We're Jim & Christie Wells... We started Fantasonics Engineering in 1980 as a design consulting group (The Enginears) specializing in the studio production and audio system engineering for themepark attractions 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 a speaker reference system during the soundtrack mastering process. We also designed the first 'animation transportation system' (a railroad theme), 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 work. The Station at Summit, on The IDH... Over the past decade we have set our sights somewhat 'smaller', bringing the same experience, innovative thinking, and commercial resources to bare on scale sound applications in model railroading in every scale from Z to prototype! Until recently, all of our work had been custom 'RailRoadies' design... and fairly expensive. This year we have hopefully figured out how to make scale sound accessible to everyone, with the release of our CD scene collection. As I always say, "my parents were musicians and model railroaders, before they were parents". 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 for the past twenty-five years. 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 scale sound designer and producer in her own right! Between our 'RailRoadies' associations and Scale Magic Sound Kits we now have hundreds of scale sound systems and soundtracks at work in pikes all around the world. And in very real ways, we're only just getting started. As in every other medium in model railroading, there is discovery every time we 'go in' to work on a new project. We love what we do, and you can always hear that... You can contact us: Fantasonics Engineering 695 Crescent Avenue - B Orcutt, CA 93455 (805) 937-4342 enginears@fantasonics.com [BACK] Artwork by Dan Sawatzky Sawatzky's Imagination Corporation www.imaginationcorporation.ca copyright © 2004, Fantasonics™ Engineering, all rights reserved.