A conversation with the team

Have a read of what our creative team had to say on the project.

Adam Grant, Online Editor

“Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland provides a historical lookback through the eyes of those involved in this big moment in history.

The series is incredibly archive heavy, with talking head interviews retelling stories from the Troubles. My brief was to clean up and improve the footage as much possible. There was a real mix of archive footage I got to work with including tape and filmic looking material. The stories being told by the contributors were so powerful by themselves, the footage accompanying these accounts did not need to be massively cleaned up.

As well as wrangling archive, I used Avid Symphony’s extensive toolkit to sharpen faces and eyes to draw the audience to their faces whilst recalled their stories, and painting out any stray equipment that may have appeared in the background. There was one individual that the Producers wanted disguised and obscured; to achieve this we darkened the shot and tracked a shadow on the person concerned.

It was a pleasure to be involved in such a massive project and working with Keo Films was a huge honour.”

Matt Skilton, Dubbing Mixer

“Throughout the mixing process, it was imperative that the archive was treated in a sensitive way. What happened in the Troubles impacted so many people so we had to respectful in the way we treated the archive.

Despite a lot of the archive being from the 70’s and 80’s, we found some of the audio needed to be completely reconstructed with some commentary and music being unusable. Using our vast sound library, I was able to build up scenes using atmos and SFX layered up to give the pictures an extra dimension. I then EQ’d these tracks to change the volume of certain frequencies to make it sound more from the Troubles. We found that sometimes taking all of the SFX away and leaving the music to play alone with the harrowing visuals had a more powerful effect on the audience rather than an SFX-heavy sequence.

It was incredible to work with The Keo Films team and Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland is a project that I’m incredibly proud of.”

Award Winners

The series has gone on to win several accolades at award shows including:

RTS Programme Awards (2024)

- Documentary Series

Broadcast Awards (2024)

- Best Documentary Series

Televisual Bulldog Awards (2023)

- Documentary Series

Grierson Documentary Awards (2023)

- Best Documentary Series - Best History Documenary

Envy Credits

Online

Once the Offline is completed, our experienced Online team will bring your project to life with their knowledge and skills.

Our online team operate across ten Avid Symphony suites and two Autodesk Flame systems all connected via high performance shared storage, working at resolutions from HD up to 4K HDR and beyond if required. They offer the latest plugins from both Boris and Sapphire, as well as the highest quality broadcast monitoring available. The team are highly experienced in large-scale multi-episodic productions as well as fast turnaround ‘day of transmission’ style projects.

Audio

Our Sound department are able to create thrilling soundscapes, record and edit voiceovers and mix the most complex of projects.

Our Broadcast division has nine sound studios, all with VO booths alongside two additional Audio Prep rooms. All our studios are 5.1 capable with three studios being Dolby Atmos 7.1.4. All suites run the latest ProTools 20.12 software with the latest plugins. As well as mix, we also offer ADR, Foley and remote voice over.