Focus on spatial and 3D audio set to drive its growth and market dominance.
Recognised globally for its multi-award winning technology, innovation and development as well as customer support, realtime tracking technology creator CAST BlackTrax Ltd is set to accelerate and increase its international presence over the next few months in the audio world. To drive this forward, effective 22 January 2014 BlackTrax has appointed Christopher Jenkins to be General Manager, BlackTrax Audio. The newly formed division’s mandate is to focus on increasing market share and presence by leveraging its advanced 3D and spatial audio applications and installations with BlackTrax. Jenkins is President and CEO of BISBY Corporation, located in Agoura Hills, CA.
As a two-times Academy Award-winner and senior leadership executive in the entertainment industry, Jenkins has enjoyed an illustrious career with over thirty years of solid experience in production and post-production of major motion pictures, television programs, videos, and commercials earning an enviable reputation in growing business revenues. BISBY Corporation is a leading motion picture, television post production and audio consultancy company working for clients such as Warner Brothers, Sony, Universal Studios and numerous independent media companies. BISBY is involved in using audio technologies in new and exciting ways, often co-inventing technologies and providing valuable user feedback to manufacturers’ research and development teams.
Jenkins has held positions at Universal Studios including simultaneously running operations as Senior Vice President, Post Production Media Services, and Lead Recording Mixer working on high profile and independent projects. Prior to this Jenkins was President and Member of the Board of Directors at Todd-AO Corporation where he spearheaded efforts to make it the world’s largest post-production company. As a Lead Recording Mixer, Jenkins creative expertise earned him esteemed recognition inspiring success in business, technical and creative operations during times of rapid changes in the technological landscape.
“Jenkins’s global depth, knowledge, and skills, underpinned by the powerful mix of business acumen and talent, will help establish BlackTrax as the preferred supplier of realtime tracking for spatial and 3D audio for live productions as well as for TV and film production,” said Bruce Freeman, Chairman at the CAST Group. “The advancements in recent years in technology for recording, processing (including post-production) and delivering audio are astonishing. The next step brings it all home. Imagine hearing sound that your ears and your eyes agree is absolutely genuine, so much so that you are virtually immersed into the scene. How will your concert, live theatre, rock concert, or movie-going experience change? Imaging pinpointing the sound emanating from the lips of the person onstage or onscreen speaking/singing to you, not to mention all the other sounds that naturally fit into and around that scene, which in the whole, puts you into that virtual reality? 3D is already done on the visual side, and now, using the upstream live data stream from BlackTrax and new audio technology, that same experience can be delivered on the audio side. BlackTrax delivers the data which pinpoints the 6D precise target information to bring “live” alive, and life into playback. While 3D audio is the holy grail for sound engineers and scientists, it’s audiences that are the big winners!”
“Taking advantage of his strong audio experience, Jenkins is charged with bringing BlackTrax to the innovators in the audio industry. In fact, BT supports 4 downstream technologies – 3D &/or spatial audio plus automated lighting, multimedia, robotic video cams — provided the manufacturer of any such device writes the protocol/interface necessary to connect either directly or nearly directly to receive BT’s streaming output,” added Freeman.
Excited by his appointment, Jenkins said: “BlackTrax is a beautiful creative tool that will transform the way that we experience audio integrated with lighting, visuals and performers to engage, thrill and immerse audiences. Taking advantage of developments in audio digital signal processing technology, we’ll be actively embracing opportunities for BlackTrax in Europe and The Americas.”
