Thank you so much!

The studio should be open for production by sometime in August 2010.

I expect to soon be booked full time months in advance in the near future, so please contact me now if you want to work on a project.
Check back here for more details and updates.

Last year, i had the pleasure of working on quite an incredible Chinese project with the renowned Beijing artist Jin R (pronounced Jing R).
It has recently been released in China, it’s called ‘T. Journey’

Jin R is a known world class Chinese chef, restaurant owner, and sublime improvisational Yang Qin performer and artist.
Best known for her Hong Kong and Beijing restaurants ‘Green T House‘, Jin R was recently flown to Vancouver to cook her incredible culinary creations for the VIP guests of the 2010 winter Olympics.
Many attempt to copy hear ideas all over Beijing if not the world, and she truly represents a new era of China.

Last year Jin R developed a new bath house called Green T House Living Bath House & Residence which has already won the Wallpaper* Design Award 2010 – “Best Spa” and “AsiaSPA Magazine Awards 2009 – “Best New Spa Design” and “Best Day Spa”. Jin R wanted to create a unique soundtrack for this spa experience that took you on a journey through ancient to modern China and beyond. She asked me to produce and engineer the album as well as do some sound design.
We discussed what the album would sound like, I played Jin R some sound effect ambiances, chanting, and other musical elements and she eventually became inspired to envision the entire album, with all the performers and instruments she wanted to be a part of the project.
It was quite a diverse selection! I told Jin R, “not only is this not going to be relaxing, but it will be very challenging to make it work musically!”
But she was determined to make it more of a journey, and felt the spa treatments would be relaxing enough, So we proceeded.

Yang Qin, Gu Qin, Chinese traditional opera, Shao, and Chinese percussion, it was an amazing journey for me into Chinese music and instruments unlike anything else I have done before. I blogged more about the production here.
I was amazed at how quickly she rounded up some of the most amazing talent in Beijing, many of which had never been recorded!

Amazingly, it all worked out and it’s an diverse and unique album, another product of the original and creative mind of Jin R.
I owe much thanks to the talented and lovely Elika Mahony for not only introducing us, but assisting us with this project and allowing us to generously use her studio.

You can’t buy this album though, only receive it as a guest of the Green T House Living Bath House & Residence! So make sure you visit when your in Beijing, China.

Jin R’s ‘ancient meets futuristic’ Yang Qin performances on this project reaffirmed that the Yang Qin is one of my favorite instruments in the world.
It’s hard to get a sense of the album from a small part, but you can hear an excerpt of the album below:

[audio:T_Journey_edit_Jin_R.mp3]

.

I am working on post production for a DVD for some fitness products by Zenzation and they also asked me to assist with the production, so I had Tobin Smith work on the video shoot with me and found a location on the beach for a nice background:

There was a lot more seaweed and junk that the day before when I checked the location, and all we had as this kids rake to clean it…

We used a wireless headset mic to avoid background noise and get a clean sound while the instructors were doing a lot of movement. It sounded great despite extraneous noise. At the start of the shoot the city was cutting down trees, luckily that didn’t last long enough to kill the shoot…

I really don’t know why so many people are giving this film such bad press. I was totally blown away by it after seeing it about a week ago.

As a sound designer, one of the elements that stood out for me was the incredible sound design by Cameron Frankley that breathed new life into the machines that I grew to love since the original film by James Cameron. The sound in this film penetrated right into your gut and created such intimidation for an evolved new side to the machines that have taken over the world, as they should now that we are in the future, right in the middle of the apocalyptic battle that we had only seen glimpses of in the past.
As you’ll hear in the intro on the main website, when many of the larger machines commence their destruction of the humans, a threat to their existence, there is this new buzz of electrical energy surging that is perfect to convey just how much trouble your in when they appear! It is really only appreciated properly in a good theatre [I saw it in the best one in Vancouver].

The look of this film was also gorgeous, shot on a special never before used film stock to give it this bleak apocalyptic feel. The Director apparently also gave the cast and crew a copy of the famous “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” That inspired Blade Runner to give them an idea of the kind of world he wanted to create. And he succeeded in every way in doing that in my opinion.
We have to give credit to The Matrix series for doing this so well first…

But a good film requires more than just ear and eye candy, and as a fan of the series, I felt the film did a great job of bringing the story into the future in an exciting way that really impressed me.

So don’t listen to the hype, and see it in the theatre! It’s my fave of the year so far, even beating out Star Trek which I am usually an even bigger fan of…

A feature film I worked on last year, ‘Sweet Amerika‘ was released last week in theatres across Canada. It will further be released in the UK and across Asia, then on DVD in a few months. It’s a multi cultural drama  based on real events about a Sikh grocery store owner who is kidnapped and tortured by four Americans who mistake him for a Muslim.

We went to see it in the theatre over the weekend, and although I was pleased with how the sound came out, the sound in the old theatre we saw it in was so bad that it ruined the experience. 2 Channels instead of one, terrible old speakers, weird, compressed audio with a lack of dynamics, and a dark, dingy screen made it a disappointing experience. I have blogged before about how I’ve been doing more film work because of the declining quality of music playback devices, so it was kind of ironic that it sounded so bad. I heard it’s playing in a good theatre now, so I’m tempted to find out what it really sounds like.

I could go on with all kinds of stories about the massive amount of work and trials involved during the process of doing sound design on this film, how Maria’s screams and non dialog audio had to be done in my studio despite ADR being done previously, and how other location audio had to be used because ADR was never done for other key scenes, but I would have to write a novel to talk about all that.
And even though it was a very impactful experience in many ways, It’s a year later, and I’m done with this chapter of my life, so check out the many decent reviews of the movie out there, and see it if you can.

I look forward to the next film project being a better production, and playing in theatres with great sound.