In ACTRA we trust...

I have nothing fundamentally against ACTRA. The union works to ensure performing talent get paid a fair wage for commercial work - nothin' wrong with that. However, if I were to say ACTRA was complicated from a producer's point of view I would REALLY be understating things. Brain surgery is complicated. Successfully landing a Mars probe is complicated. The ACTRA Commercial Agreement is really REALLY complicated. Take this little doozie of a paragraph for example...

Single Voice is a performance category applicable to Performers engaged in radio commercials, including an actor engaged to execute or interpret a role in a dramatic form of presentation when one or two actors are engaged in a commercial. When one or two Actors and an Announcer are engaged in the same commercial, they shall be categorized as Single Voice.

If you can make sense of that in less than a unionized work week, you are a better person than I am, and I'm guessing a 'wonderful' career awaits you in complicated verbiage construction. Congratulations!

Anyhow, the other thing that strikes me about the tone of the ACTRA collective agreement is the very RELIGIOUS bent of the prose they employ. With this in mind, Nolan and I wasted some time in the studio, putting together an excerpt from an ACTRA Church Service...

Miiiiister Rabbit...

There are certain things that people were never meant to see. Like your diary. Or that skanky dream you have at 3 AM when you drop into REM sleep, or a Protools session you made by yourself when you were overtired AT 3 am...

A couple of turns of the earth ago, we were asked by the North West Company to put together a stupid radio spot for their board to listen to at an upcoming marketing meeting to give them an idea of goofy new directions they could take their radio spots in. We were pretty busy at the time, and I was spending the night at the studio finishing up some projects when, lo and behold, inspiration hit me at about 3 AM... I had the perfect Easter spot for the North West Company (or so I thought)! Before I forgot (or wised up!) I set up a microphone, set a ProTools session a running, walked into the voice booth and recorded all the parts for the spot myself.

The next morning, before I could come to my senses enough to realize the travesty I had created, Olaf found the recording session and laughed so hard he pissed himself. He then made a little playback featuring the highlights of my performance. In self-deprecating good humour I have posted it HERE. And yes, those footsteps you hear ARE me walking in and out of the voice booth in between takes...

Let them eat cake...

Audra (from Taylor George Design...they are great! they designed our logo for us,) and her partner George dropped by over the weekend to say 'hello' to the daCapo gang. Here's a few photos of our 'fête'. Thanks for the great evening guys!

Olaf and George are shocked when they discover they both sport the same hair style! Audra decides she wants a glass of red AND white... after all these glasses are SO SMALL! Nolan eats the better part of a cake... keep er' down buddy! Clint tries to distract everyone's attention as Nolan's dessert discomfort climaxes...

Ruby Ruby!

Olaf and Kevin have been working on a submission for Ruby Gloom, a project currently in development by Nelvana. We snuck a video camera into the sound studio and grabbed some hot footage of Kevin laying down some ripped vocals for one of our demos...

Click here to witness the creative process at its finest!

Kevin grooves to the gloom.

The Aichele Has Landed!

This weekend Kevin Aichele our long time vocalist and ruiner-of-coffee-makers extraordinaire jetted into town from Toronto to help us out with a few projects on his way to spend the summer in Calgary performing in 'Jesus Christ Superstar'. In between all the craziness, Kevin usually finds time to work on some 'extra curricular' sound projects, like this 'Unofficial' theme for Frantic Film's Bomber Boys series that he wrote with Olaf last summer....

Click Here to Hear the Unoffical Bomber Boys (BOYZ) Theme!

....Olaf pondering how to create a fresh sound for a WWII historical series...

...Olaf subtly reacts to Kevin's proposed theme and suggests that Hip Hop may not have been that popular in 1940.

A Frantic Dinner Party

On friday night, our good friends from Frantic Fims came over to Olaf's house for a dinner party. We have had the privilege of working on many television projects with Frantic, including music creation for:

Till' Debt Do Us Part,

Kitchen Crimes,

Bomber Boys, and

The Flying Bandit. Thanks Frantic! It's been a great year. Cheers!

While Jeff, the 'evil' bartender contemplates what to drink. Note the artistic use of my thumb in the corner of this photo...

Annalee gets excited about salad...

While Olaf gets artistic with a tomato...

These socks are making me angry!

Olaf has this annoying habit of wearing the most ugly and obnoxious socks you ever laid eyes upon. Believe you me, when you are staring at these ugly toe covers first thing in the morning, before you even had the reassuring hit of coffee your body craves, it can make you violently ill. I could probably post a series of photos of these socks, but for now I'll content myself with today's aesthetic travesty...

Eat a cake to remember a cat

On a sad note, one of my cats, Gigalo, recently passed on. He was a great tabby, who you could always count on to make your hands bleed, give your furniture that really popular 'shredded' look, and use the neighbour's flowerbed as a litterbox. The daCapo staff decided to cope with their grief in the only way they know how... by eating! Annalee had a great cake made with the likeness of our good friend on it. To express my true feelings for our striped friend, I decided to post a song I wrote a while ago that talks about the true nature of our realtionship. Ahhhh... cats! I got Nolan to sing it for me, as had I done this myself, odds are you would have prefered the sounds of cats mating in the alleyway to my vocals... A Fuzzy Conundrum (mp3)

Welcome to daCapo Productions' Blog!

daCapo Productions is an audio production company located in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. We create original music and sound for television, advertising, internet and multi-media. Our web site at www.dacapo.ca is good, but there's lots of crazy, creative, fun and silly stuff that goes on here that does not really fit in the corporate look of our website... hence this blog! As this blog develops, you'll find samples of some of the less serious audio we create, photos of daCapo events, and amusing anecdotes from our day-to-day operations.