I do a fair amount of work out of a particular studio in downtown Toronto; Boom Sonic Branding. A few years ago, these guys were always having problems with their printer. Either it wasn’t working or they had to run down the hall……there was always an issue (and thus, delay) every time I showed up for a session.

One day, it was impossible to print the script and these guys got caught with their proverbial pants down with the client in attendance. Being a solution-oriented guy, I suggested that I place the client’s laptop on the music stand in the booth….and I could read from that.

Thus, the idea of The Paperless Studio was born.

From that day forward, I was hell-bent on converting my studio to a paperless format. I first started by using the guys over at Boom as my “lab rats.” In short, I added two monitors – one in the booth for the talent, the other on the desk in front of the engineer so he could handle the script and also view what the talent was seeing in the booth. The machine that was used to display the script extended it’s desktop to the two monitors via a video amplifier.

Talk about luxury. Talent loved it because the script was always easy to see and they could shut off those halogen lights that created heat in the booth. The engineer could adjust Zoom for those that had vision issues.

Directing talent went in a completely different direction. Instead of producers saying:

“Do you see that part in the script where it says….?”

The engineer would merely point to it with his cursor……and to make things even better, bold, italicize or underline the text in question. Beautiful. No need for a pen or pencil.

Let’s not forget the word “paperless.” Consider this: a 30 page narration recorded in a pro studio with the talent, an engineer and a producer would require that 90 pages of paper be printed.

90 pages.

What about all those times you have to print something off for a simple audition or the spot where you’ve only got 2 lines to read…..seems wasteful to print a whole sheet of paper for a single line, doesn’t it?

How much have you spent on ink cartridges in the past year? The past two years?

LCD Monitors are pretty cheap these days….about $120.00 for a cheapo 17”. Which is all you need, really. They don’t make any noise….and they don’t require paper or a cartridge.

I’ll let you chew on that for a while. In the next article, I’ll fill you in on the best way to set up your paperless environment that best suits your existing studio configuration.

Thanks for your time!

Kind regards,