We're Jim & Christie Wells...

My entire life story:
"My parents were musicians AND model railroaders... before they became parents".
(-Jim Wells)

Those two themes have guided me throughout the first half of my life. I've worn pretty much every hat imaginable in music and sound... I've been a performing and studio session musician, a music producer, designed recording and broadcast studios, and was a studio and touring concert sound reinforcement mix engineer... and a model railroader in almost every scale the whole time. Then, in 1979, I met and fell hopelessly in love with Christie.

Together we started Fantasonics Engineering on April 1st, 1980 as a design consulting group (friends from the music and sound, The Enginears). We specializing in the studio production and audio system engineering for themepark attractions, dark rides. and animated display. It turned out to be a lot of fun, and we stumbled into a number of innovations in theme park sound design along the way. For example, we were the first to successfully put sound 'on-board' audio-animatronics characters, and the first to use the attraction itself as the speaker reference system during the final soundtrack mixing and mastering process. We also designed the first 'animation transportation system' (a railroad theme, of course:), where the train sound, the animated passengers, and the display through which they are traveling, are all synchronized in a single musical orchestration. Model railroading can be an awful lot of fun... with a commercial budget!

Indeed, the concept for our own layout, "The Incredible Dizzying Heights Railroad", grew out of this early design & development work.

The Station at Summit, on The IDH...

For the last three decades we've set our sights somewhat 'smaller', bringing the same experience, technical expertise, innovative thinking, and professional audio and recording resources to bare on scale sound applications in model railroading... starting with our own layout! And so little by litter we remixed & re mastered the sound we'd built for our own layout and began offering a few simple scenes on CD to the Hobby

Initially, all of our work with other model railroaders had been custom 'RailRoadies' design projects... and quite expensive! Being model railroaders ourselves we know there's NEVER enough money, and we wanted to share our innovations and work in miniature sound with our fellow model railroaders....

From fairly early on a kind 'patron of the arts' relationship began to evolve with our RailRoadies™ clients! They realized that they could not only invest in their own layout sound, but could also be investing in The Hobby by allowing us to use some of their scratch built designs to create and sell new scenes to everyone!Without exception every one of our RailRoadies clients has embraced this idea, and so our Scale Magic™ miniature scene collection evolved over the years. We're grateful to have worked with so many wonderful model railroaders... it truly IS The Worlds Greatest Hobby!

Our work in theme parks, and now in scale sound, evolved in no small way from a lifetime of model railroading. Christie has been right there with me from the beginning and is my muse (and the world's greatest magician's assistant:). She has been supportive, and downright inspirational in every way. She has also been directly involved! She runs the general store, and has turned out to be a terrific sound designer in her own right!

Between our 'RailRoadies' associations and Scale Magic Soundtracks we now 'serenade' hundreds model railroad scenes all around the world. And in very real ways, we're only just getting started. Through our association with PRICOM Design, we're making aural, and now visual, magic through the integration of technology, creativity, and modeling practicality!

As is true in every other medium of model railroading, there is discovery every time we 'go in' to work on a new project.
We have fun, and love what we do, and you will always hear that in our work...

You can contact us:
Fantasonics Engineering
695 Crescent Avenue - B
Orcutt, CA 93455
(805) 266-6085
[email protected]

[Scale Magic™ CD Soundtracks] [Scale Magic™ Dream Player] [PRICOM Design products]
[
RailRoadies™ Scale Sound Services] [Creative FX Book]

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Artwork by Dan Sawatzky
Sawatzky's Imagination Corporation
www.imaginationcorporation.ca
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