Former Warner Bros. Sound Facilities Become Audio Head, Targeting Film and TV Producers

Picture Head, an 11-year-old post facility in the heart of Hollywood, is in expansion mode. The company has a history in trailers and TV spots for studio clients, but it’s growing to fill a sweet spot that it sees somewhere in between the very largest post houses in L.A. and specialized creative boutiques. At the same time, it’s making some noise, having purchased an armada of sound recording, mixing and editing facilites that give it credibility in the film-audio world.
Company President Barry Nulman says the goal is to match the nimble creative services and personal attention found at a small shop with the end-to-end resources of much bigger companies. “We are a high-end boutique,” he says. “We offer the entire breadth of services a production needs from the time it moves into offices until it makes delivery to all platforms. We offer more supervision than most facilities and we understand what the client needs with respect to today’s compressed schedules and budgets.” Appropriately, the company’s new tagline is “everything under one hat.”

Nulman sees the effects of the company’s deliberate evolution in every aspect of its operations. A completely refurbished 4K digital intermediate theater is equipped with a Baselight color-grading system, and on-site offline edit bays are available for lease by filmmakers on a short-term or long-term basis. “We have multiple formats,” says Picture Head Vice President Matthew Flint. “Our primary workflow is Avid. We employ Avid DS as well as Avid Symphony. We also have three Final Cut Pro systems, which we utilize for projects that are very FCP-specific and are best-served by remaining on Final Cut platforms through online.”

The new infrastructure is fully file-based, with more than 100 TB of central storage deployed through several different systems, including an Avid Unity, a Filmlight Baselight system, an Autodesk Smoke system, and a Final Cut Xsan. On-set dailies and stereo 3D are among the new services offered, and the digital media department has expanded to provide more archiving, encoding and other digital services. But that’s just part of the story. In late 2009, Picture Head acquired a group of sound facilities located nearby on “The Lot” in West Hollywood, which had once housed Warner Bros. Sound Services. Those facilities, including four film-style mixing stages, some of the largest ADR and Foley facilities in Hollywood, a number of sound editorial rooms, and a 135-seat theater, are now known as Audio Head. The pedigree of these stages is pretty much unassailable — Hop, Never Say Never, and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life have been mixed there recently.

“It was a natural asset for us,” Flint says, “enabling us to do both audio and picture at a high level.” Picture Head already has several 5.1 ProTools mixing suites, but packaging Audio Head’s sound services with Picture Head’s dailies, editorial, color grading and media services, makes the companies an appealing option for episodic television producers.

Picture Head

Sound work for I Am, the new documentary from writer/director Tom Shadyac, was completed at Audio Head while DI work was ongoing simultaneously at Picture Head. Flint said the companies are “on the verge” of several more film and television agreements that will include both sound and picture services and notes that television producers have been especially enthusiastic about the new off-line editorial suites. “We have a more robust infrastructure and far more storage capacity than is typically available from a rental facility,” he says, noting that tech-support staff are on-site 24-7.

“The more services a client uses, the greater the flexibility we have with costs,” Flint notes. “Today, with most producers facing challenging budgets, the option we offer makes a lot of sense with no compromises. We can put together a great package.” Nulman says Picture Head continues to post a lot of trailers and TV spots for new film releases, but it’s now attracting more longform work, including independent films and reality-TV programming. Nulman says the company’s increased visibility is all part of a plan to raise Picture Head’s Hollywood profile: “We’re no longer the industry’s best kept secret.”

For more information: www.picturehead.com; www.audioheadpost.com.