Atomic Productions on NFL commercials, Dolby Atmos & Top Gun demos: “There's not a picture on the wall that's straight!”

Danny Angotti, founder and executive producer at Atomic Productions – a full-service video production company based in the San Francisco Bay Area – and Johnny Small, Atomic Productions’ sound designer, motion graphics editor, and the primary audio engineer for the facility’s new Dolby Atmos audio suite talk about the company’s evolution since the ‘90s, first ever clients and explain why their Genelec monitoring array in their new immersive room brings the wow-factor…

Atomic Productions opened in 1990. What made you decide to open the studio and what was your vision back then?

DA: It's a long and unusual story! I didn't set out to have a multimillion dollar business; that wasn't my goal. I was just doing things because I wanted a job! It's my sister's fault, really, because when I was out of high school, she got me doing wedding videos, and that eventually led to other things. I got a job in a TV station that strangely was very well equipped, but they didn't use their equipment. 

They had great production facilities, so one day I said, ‘Hey, can I use these facilities to freelance out of them and charge clients?’ – because they would turn away business. They were nonprofit so they said, ‘Go for it!’ I ended up making this TV station kind of my own and I became the production manager. As long as I got their show on the air at night, they did not care what I did. 

Eventually, they became an incubator for what Atomic would become. You can't think of a better position to be in as a young person trying to start a business: here's all this equipment that you can't afford and it's available to you to use. I rented offices from them after I generated some income, and they were fine with that. 

Eventually they were sold to Univision, which was an NBC station, so we were suddenly homeless and we had to move out. That's when we started our own shop, and I just kept adding to it over the years.

What was Atomic Productions’ first big client?

DA: We did so many car commercials; that's where we made our bread and butter. It was an evolution from that that really taught us a lot about the business. We were doing 3D animations in the late ‘90s. It would take weeks to render for Volvo car commercials, so that was where we started – it was a graphic company.

Then it became clear that American football might be a business for us. The Oakland Raiders were a star NFL team that came to us because they moved from Los Angeles back to Oakland and they needed to do some commercials. That was our first foray into, ‘Hey, this is a real client. This is an NFL team!’ 

We're all sports fans. I grew up a Raiders fan. I was born and raised in Oakland and was crushed when they moved to Los Angeles. When they came back, the fact that they came to us to do some commercials for them for ticket sales…I was like, ‘Hey, this is cool. I like this!’ 

We've worked for the NFL since 1999. To this day, we still work with the NFL and do a lot of stuff with them, but that was the very beginning. It was our first big client. The NFL is a marketing powerhouse in the US.

You recently commissioned a new audio suite equipped for Dolby Atmos production; are you seeing more and more demand for immersive mixes?

DA: We’ve got an upcoming Dolby Atmos project, which is a documentary. It’s still being edited. It's a big project - it's a 90 minute documentary from an Academy Award-winning filmmaker, and we were lucky enough to get in with him and we're editing now for him. 

He said ‘it needs to be Dolby Atmos’. We're gonna dive right into it like we always do; when you come into this room and we give a demo, people are blown away.

JS: The room sounds great. We've had some great stereo mixes recently, just because we have the opportunity to use this perfectly sound-treated room to work on that stuff. You can hear things that you wouldn't have heard in another room in a different environment with different speakers. It gives you that extra upgrade even with just a regular mix.

For the new Dolby Atmos suite you chose a Genelec monitoring array. Dolby's requirements for Atmos certification are notoriously high; why did you choose Genelec for your immersive studio?

DA: Our vendor who's worked with Dolby said, ‘Genelec’!

JS: I like the sound of Genelec. I did my research upon the recommendation of our guys that were helping build out here and I said, ‘Genelec seems like it's gonna be a really good choice. And that's what we want’.

How useful was Genelec’s GLM calibration software when it came to the placement of each component in the array?

JS: Obviously, it sounds amazing! But beyond that, you hear things that you wouldn't have caught before - maybe your brain took note of it, but it wasn't something that you actually noticed until you got into a room where everything's perfectly isolated. You have the best quality speakers and you sit down and hear your mix and you say, ‘That was that thing that I was hearing!’ My mind was just ignoring it because it's not perfectly there and right in front of you to hear. The sound quality is just amazing.

DA: When they were first going through the room after they put it all together, they grabbed Top Gun in Dolby Atmos. They played that in the suite and that really made me realise that I made the right decision – this is really very cool. There's not a picture on the wall that's straight in this office because of the thundering Top Gun soundtrack!

JS: The two mini fridge-size Genelec subwoofers definitely create an earthquake-type environment!

Listen to the entire podcast interview below: