THUNDER BAY – The city is now home to Northwestern Ontario’s first multi-purpose music, film, and TV audio recording facility.
Blueprints has been working steadily toward opening its doors and Jean-Paul De Roover, president of Blueprints, was very pleased to finally be ready.
“It’s definitely a relief to be able to open our doors," he said.
"It took two-and-a-half years to get here - going through the pandemic, through all the construction issues that happened during the pandemic, supply chain issues, getting all of the equipment here because a lot of it came from international sources.
“So it has been a real harrowing experience to get it all done. In fact, a lot of people told me ‘you chose the worst possible time to construct something.’ But, we’re here, it’s ready - we’re ready.”
Blueprints has different spaces throughout the facility including isolated recording booths, full surround sound video editing suites, underground coverable foley pits, and fully customizable work places to cater to just about every audio need.
With a hope of attracting more TV, film, and music production companies to Thunder Bay, Blueprints outfitted itself with industry standard equipment including Dolby Atmos, the new industry standard surround sound technology.
“What we’re hoping is that a facility like this can really open up the doors to encouraging more productions to come up here knowing that they have access to post-production facilities, that they have office spaces to do their work out of,” said De Roover.
“We have a talent pool that is now trained in how to deal with audio and video as well as negotiating and securing things like rental equipment to be able to handle bigger productions.
The facility also has plans to launch some programming over the next few months, some of which involves a potential collaboration with Confederation College to develop interesting ways to incorporate their students and graduates.
Eric Weller, coordinator of the film production program at Confederation College, said he’s looking forward to the possibility of collaborating with Blueprints. He hopes the presence of this new facility can lead to more productions coming to the region and potentially hiring students and graduates.
“I think Thunder Bay is an excellent place to make films. It’s an excellent location in so many ways. You can get to everywhere you need to be, from the mountains, to the lakes, to the city streets, to deep in the forest - all in a few minutes drive,” he said.
“We have tremendous advantages should anyone want to shoot a television series or film here and I hope very much that more facilities like this studio will attract that sort of business."
Blueprints will be having an open house on Jan. 26 from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. They are located at 911B Tungsten St.
For more information about Blueprints, please visit the website.
