Today we’d like to introduce you to Eric Marks.
Hi Eric, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstories with our readers.
After receiving my MFA from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, I was hired onto a marketing trailer team at Electronic Arts as an in-house sound designer and re-recording mixer. I got to work on dozens of trailers for Dragon Age II and Mass Effect 3, among many other games.
A year later, I was hired onto the game team for a reboot of Command & Conquer at EA. I was tasked with overseeing the entire dialog pipeline for the game, including casting and directing actors, implementing audio files into the game, designing the systems in which they’d be triggered, and mixing the sounds to play together well. Also, once the lead designer of the game found out that I came from a film background, he also made me the lead dialog writer for the game too!
But as great as things seemed to be, the game was canceled and the entire team was let go in late 2013. I had to quickly figure out what was next for me.
Fellow USC graduates who had advanced in their own careers in various parts of the industry began approaching me about freelance work. They personally started hiring me on for their one-off projects – TV pilots, spec commercials, branded videos and short films. I invested in my own Pro Tools setup at home and built a 5.1 rig in case directors wanted to come review mixes in person.
While this work slowly built upon itself, I was separately hired on as an in-house mixer for promos at NFL Network. I worked night shifts there from 5 pm to about 3 am, mixing in-house commercials for NFL Network shows. We used ISDN to record multiple actors daily who would perform voiceover lines for the commercials. “Tomorrow on NFL Network…”
But my freelance requests kept multiplying as the word got out about my work. After about three years, I dropped the NFL Network mixing to focus solely on outside projects that I was being hired for.
Once this work was sustainable enough that I could no longer do it all myself, I formed Transported Audio in January 2016.
My path certainly wasn’t a straight line, but I still enjoy every minute of what I do!
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
After graduating from USC, it took me about 18 months to get hired by EA. Nobody came knocking at my door to hire me during that time. I quite literally had to reinvent the way I networked.
And after getting laid off from EA in 2013, I thought I was back to square one. I had no credits to show for my work over the prior two years, in spite of all the exciting things I was working on. This inspired me to want to work on projects that I knew would get released, and as many as possible, which resulted in a lot of commercials and trailers.
Nothing is promised in this industry, and there will always be hundreds of people ready to occupy your chair if you leave it. It takes a lot of grit and determination, a constant building upon skill sets, and an ability to sell yourself as someone people trust and want to work closely with. I had to learn some of this the hard way.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
My company, Transported Audio, is a post-production sound studio in Burbank that has worked on projects of all shapes and sizes. We’ve been fortunate to work with some of the biggest studios in the world – Apple, Netflix, Prime Video, Discovery, PlayStation, and EA to name a few.
For our first year, the entire company was in the second bedroom of my apartment.
By 2017, I moved the company into an office in Chatsworth. It was just me in a single office. Freelancers were a great support system, but their schedules were increasingly challenging to work around. About eight months later, I hired our first employee, Austin Chase. Austin is still on our team 5 years later and has grown into our lead mixer!
In 2018, we rented a second office and hired our second employee, myself excluded. In 2019, we moved into larger rooms where we could welcome more clients in for playbacks.
After the pandemic began in 2020, we moved our offices to Burbank, where we now reside. We built out our first ADR recording stage, and two much more professional mix stages.
Our team has now grown to five people, and we have a number of freelancers who support us as well. Our projects range from theatrical feature films to documentaries, episodic content, EPKs, game trailers, commercials, and short films. We have specialists who are experts at dialog cleanup, ADR recording, sound design, and mixing.
The more projects we’ve worked on, the more we realize it’s not about the shininess of a popular, impressive brand name – it’s all about the unique people we work with.
We aim to be deep listeners who can quickly get to the heart of what a storyteller is aiming to communicate. There are millions of ways to mix any project, and there are no fast rules about what is “right” or “wrong”. Every project requires an openness to what that story requires, and what the filmmaker’s vision is, so it’s crucial that we totally sync up to this early in our process.
We truly love what we do, and want to make every story come to life through rich, dynamic creative choices that help bring that world to life.
Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
I didn’t originally intend to work in sound – I was 100% convinced I’d be directing films one day!! And my hero once upon a time was M. Night Shyamalan.
But I was quite pleasantly surprised about the storytelling possibilities there are working in sound, and just how close we get to work with directors. I wouldn’t change a thing about where I am today.
Contact Info:
- Website: TransportedAudio.com
- Instagram: @ericmarksmpse
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NYSt80Mind
- Twitter: @NYSt80Mind
