"I will never be an old man. To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am."
Francis Bacon
Dynamix turns fifteen years old this month. Well technically sixteen, because I incorporated a year earlier and did small jobs out of my basement until I could step out on my own. When I did, I couldn't have timed it better. As I wrote about in our ten-year anniversary newsletter, the Great Ice Storm of 2003 delayed our opening for a week. In fact, I was stuck in Dayton, Ohio for several of those days. Our entire Lexington clan was there overnight for a wedding when Mother Nature dumped a ton of snow onto Dayton. Back home, Lexington was covered with inches of solid ice. All of our houses were without power, our pets were starving, fish were freezing, and everything from the Ohio Valley to the northeast was at a standstill. For several days, Dayton police were restricting all travel and most of Kentucky was shut down.
After four days in a hotel with two days worth of clothes, I had had enough and decided to make the 150-mile trek back into Kentucky, police be damned. I don't remember how long it took, but I was exhausted when I finally pulled into my neighborhood. It was on a small hill, and I remember looking down over several neighborhoods with drooping, ice-laden trees. Everything had a Disney-esque feel to it with the layers of ice glistening in the sunlight. Except for the house fire I saw churning out a column of black smoke. The fires would continue over the next week as 65,000 people without power tried everything to keep their homes heated. I grabbed my pets and headed for my mother's house to check on it. In one of those stranger-than-fiction moments, the power kicked on just as I opened the front door. With this good news, the rest of the family ventured home the next day. We all camped out at Mom's (with pets, including surviving fish) until power was slowly restored in our neighborhoods. Meanwhile, I anxiously awaited for power to be restored at my new location off Alumni Drive.
So a cold start to my first studio. It was sandwiched in the back of a sports medicine facility alongside Post Time Productions and Filmburn. In order to cut a voice-over, the talent had to walk around through the kitchen to a former closet now lined with foam. Make a wrong turn and you might wind up getting an impromptu physical therapy session. Knowing this was temporary until the whole group of production companies could find a new, larger space, we operated in these small confines for the next year. It was a little embarrassing when 20th Century Fox booked an ADR (dialog replacement) session with Dakota Fanning for the film "Hide and Seek." But the ADR editor, R. J. Kiser, who coincidentally was ADR supervisor for another film we recently worked on, "War for the Planet of the Apes," calmed my fears. He had worked all over the world in small studios that didn't specialize in ADR, and said that he actually envied studios like mine that were able to do a variety of projects. Over the years, we've been lucky to do ADR sessions for a number of films and television series with other great actors such as Steve Zahn, Sam Shepard, Kevin Pollack, Boyd Holbrook, and Muse Watson.
Three studios later, we've been graced with some interesting projects and people. Though music is my first love, sound-for-picture is my bread-and-butter. Manipulating the viewer's emotions and perception with music and environmental cues is as rewarding as composing a piece of music. Historical documentaries have been the bulk of my work and fun. Some interesting moments include: