Examination of Witnesses (Questions 19460
- 19479)
19460. Mr Newberry: Can you put up number
4, please?[7]
This goes to the question that has been asked.
(Mr Taylor) It is this compactness
and it is something very special that has occurred. Nobody intended
it that way but it means the actor walking across Oxford Street,
or those other areas, takes himself away from the core of the
technical excellence, and that excellence is about speed as well.
That is about being walking distance and not taking taxis.
19461. Taking that last bullet point, Mr Taylor,
on the slide there, you say the service providers for broadcast,
cable, satellite, video, film, computer graphics and the internet
have all now set up shop in Soho.
(Mr Taylor) That is correct.
19462. To take the premise that has been suggested
to you, if you move out of Soho, would all these service providers
for broadcast cable, satellite, etc, move with you or would they
remain where they are servicing the Soho market as it exists?
(Mr Taylor) I know where
I am in the food chain. No, not at all. A classic example of how
volatile a business we would be working in: you may have heard
of the electricity power cuts in Soho in the heatwave last August.
We lost three days through power not being reliable in Soho. People
were booking facilities elsewhere, trying to find facilities,
outside Soho. Because it was affecting a large part of Soho all
of the people using Soho were trying to find out: "Okay,
if EDF do not get it working again, where are we going to get
our work done?" Work was starting to move out and could have
left Soho en masse. It will not come back again. This sort of
work is volatile; it is very hard to get it back. There was an
actors' strike—
19463. Chairman: The question I asked
is if you moved out, why then would it not move with you?
(Mr Taylor) Because our
clients would use other competing facilities against us inside
Soho. The engineers we have got would leave us and go and work
inside Soho. Soho is—a terrible phrase—where it's
at, as far as the work we do. It is absolutely essential.
19464. Mr Hopkins: If I can just go through
what you have been saying: the problem is not when the railway
is running because we are going to have quiet technology; it is
while the railway is being constructed that is the problem.
(Mr Taylor) That is correct.
19465. Some sound studios are already very close
to tube lines and they have insulated themselves to deal with
that noise problem.
(Mr Taylor) That is correct.
19466. Within your studio facility, the serious
problem you have would be during the construction for quiet voiceovers.
It is the quiet voiceovers you have a problem with.[8]
(Mr Taylor) It is quiet voiceovers
but it is actually just as much the monitoring of the recoding
you have done, which is done in the control room. So you have
to be able to listen. It is not something you openly talk about
because it is assumed, but it is quality control. The engineers
have a responsibility to make sure that the tapes and the work
they have done is pure and uncontaminated, and you check it inside
the control room. If you have got a train going past how do you
know what was right and what was wrong, unless you can play it
again, but the clients will not put up with it.
19467. The crucial thing is what actually goes
into the recording—the tape, or whatever.
(Mr Taylor) In technical
terms you are correct. In commercial terms the critical thing
is that we have clients who want to use us. What would happen
is that the clients would not put up with the disruption to their
schedules and the extension of their time. They are just not interested—full
stop. They are absolutely not interested. The work would just
move to facilities which did not suffer that problem.
19468. What is the feasibility of, first of
all, insulating the small boxes that you use for voiceovers for
recording? That would be quite a simple thing to do, they are
quite small.
(Mr Taylor) Okay. It is
a very good question. The answer is quite complicated. Firstly,
we are a working studio. Where we currently are at the moment,
with our landlord, when we took our lease we had a clause put
into our lease that we had to have 48 hours' notice if our landlord
was going to use a hammer drill (if you can imagine the noise)
anywhere in the building, because that noise could disturb us.
We built the rooms to a very, very high isolation standard. Improving
the isolation for voiceovers would involve a massive amount of
work that we would hear in all the other rooms. What will happen
is in an attempt to try and make the facility more soundproof
we would make it unusable for the purpose for which our business
is. So the actual act of trying to fix the problem would kill
us. The medicine is more dangerous than the disease. What would
we have to do? The voiceover booths would have to be totally dismantled
and completely rebuilt with yet thicker plaster board and more
wood—a higher mass of materials. Ignoring the fact we could
not work in the facility because of the noise and the dust, that
could be done, but it would be uneconomic. The control rooms are
another whole question altogether, which is where you are listening
to where you have contamination of the sound. The control rooms
in the lower ground floor are what they call mass slab isolated,
where the heaviness of the slab is used to help keep the sound
out. It is a question you had probably better ask of the acoustic
designer David Bell of White Mark. My understanding is that the
only way you can isolate the control rooms more is, basically,
you would have to take them away and build a completely floating
room inside that area based on rubber which is the same technique
as used for the voiceovers—thick walls—and one of
the things that happens is the whole room inside gets smaller,
and we then drop below Dolby certification for the licences for
Studios 8 and 9 downstairs. The rooms get smaller so the whole
physical layout of the room has to start to be accommodated. So
it is effectively rebuilding entirely the ground floor, or the
basement facility, and whilst you are doing that you could not
work. You cannot do it out of hours. Westminster Council will
allow you to work until half-past eight at night. If we were still
trying to run our business we would have a two-hour window in
the evening and a one-hour window in the morning where we could
actually do this work. It is uneconomic and completely unfeasible.
19469. Mr Newberry: Mr Taylor, can I
ask you about the statement you have made about reducing the size
of the room, flowing from the question you were asked. You indicated
that you would get below the Dolby standard. Can you just remind
us of the importance of meeting the Dolby standard in terms of
doing the work or attracting the work that you need to attract?
If you are non-Dolby compliant in terms of the size of your facility,
so you would not get the appropriate certification, what is the
effect and the consequence of that?
(Mr Taylor) Dolby certification
is required specifically when you are working for film. We currently
do commercials for cinema, we do trailers for cinema. It is a
growing part of our business and we see it as very important.
We have recently done the sound for a short film. All film work,
fundamentally, touches Dolby, or Dolby touches all film work,
because it is a recognised, de facto standard of quality
performance for films on sound. They specify a whole raft of parameters
for sound and, also, physical parameters on the sizes of the rooms
the location inside the room of the mixing console, the speakers,
the monitoring and how things should work. Again, I would defer
to David Bell on this, of White Mark Designers, but my understanding—and
this is purely a practical understanding—is that if we had
gone for a floating room we would roughly lose about one foot,
maybe more in head room. It then becomes quite cramped vertically
and then what happens is because the picture size has gone down,
vertically, the left to right dimension shrinks enormously. If
you take a foot to eighteen inches off, this picture of the Nike
lady dancing gets much smaller. This is a Dolby premier size room.
We are no longer in that category of room. The sight line changes.
Everything changes. You take everything away and it is a different
commercial proposition.
19470. Would you get Dolby certification or
not?
(Mr Taylor) No, not with
that room. If you took a foot off that you would not get it. If
you took a foot off any of our Dolby certified rooms; if you reduced
them in size, the certification would change and that would effectively
change the profile of our business. We would not be able to do
the work that we currently do.
19471. Would that have a terminal effect or
would it boost business?
(Mr Taylor) I would be amazed
if it would boost business. I cannot see any reason why it would
boost it at all; all I can see is that it would reduce business.
If we actually lost our Dolby certification we would lose about
25-30 per cent of our turnover, and anybody who has been in a
small business knows that if you lose 25-30 per cent of your turnover
you are very lucky to survive. It is as simple as that. There
is not the flexibility. These businesses look very flash, they
look very trendy and they look highly profitable; anybody who
works in this area knows there are incredibly tight margins. There
is no potential for us to lose 30 per cent of our business. That
takes us out.
19472. If you want to remain a world-class studio
and if you want to keep that accolade which you have currently
got, would you retain that description if you were not Dolby certificated?
(Mr Taylor) No, we would
be second-tier. There is not a single one of our competitors who
has not got Dolby certification. It is a requirement. It is almost
a badge of honour to a certain extent. It is: "Are you in
the club or are you not in the club?" A lot of the time the
Dolby certification is not used, in reality, for the work that
is done, but if you have not got it (for all film work it is used)
then you are not a world-class facility.
19473. If the majority of your competitors,
if not all of your competitors, in Soho do have it, and as a result
of what has been suggested you do not have it, where are you in
the competitive pecking range within Soho?
(Mr Taylor) To use the A,
B, C list, you drop down into the C. A is the studios which are
Dolby certified, very, very high quality—and we are, by
no means, the only one in Soho—there are B-listed facilities
who are Dolby certified, who are respectfully speaking, not such
high quality establishments, and then there are C-listed studios
who do not have Dolby certification, and down we go. As I said,
it is a fundamental requirement of the club to work at the highest
standards on any material on any project that you might be lucky
enough to do in business. We did the cinema trailers for the latest
Bond film Casino Royale. We are a small post-production
facility in Soho; we are not a massive establishment. There is
a very large facility called De Lane Lea where they mixed Casino
Royale but we did the trailer for Casino Royale, which
is effectively a long commercial. To do that you have to have
the same Dolby certification as a large mixing station. We are
very proud we did it, and we think it was a really cracking good
soundtrack. We could not do that. We would not even get asked.
You would not get talked to.
19474. Mr Binley: Of the 59 studios listed
in the document, only five of them have six or more studios. Is
that also related to quality or does that not have an impact on
top end quality at all?
(Mr Taylor) I would not
in any way suggest that because you do not have six studios you
are not a top quality facility. Grand Central have four studios
and we deem ourselves to be a top quality facility. The extra
studios, basically, move you to a different serviceability for
your client base. Our clients have a constant flow of work; they
need to have that service, and because work is always chopping
and changing—"Are you coming tomorrow? No, you are
not. Fine. Oh, you are coming"—all that sort of thing
is what our business is about. Having six studios gives you much,
much greater flexibility. We run eight engineers from six studios
to give us more flexibility on which engineer and which studio,
and all that sort of thing. There is a critical mass that gets
you into the A group as well.
19475. Mr Newberry: I have no further
questions in-chief.
Cross-examined by Mr Taylor
19476. Mr Taylor: This is another case
where there are a lot of Taylors involved. We are going to have
three doing the one Petition. I will try and make it as clear
as possible. Mr Taylor, you have already confirmed that you knew
when you were buying the interest in the property that Crossrail
had been safeguarded, and you gave an indication in your evidence
that your business partner was told by Crossrail that Crossrail
would not be built. That was the effect of your evidence.
(Mr Taylor) That is correct.
19477. Presumably, given the particular importance
of the noise environment within the studio that you were going
to build, you instructed your solicitors to obtain confirmation
of that from Crossrail in writing. Is that right?
(Mr Taylor) No, it is not
correct. We never had much luck getting much from Crossrail in
the early days.
19478. Did you attempt to get confirmation of
that in writing?
(Mr Taylor) I would suggest
you should address that to my business partner, Carol Humphrey,
who is dealing with that specific point.
19479. When you were getting your studios designed,
what steps did you ask the designers to take to enable additional
mitigation to be provided if Crossrail were to come along, so
as to preserve the acoustic environment of the studios?
(Mr Taylor) We did not ask
that question, because we are not aware of any method or technique
by which you can design a studio or insulate against sound that
does not yet exist. We are not aware of that. We saw nothing from
Crossrail giving an indication of what the sound levels would
be. As I understand it, it is impossible to design against sound
that has not yet arrived, unless you spend a huge amount of money
over-engineering the isolation. Everything is possible always.
So the conundrum would be we do not know how loud Crossrail is
going to be; we do not know how fast the train is going to be;
we do not know whether it is going to be a commuter train or a
freight train. Are their trains going to be fast or slow? How
big will the trains be? How much will they weigh? What will the
track be? What sort of track will it be? None of those questions
could be answered.
7 Committee Ref: A221, Grand Central Studios-A brief
history of Soho Post Production (WESTCC-9305A-028). Back
8
Committee Ref: A221, Grand Central Studios-control room (WESTCC-9305A-031). Back
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