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
- copyright © 2020, Fantasonics Engineering, all rights reserved.
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