NYC Post House Mega Playground Adds Audio
WEST VILLAGE, MANHATTAN: Mega Playground, a NYC post-production facility encompassing three Manhattan locations, dozens of Avid edit rooms, multiple finishing and Telecine suites and production office space, has added audio to its portfolio of services.
The first of two mixing rooms, manned by resident mixer/sound designer Keith Hodne, came online just last week in Mega Playground’s main downtown Greenwich Street facility.
“We’ve always thought about adding audio facilities and now seemed like a really good opportunity to do so,” says Eitan Hakami, president and owner of Mega Playground.
“While we service films and commercials and documentaries, we also do a lot of reality shows and some of the clients we service for video are also clients that Keith has serviced for audio. So, it seemed like a no brainer to essentially bring it all under one roof.”
We visited Mega Playground the day after Hodne’s first session in the new room, sound mixing for First 48, an ITV Studios production for A&E. It’s a sizeable mix room, built with acoustic consultation from John Colluci, and tweaked and fine-tuned by Mega Playground CTO Terry Brown and Hodne.
“I’ve got all my go-to equipment here — the latest Pro Tools and Waves plug-ins,” Hodne shares. “Plus I’m working on a new ICON D-Command board, which I didn’t have previously, and am finding it’s speeding up my workflow. And the Waves Mercury bundle contains pretty much every kind of tool that I need.”
Mega Playground’s audio department will ultimately encompass two sizable mixing rooms and a recording booth and small control room, so that the facility can run three sessions — and handle mixing and sound design, ADR and voice-over recording — simultaneously.
Big AND Boutique: The Secret To Playground’s Success
Mega Playground has been around since 1994, starting out of the famed Brill Building, where it still maintains ten edit suites and a screening room. Hakami is obviously a ‘finger on the pulse’ owner/operator to have navigated and grown the business through so many incredible ups and downs in the past 15+ years.
“The secret to sustaining yourself through 9/11, the SAG and Writer’s strikes, recession, depression, etc. is that you need to constantly read and evolve with the market,” Hakami shares. “When we started, we never thought of doing reality shows or video. We were a feature film house. But you watch the market and you diversify your services as you see where it’s heading.”
Here, Hakami is careful to point out, however, the dangers of growing your facility too big too fast. “There is a law of diminishing returns,” he acknowledges, “And that’s why many of the huge, dinosaur post houses of the 80s may have gone down, because they ran the business as if the sky was the limit. And it really isn’t. We have dozens of Avids, but there are companies out there that have 600. If there’s some big Avid hardware upgrade that catches on fast, now you have 600 systems to upgrade.”
A post production facility being able to offer full service solutions under-one-roof is a classic concept and was indeed the model espoused by those oversized post houses of the 80s and 90s. But Mega Playground’s approach is one heavily refined. “Our model combines the diversity of the big post houses of the past with the feel of the boutique houses that grew afterwards,” he notes.
And the everything-under-one-roof offering is essential to working with today’s crunched budgets (and subsequently, schedules). “Clients want to stay in one place,” says Hakami. “If you can give them the quality, pricing and services they want, they want to stay in one facility. And if they trust you for video, they’ll trust you for audio. By the same token, Keith has clients that trust him for audio and would consider us for video where otherwise we wouldn’t have even gotten that lead. It’s a reciprocal relationship that helps him expand his portfolio into features and commercials and also helps us expand ours.”
Wider view of Hodne in the mix suite
Case in point, Mega Playground was heavily involved in the post-production of the HBO film You Don’t Know Jack, directed by Barry Levinson and starring Al Pacino. “Now we’re bidding on a commercial project with Levinson and [his DP] Eigil Bryld and Pacino,” says Hakami.
“A lot of the same creatives from features and television will get asked to shoot commercials, which is how we usually get involved. In our bid, we’re including the audio component, which may give us an advantage. Plus, it’s an opportunity Keith may not have been exposed to at another audio facility.”
Diversity in services, clients and projects is key to the post-production business, according to Hakami. “We ride both saddles — working on both reality television and features — and these two worlds are like oil and water and the population simply does not mix,” he describes.
“The vibes and the needs of the client are different. But the bottom line is they use the same technical equipment. A deck is a deck and it doesn’t care whether you put a commercial, a feature or a documentary into it. And this is key because we’ve had dry periods in features and the reality work kept us afloat. We’ve had dry periods in reality shows and feature work kept us afloat. You need the variety.”
Hodne seconds that notion for audio professionals. “You certainly can get pigeon-holed as a mixer, so you have to put yourself out there and be a businessman, not just a button pusher, to step out of those boundaries and into other areas you’d like to explore,” he shares. “People I’m meeting and reconnecting with here may want to come to me for a TV show they’re working on, and then maybe they’ll also bring me their indie film side project.”
On the overall health of the post-production industry in NYC right now, Hakami is cautiously optimistic. “There are months where we’re really high and there are months where we dip fast and there are months where we turn quickly,” Hakami attests. “So, we’re riding the roller coaster just like everybody else.”
As for the proposed NY State post-production tax credit program we’ve been hearing about around town, Hakami enlightens, “Mega Playground is one of the founding companies of the New York Post Production Alliance, which has been lobbying — successfully so far — to have this pilot post-production program included in this year’s state budget. The post-production program would provide a credit to those productions that don’t qualify for the existing NYC production credits because they shoot outside of New York.”
Should it pass, the program could stimulate the post business in NYC significantly.
“It could have a major impact on us,” Hakami allows, noting, “But it’s strictly episodic television and features — reality shows and commercials do not qualify. And, it hasn’t passed yet!”
For more on Mega Playground, visit http://www.mega-playground.com.