Screen Magazine - Index

Screen Magazine - Screen Magazine: Vol. 29, Issue 6 - Index

day, by the end I was
exhausted and the
client was exhausted
and it was very tiring,
[whereas] I just did [a
session] last Friday,
and I didn’t even
realize it was five
o’clock. I could have
kept working without
any problem. So the
aesthetic really feeds
the functionality.
It’s a pretty relaxed
environment that’s
comfortable to work
in, and when people
are comfortable
they’re more creative
and they get a better
product out of it.”
Another feature
offered by Particle
that is unique among audio houses and seems to be
making clients happy is more on the financial side of the
business, according to Rheude. Instead of charging clients
a fee for using the audio suite and then adding services on
a la carte style, Rheude says Particle charges one flat room
rate – and that’s it. No surprise bills showing up in the mail a
month after services are rendered.
Something else interesting and somewhat unique among
the folks at Particle is the way they collaborate with each
other and with the composers at sister company Comma. At
other music houses and audio post facilities, the composers
and sound designers are more competitive with each other,
but not at Particle.
“We give and take with each other,” says Mindeman. “If I
have a question, I can go to Dave and say, ‘Hey what do
you think about this,’ and vice-versa. We help each other
out.”
“[At] a lot of other facilities, the engineers are kind of in
competition with each other, so they won’t share tips
or tricks and a lot of times won’t even associate with
each other,” Kaduk explains. “[Particle is] a very creative
atmosphere [where I am able to] ask somebody else whose
opinion I can respect about a project I’m working on or
[about] a technical issue or something like that. Everyone
can kind of come together and work on it. It’s really nice to
be able to work like that.”
Executive producer Maggie Wasserman also adds that
creative collaboration is fostered in part because of the
atmophere Particle has created for itself, where clients
are more relaxed and therefore the engineers are more
relaxed.
One thing to remember, however, speaking of collaboration
and helping each other out, is that Comma and Particle
are sisters, not twins. Though they work together on many
jobs and the composers and sound designers consult with
each other often, each company offers its own services
and is responsible for its own clients and jobs.
“Comma and Particle collaborate, but part of the reason
we set Particle up as a separate company and in a
separate physical part of the building is so [it] could work on
jobs where the music was done elsewhere,” says Rheude.
“We want people to feel comfortable coming here even if
they’ve done music elsewhere.”
“With what Bryan just said, we work as a separate company,
but there’s also something else that we’re doing, too,” Kaduk
adds. “Particle has an extensive library of Comma’s music,
so it’s sort of like [a library of] custom-made tracks. When
Comma’s doing a pitch, [it will] do tons of tracks, and only
one will get sold, but then [there are] these leftover tracks.
We’ve assembled them into a library, and it’s actually a
cool thing and people really like it because it’s fresher
library tracks that we have access to.”
For example, Kaduk says that the company just worked on
a McDonald’s campaign utilizing some of these “leftover
tracks” of Comma’s music from the Particle library, and
because the tracks were created in-house, the team was
able to add McDonald’s signature “Ba da ba ba ba” to the
end of them.
“That would be really hard to do if [the track was purchased]
off of a website or something,” says Kaduk. “So it’s a benefit
to work with Comma, but then as Bryan said, we’re trying to
keep it separate.”
//www.particleaudio.com
//www.commamusic.com
Thanks to Erik Walter for contributing to this article.