Sounding Off

Joel Block (l) and Bill Harwell

If you've watched King of the Hill or the 1991 remake of Cape Fear, or listened to NPR's long-running EarthSky series, or caught a political campaign ad, you may have heard the work of Austin's original voiceover studio, the Production Block. Now, after 35 years of providing recording facilities for the local film and advertising community, founder Joel Block is unplugging the mics for the last time. "I'm just ready to do a little less shaking hands with insurance agents," he explained.

The glamour bit of the business would be ADR – that's automated dialogue replacement – necessary when filmmakers suddenly realize that a line was muffled or delivered incorrectly or ruined by a passing car, requiring re-recording. That's what's brought A-listers like Tommy Lee Jones and Sandra Bullock into the studio. The Block's production engineer Bill Harwell said, "It sounds pretty exciting, and there were some pretty high-profile people involved in it sometimes, but I'll be honest, those sessions are not much fun to do at all." Often the session gets booked months after shooting has finished, Harwell said, so when the actor arrives, "he's in a totally different character, on a totally different project, and he's totally forgotten about the offending role. So the first thing he'll say is, 'What movie is this now?'"

As the stack of "happy trails!" e-mails from local ad firms and small film companies on Block's desk shows, the firm's real impact has been in repeat work for radio series, state agencies, and advertising firms. Harwell said, "What Joel saw the niche for was people who wanted to go a little more upscale in their production values." In the age of prosumer equipment and free AV-editing software, it's hard to imagine how revolutionary having an independent facility like the Production Block was in a small media market like Austin in 1974. Harwell said, "Now [studios are] a dime a dozen, but back in those days, if you wanted to record a commercial, your options were record it at the radio station or record it at the TV station."

With retirement beckoning and the changing market growing more competitive, Block and Harwell have just dismantled the first of their three Pro Tools recording studios. The equipment has changed a lot since Block's first home studio of two eight-input Sony boards with no equalization and a 6-inch-by-9-inch car speaker for monitoring. Since those early days, Harwell said that the biggest change hasn't been Austin's growth as a production center but "the switch from analog to digital gear." When they started, a studio-quality tape-to-tape system cost around $80,000, and a mixing console ran for around $100,000. Now, Harwell said, "You can go to the Apple store and get tricked out for three grand." While that changing technology has made life easier and cheaper for the Production Block, it's also meant that everyone's a producer now. "The business has got quite diluted over the years," said Block. "So many people can do it in their own home now."