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Pull Quote:

"The first anime interview I ever read for Coastal said "best dubbed anime to date" So I got all excited."

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Interview:

Scott Houle

Interview by: Matthew Anderson and Lauren Synger

An industry leader, Scott Houle and his "Costal Studios" were at the top of their game. Suddenly, the company he founded had to close it's doors. Now, Scott Houle is on the comeback trail with a new recording studio, a new company, and plenty of talent at his disposal.

DVJ- Tell us about your first job in the industry and how you got into it.

SH- I started in the world of movie business doing ADR. I was doing ADR for a few years in Wilmington. I had been doing that for the movie industry for some time, and all of the sudden one day this really strange guy walks in. I can tell this guy was very intelligent but I couldn't tell which particular genre he was part of. He had a VHS box with a bunch of colorful cartoons on it- really neat looking cartoons. Not like any I'd seen (before). He said he was looking for Automatic Dialogue Replacement and he was wondering if I would take on some, and I said sure. He introduced himself as Robert Woodhead from AnimEigo. I said "Well, I'll take a look at it when I have time" and he left it with me. A couple days later I popped it in, and have been hooked ever since. I just took a look at this stuff and said, "This is cool! This is really cool. I can make these guys talk? Whoa!"

He (Robert Woodhead) asked me if I would pick up where someone else was in the middle of the project. I won't mention which project or who it was, but I knew the guy he was talking about, cause of course the studio owners all know each other. I said no, I wont get involved in that. If you got something new you want to start me with, then most certainly. So he came back with a Lupin movie, which he calls Rupon to stick with the original family who owns the rights. So, that was “Lupin the Third: The Fuma Conspiracy”. So that’s the very first one that we did and I had an absolute riot with it. At the time it was small pickings, but the guys that came almost every single audition was like a first take because I looked at the pictures, I looked at the character, I listened to the voice and said 'This guy would be really great for this". So I call him up and have him come and audition for it and it was great. So we probably went through auditions for about a half a day and got into production the (very) next day.

The first anime interview I ever read for Coastal said "best dubbed anime to date" So I got all excited. "This is cool you know? Not only did I make them talk, but somebody liked it!" And its whole different thing from ADR because ADR with the big guys you know, it’s their job they are supposed to sound exactly like they do on the set. There's a saying I coined when it comes to ADR which is if anyone notices my work I did something wrong. You'll see it in major movies- Major Seventy Million dollar Blockbuster movies. You'll see the mouth move and the dialogue doesn't fit it for a split second and it sounds different. That’s bad ADR and it amazes me how some of these really big productions can just slide that in there and say, "that’s good move on". Its gotta drive the actors crazy.

So anyway we went 10 years and Wilmington has always done really well with the movie industry. I got right in there when Carloco was first coming in and they were bringing five to six feature films a week and everywhere you looked there was main movie stars walking around grocery stores and Wilmington got very used to it.

(Then) Carloco's home office, I believe in NY, wasn't doing so well. It was sucking profits out of their boomtown and eventually sucked it dry so they had to close up. Screen Gems came in and bought the place and Screen Gems did ok, but in the last number of years it hasn't done very well at all and I don't know whose fault that is and I don't know who to blame. Everyone blames 9/11. Its a 9/11 thing. But anyway the last feature film done here was Black Knight? And that was some time ago. In my industry I can't just sit here and wait around because of some 9/11 thing. So I was saying I built this studio, worked on it for seventeen years; designing the main room and getting the sound just right getting all the equipment right and really honing the art and then all of the sudden there's no work. (Then) I saw the writing on the wall. Just because you don't have checks coming in doesn’t mean that (no) one else is gonna send the bills in. So every day the bills just started piling up and the balance started going (down). I said the studio is too expensive I am gonna have to shut it down. That’s when I made the announcement that Coastal is gonna have to close. And the problem was so much like “go go go go go” cause we had just finished 52 episodes of Your Under Arrest for AnimEigo and in conjunction with that we were doing the movie through ADV and also doing their twenty Your Under Arrest Specials all at the same time and we got everything done and we were slamming. We got everybody's contract satisfied and every deadline satisfied. And then I figured when the TV series came out and we saw the reviews well, I couldn't pay people to give better reviews. The actors were on their thang. It was like magic. It was a magic cast. They all knew what everybody was gonna say before they even heard the next line. They knew how they were gonna say it, they knew their comedic timing. It got so much like that it was a really fun series to work on. So after seeing all those reviews I was like "Man All I have to do is call around and get my next gig." ADV, Pioneer, Robert at AnimEigo, Central Park Media has offered us stuff before, whoever. I just called and picked the best deal. I called and one by one they said No room at the inn. Don't have any work for you. And I kept thinking "This'll turn around" And so I gave it a couple months and by that time the bills were just a huge stack. Everybody's still saying "Sorry, don't have any work.", and I said “How can this be? I have been doing anime and have gotten really good reviews on every single show we've done, and just finished a really killer title.” Now all of the sudden no one has any work for Coastal.

Well, obviously someone was trying to tell me something. So I had to shut the studio down and went through some real soul searching times. Obviously I only do one thing and you can't do it in a little town like Wilmington. And so out of the blue I got a call from a brand new movie studio. Blue Ridge Motion Pictures. A 40 acre movie studio up on top of a beautiful mountain in Ashville, North Carolina. Ashville has one of the most renowned local acting scenes in the country. Charlton Heston and his wife started the community theater there. They go back and once in a while do shows. There are just phenomenal actors in this town. Untapped. Actors, Musicians, Artists. The town itself supports all this. The city council promo things "come to Ashville and see the arts". So here is a movie studio. They've got everything they need. They got the sound stages and everything. There's just one thing they are missing and that’s a Post Audio Department with someone that knows how to do it and so they offered me to come and said they would pay for the construction of the studio and we really want you to head up the department. Now here's the kicker. One of the heads of the studio has just lived in Tokyo for the last number of years helping build Tokyo Disneyworld. And he met a Japanese girl there, married her. They since had some kids, moved back to Ashville and he says his kids are the most popular kids in school because they know anime. So they are really excited and interested to bring anime onto the lot of the movie studio. And they also said this would be a great bridge between this new movie studio up on the mountain and the local community. Just before I left the head of the studio told me she wanted to have a meeting with me to discuss more of this anime stuff. Who knows? Maybe down the road we'll be getting some dubbing done. And here's the new card (he hands us each a business card) We never really shut Coastal down legally so this is Phoenix Post Sound, a division of Coastal Carolina Studios, Inc. And right now we are building a studio and should have it done in a week to a week and a half. Doing all the wiring. I've already got my first couple of jobs coming in for some pretty cool features and hopefully this weekend I will be able to talk to a couple companies about loosening up on that no out of the house policy and maybe give coastal another shot. I don't know what the reason is. Maybe they want Coastal to use other actors or maybe they want Coastal to do this or that I don't know but I hope to be able to bring anime back to Ashville and if not maybe we'll have to cross the big water ourselves and go shopping. I don’t know. I don’t want to lose anime. I love it.

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DVJ- You are very dedicated. We can see how much you love it.

SH-Been doing it for ten years and yeah I do love it. Its one of those things-one of the only jobs I've had when you really can't wait to wake up in the morning and do it some more and hone it a little bit. You've got a list as long as your arm on changes because that scene isn't flowing quite right and if we just change these couple of words here then it would make sense and then the timing would be perfect. It draws the audience. So that’s what’s going on. And hopefully we'll be able to retain some anime in our world.

Pam Weidner has been the engineer for the past 2 years- she has directed, recorded and mixed all the stuff. So a lot of people are finding it hard to believe that she is a valid pro-tools engineer and a valid voice director. Has done major stuff ever since Virtua Fighter and some other things for Media Blasters. So, we got to the point we were extremely busy. There was really a nice flow. Busy seven days a week. We had our two studios networked together so I could search her hard drives when she is in the middle of a session and grab stuff she just finished. So, change here change here change here change here and then the major mix. I'll spend 12 hours on a 22-minute TV show just for the mixing.

DVJ- How long does it take to record the voice actors?

SH-That depends. Obviously I have had allot of talks with Kira Kimiya at another convention and we talk at night before the panels and he is a very well rounded voice actor. He's got some very interesting things to say. He'd like to do it the way the American's do it. He said its much too rushed in Japan. All actors are on the same microphone. Now there are good things like natural delivery. However, you get live takes where the director will take 2 or 3 live takes of a scene and the director will pick which one overall is the best. We've got lead actors who might have been doing this for years and years and years and maybe that wasn't their best performance. But overall that was the best. But their speed is incredible. They'll do a whole show in two or three days. But mixing, sound effects, all that stuff still takes the majority of a week for a show. So, they still crank out a show a week but the Americans are handed the anime tracks for music and effects so we don't have to do that. Now some companies opt to redo the music. I am not a big fan of that. It’s not for me to say, but I love the Japanese music and I think it fits very well. But still they have to do that and effects. They take a lot longer than the music does like the steps, wind blowing. All this cool stuff people take for granted.

DVJ-It’s all timing.

SH- Yeah. And there's little cues in the effects to make someone's head turn. That’s time consuming and I think the Japanese effects designers are absolutely brilliant and I think they probably don't get a whole lot of attention for their work. Its just really detailed work and its done phenomenally.

DVJ- I was wondering if you could explain for the audience what the difference is between ADR directing and Voice (Over).

SH-Basically the difference is between ADR and VO. VO and VA. That’s the way to really look at. VA-Voice Acting. VO-Voice Over. Acting versus Commercials. There's a huge difference in delivery and a huge difference in what the producers want in the deliverers. Producers that come in and want a VO-"Buy Jone's Ford" That’s what it is. They want it just like that. They want allot of DJs The female DJs that sound too much like the happy housewife (he demonstrates) No housewife sounds like that, but that’s the typical American entity of what they want housewives to sound like. Those are all DJs and they speak really fast. They edit all the breaths out to get it to 29 seconds. So that’s the difference between that and Voice Acting. Now here is the big deal that’s really important to me. A lot of people say the way we want to cast is that we want the same voice as the Japanese. That’s great if you can get it. I'd rather have an actor. Maybe the voice will sound a bit different, but the audience will believe that. They won't believe someone who just sounds like the original Japanese counterpart and can't act. If they are talking like this (he demonstrates bad acting), but they sound exactly like the Japanese voice actor I'm sorry I just can't go there. I would rather have someone who sounds a little bit different but can really draw the audience in and develop that character. Now the plus side is if you can get both. That’s very tough

DVJ-Can you describe a typical workday for you?

SH-That’s interesting too. I am a firm believer and its been proven to me that old adage or idea when you first wake up you use the analytical side of your brain and the mechanical side and as your day works in it starts leaning more toward the artistic intellectual side of your brain-that has been proven to me over and over and over. And VOs I have them come in the morning cause they are being very articulate and the timing is fast, but I am not gonna ask somebody to act and certainly I am not gonna ask the women to come in the morning for anime because their voice is six octaves lower. I start at 3 in the afternoon. I do two 3-hour sessions a day with a break in the middle. Then I go eat, come back and start mixing and I mix until like 4 in the morning. I generally sleep 6 hours a day and work seven days a week. And that’s what I've been doing for at least ten years.

DVJ- Is there anything you would rather do than ADR or do you feel you've found your niche?

SH-I like both. ADR and Sound Design and they are both so close, but with anime you've got a little bit more liberties with voice actors there that you have to adapt another language and have it be understood. Have your audience cry at the same time the Japanese audience cries and have em laugh blah blah. Once again everyone says this and I think its true-to portray the original artist's intentions. That’s what its all about. There is no "definite direct translation". I've talked to allot of Japanese guests about this and they agree. You have to adapt, but you cannot add storyline. Here is what their saying. I have taken 3 individual translators and have asked them all to help with a particular scene with translating and I got back 3 completely different translations. The words were completely different. The meanings were exactly the same. They are adapting as well because they have to so when a fan comes up to me and says "you know, I really hate it when somebody varies from the direct translation" what they mean is they really hate it when somebody varies from subtitles and who did them? One of the translators. So it depends who the translator is that is the bible for that movie.

DVJ-Do you have to give a lot of directing when working with the voice actors or is there artistic license?

SH-Some do. The really, really good voice actors you have to hold with a leash and I would much rather do that because they want to add allot of stuff. I would much rather pull somebody back then go "Give me stuff"

DVJ-What advice can you offer to people wanting to get into any aspect of the industry?

SH- You gotta live there.

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