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Pierre Castin - Free Son Production
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Located in Brussels, at the heart of Europe, Free Son Production is a lot more than an ordinary studio, offering its customers a personalized service in a privileged environment. Free Son is also characterized by its standard of excellence in the creative and technical areas and, thanks to the APT-X system and numerous contacts throughout the world, by an international reach that extends far beyond the borders of Europe. In search of a system compatible with its requirements, Free Son Production has selected Soundscape for recording, editing and mixing. We interview Pierre Castin, one of the founders of Free Son.
 Free Son appears to be a sizeable company, with a substantial number of employees. How did you create the company?
First, I would like to stress that, while we are indeed one of the leading studios in our field, we remain, essentially, a human-sized studio, unlike some "big factories" that emphasize the overall amount of work performed, as opposed to the quality of personal exchanges and the time that can be allocated to a single production.
We are three partners, Jo Nagy, Pascal Reumont and myself. Pascal comes from public relations, after some agency work he became active in production and dubbing. Jo and myself are sound engineers by training, with Jo having learned the ropes in the fields of music and dubbing. As for me, I have worked in the fields of CD mastering and television.
In 1995, the three of us wishing to go further in our activities and each one of us finding affinities with the field of advertising, which we knew well, we decided to create Free Son Production (FSP). We are active in the fields of post-production, radio and TV advertising, documentary, film and animation, DVD, CD-ROM and internet audio, and we are also active in music production.
Who are the current members of the Free Son team?
Pascal is basically in charge of the admnistration and of video production (corporate only). Jo is in charge of the creative part for FSP, he is the house composer, he also deals with sound design, website design etc. As for me, I handle all the production side, creating a link between he client and the various members of FSP, handling the client's requests globally, so that he always knows who to turn to regarding the handling of his project.
We work with two "house engineers", Ivan Plusnin and Jen Jean-Pierre Everaerts, who have been here for a long time and know the studio and the clients by heart. We must be technically beyond reproach, fast, but we must also have a very acute understanding of management and human relations. Studio work is often scrutinized by all the people in the production chain, from the sound studio to the final client, via the production company, the aganecy and its creative personnel and the commercial people. The studio's production director is therefore very useful to establish links between all these people.
Besides Jo and myself on the French-speaking side, Arnaud Jacobs handles the Flemish language projects. As required by language diversity…
The team also includes Yannick Piret, assistant sound engineer and François Géry who, like Jo, is a composer.
 What makes you different from other studios in Belgium?
FSP is one of the leaders in the field of post-production, yet it remains essentially a human-sized studio. Contrary to some (quantitatively) big studios, FSP makes customer care and quality of service its priorities.
By emphasizing the quality of personal exchanges and the time we can devote to a production. We do not do chain work, rather, we work like craftsmen who love their job and take the time to do it correctly. Even if, of course, production deadlines come with the territory in this profession… but this is also part of the service: to have the ability and structure to be able to respond directly and in a very personalized way to each new incoming request.
 We are in a very demanding sector, the client wants the maximum for the production made in our premises but also for everything that surrounds him.
At Free Son, the welcome is very important. And if the client still needs to relax after his session, he will be able to jump into the swimming pool and enjoy the jet-stream.
You have chosen premises in a very specific location, right in the heart of Europe, in a country that has multiple official languages. Does this have implications for your creative work?
Of course, our geographic specificity has direct implications for the type of productions that we handle. To start with, we work on almost every production in two languages (like all the big studios in Belgium). We are therefore familiar with this mix of languages and of two cultures that are already very different.
Furthermore, we are used to make recordings in other languages that we are also rather familiar with: English, Dutch, German, Italian or Spanish. Due to our location in the center of Europe, itis not difficult to find collaborators (voice, coaches, producers) who are "natives" living in Belgium.
But beyond this, we manage productions done in the various languages of the European community on a regular basis, and our central position is an advantage for this type of jobs.
So the APT-X allows you to work in real time with collaborators located anywhere in the world?
The next step was indeed to become competent in the management of languages from all over the world. This was possible thanks to our ISDN system and, in particular, our knowledge of the specificities of the various laguages we have to handle. When the client asks for a recording in Chinese, this does not mean a lot, a lot more details are necessary to decide which speaker we are going to use.
When and how did you discover Soundscape?
 In the early nineties, even before the creation of FSP, we already used the most powerful DAW systems (it was the subject of my end of study thesis int he late eighties). Right from the start we'd worked on the Lexicon Opus and DAR, which were two of the three "Rolls Royces" of the time (the third being the AMS Audiofile). This was long before the appearance of the more "democratic" and open systems (dedicated to a universal IT platform, Mac or PC). Therefore, we had a very critical outlook and very high demands in terms of performance and reliability when, a few years later, we examined the different DAW systems in order to make a choice. We chose Soundscape based, essentially, on its ergonomic qualities (user interface) and its level of reliability, which in my view is unmatched so far.
You are based rather close to Sydec Audio Engineering… have you had any personal contacts?
 My first personal contact dates back to the time of the one and only problem I have encountered with Soundscape. We had lost all the data from a hard disk (the file allocation table was missing). This problem was not in fact a Soundscape problem as such, but caused by a lack of ventilation or our studio furniture which caused the system to overheat. We had over fifty sessions with no backups, including four or five current projects. After this crash, it wasn't possible to read a single session from that hard disk.
This is when I contacted Sydec, which is really close to us, I took my Soundscape and rushed straight to Sint-Niklaas. Having been unable to trace the problem immediately, I left my system there. Johan had promised to visit the next morning, it was the week-end and he was abroad on that day.
At 11am on the Saturday he called me to tell me that everything was arranged, he had rewritten the lines of code as required and I was invited to come and collect the Soundscape system. It was the week-end, everyone was off, but my system was working. I do not dare thinking about how costly it would have been to absorb the loss of all these recordings. Efficiency, speed and personalized service, I found in Soundscape the same core values as in the Free Son Production brand name.
I had numerous other contacts after that but strictly for commercial reasons.
We are not beta testers of the system, mostly because we are not asking to be. Due to the specificity of our clientele, we do not have a chance to put up with teething problems during sessions: the advertising world, with little awareness of technical issues, includes people who would have trouble understanding that a system might have a problem during a session. And since parctically all of our sessions takes place with the clients present…
What Soundscape setup are you currently using in each of your studios?
 We currently use two Soundscape 32 systems, each with a Mixpander/9 card. We also work with two SSHDR1-Plus and still have a PC with a Mixtreme PCI card. Besides the ubiquitous Time Module and Audio Toolbox, we also have the OMF import/export plug-in, because we very often exchange files in this format with external picture editing platforms.
Do you use Soundscape for mixing as much as for recording and editing? And do you use the plug-ins much?
We use Soundscape for recording and mixing and we work a lot with the plug-ins, either Direct-X or VST, they allow us to express our creativity, in a field where we must make a difference within the format of an extremely short message. Several ideas, contexts or sonic universes are often presented in a single twenty or thirty second ad spot.
What, in your view, are the system's strong points?
In short, the strong points of Soundscape are:
- The user interface that allows the system to be one of the world's quickest editing platforms.
- Reliability.
- The system's evolution as defined by its designers (an evolution that we have been following for ten years now). With, besides the regular upgrades, the integration of internal plug-ins and Direct-X and VST plug-ins. Also noteworthy is the ability to load video files within the Soundscape environment, which makes synchronization to video tape obsolete. The time benefit we derive from this last feature is priceless.
Your clients are demanding?
The client requires a lot more than a simple technical service. He requires a sevice and a welcome (already mentioned) as well as a creative "plus" for his productions. When he comes to us, the client must be certain that he will leave with value added to his creation. He expects from us a critical outlook on his productions as well as practical suggestions to optimize them.
Who and what are your current clients and projects?
In advertising we work with the biggest companies like Danone, Nestlé, Microsoft, Fedex, UPS, Coca Cola Company, Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Dunlop, Goodyear, VW etc…
We have also just completed a year's worth of audio ad spots for Danone Germany, which gives us a particularly extensive know-how for productions aimed at this market.
 In the corporate field we currently work on big projects for Starwood Hotels & resorts. Our ISDN system allows us to efficiently manage pan-european advertising and corporate camplaigns for this European, Brussels-based company.
We have just completed the audio part of several documentaries, including the latest one: "Requiem for a cup final", which deals with the dramatic events that took place at the Heysel stadium during the European cup final between Juventus and Liverpool. This dicumentary has just been broadcast in England (BBC), in France (France 2) as well as in Belgium (Flemish version on the VRT and French version on the RTB).
Last but not least, we have just completed a musical project which is a cover of the track "A cause des garçons" originally penned by Alain Chamfort. We have just signed with Universal and are busy preparing the launch of this record which will take place on the seventh of June. The band that performs the song is called KAMA4.
What are the development prospects for Free Son?
It has now been three years since we settled in new premises that we have oprimized by creating three independant studios as well as a video copy and digitization studio. We are now aiming for stability and an optimization of the tools while continuing to extend in several directions, in advertsing, corporate, documentaty and music production.
Generally speaking: we want to feed material to the creative pool that we have created and remain forward-thinking forerunners in a lot of areas (for instance, in 1998, we have been the first in Belgium to offer our clients a voice casting for their productions on restricted access, private page of our website).
We are a big studio in Belgium and we have the structure and organization that go with this. Nonetheless, we want to remain human-sized at all costs, prioritizing direct contact and the relationship with the client.
Here, the clients do not adapt to an existing structure, the members of our group make it their priority to discover how each client works.
Because they all have their own vision, which can vary widely, we often have very demanding clients, and our job is to understand them, to help them towards the fruitful completion of the productions they entrust to us.
Useful links:
Free Son Production (FSP)
KAMA4
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