The selling of SoundOnScreen

Story and photo by William Lannon

“It’s really pretty scary,” admits Gordon MacLachlan who last spring left his Detroit, Michigan teaching career to become an entrepreneur on the Maine coast. Granted he is now doing what he has always wanted to do, which is work with film and video, but there are times when he finds that being out on his own can be unnerving. Despite his new-found entrepreneurial leanings, he faces a major hurdle. As he diffidently remarks, “I’m squeamish about selling myself.” Nor does he feel he’s “a natural networker or salesman.” In fact, he even goes on to confess that he’s “not real ambitious.”

Gordon MacLachlan of  Thomaston’s SoundOnScreen contemplates some video wizardry with his state-of-the-art Canon GL-2 3-CCD digital camcorder.

What drives him then is an almost missionary zeal for what he’s selling. He calls his company SoundOnScreen Video Services. The company offers two services. The first provides digital transfer of images recorded on VHS to DVD. MacLachlan may not consider himself much of a salesman, but he has created a sprightly slogan for that aspect of the business: “We take your tape and burn it – onto DVD.” He can deal with all camcorder tape formats and can also provide digital editing, effects, and music soundtracking. The advantages to the consumer lie in the longevity of a disk as opposed to tape and the lasting fidelity of the digital signal.

However, MacLachlan’s real interest lies in the Digital Videography service which SoundOnScreen offers. Lurking behind the imposing nomenclature is the more simply stated promise of “quality camerawork and editing.” In other words, MacLachlan will record anything from commercials to parties to instructional videos, or even original films.
Gordon MacLachlan is not a movie fan, a movie buff, or even a movie zealot. His passion for the art, history, technology, and lore of film quite simply surpasses the astounding. Name a film and the odds are that not only has MacLachlan seen it, he will in all probability be able to tell you when and where it was made as well as who directed it and was in it. He might even be able to tell you who the Best Boy was. He will certainly be able to tell you what precisely the Best Boy does as well as all sorts of other minutiae concerning the film industry.

Originally from Waltham, Massachusetts, MacLachlan astonished himself by leaving New England to attend Notre Dame where he studied Comparative Literature, essentially a way of merging a study of literature with other art forms. He also became an ardent football fan and has been known to return to South Bend for a game now and then. A disappointing pilgrimage of late, but one which a true aficionado must undertake in the same way a cinema student will subject himself to a mediocre Hitchcock film.

After being blooded as a teacher at Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx, New York, he worked as teaching assistant while earning his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1996. Not surprisingly, his dissertation was entitled, “Education in a Visual Culture: Why Would You Read This?”

After receiving his doctorate, MacLachlan returned to the heartland and taught for seven years at the Detroit Country Day School, a far cry from Cardinal Spellman. In Detroit, he was blessed with good students, good equipment, and an administration which provided both spiritual and fiscal support. He gave it up to become self-employed because he feared an eventual burn-out. He found, as have many other good teachers, that the energy required to maintain a compelling classroom presence did not magically renew itself.

Although MacLachlan is pleased to characterize himself as an “elitist snob,” a conversation with him suggests that he simply has extremely high standards based upon his voluminous knowledge of his field. He also has a self-deprecating sense of humor which no doubt derives from his fascination with the post-modern vision. Post-modernism is not particularly aptly named. Examples of the currently in vogue self-referential attitude abound in artists as dissimilar and classical as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante, and Swift.

Nevertheless the recursive is once again being celebrated as if it were a twentieth century invention. Nor is it irrelevant. The films which have most powerfully informed Gordon MacLachlan’s sensibilities (Citizen Kane, The Godfather [I and II], Wild at Heart, Naked Lunch, and Miller’s Crossing) include a number of the sacred texts. The reader should note here that the word “text” is entirely appropriate in that postmodern artists and critics embrace semiotics as perhaps the only truly useful critical language.

In any case, MacLachlan now finds himself in the awkward position of needing to turn his avocation into a money-making vocation. It’s not an easy trick. Weekend 35mm photographers who come to fancy themselves as potential professionals will send off ten dollar bills to classified advertisers in Modern Photography in order to discover what they can do to “make money with [their] cameras.” After two or three weeks, the aspiring amateur tyro receives a slim envelope containing instructions on how to contact brides-to-be and bowling leagues.

Still, Gordon MacLachlan’s entrepreneurial venture should not be casually dismissed nor taken lightly. In a self-referential age in which watching the Daytona 500 is itself a Kodak moment, the culture’s desire to keep an eye on itself cannot be underestimated. The products of analog recording devices, even digital, eventually require honing, editing, and archiving. MacLachlan has made a sizeable investment in state of the art editing equipment, not to mention his own recording devices which include a Canon GL2-3CCD digital camcorder with pixel shift technology. Consequently his ability to take miles of VHS tape and reduce it to an indexed DVD will prove popular, indeed necessary, if people are to make sense of their memories.

This process of creating DVDs, although a bread-and-butter part of his business, does not constitute the exciting part. More to the point and his liking, MacLachlan recorded a Monday Night Blues performance in November at Rockland’s Time Out Pub. New Yorker Michael Hill and Ana Popovich, originally from Yugoslavia and now living in the Netherlands, put on one of the most electrifying shows of the year. In fact, partly on the strength of that performance Popovich will be appearing at this year’s North Atlantic Blues Festival in July. Producer Paul Benjamin said he was well satisfied with the DVD which MacLachlan produced of the evening’s show, particularly since it had been shot with only one camera.

This sort of film making is attracting some very high powered directors so MacLachlan is in very good company indeed. German director Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire) has made some moving music documentaries including the award-winning Buena Vista Social Club. More recently, Wenders created a masterful film of Willie Nelson’s recent release Teatro, as well as a powerful segment for last summer’s PBS series on The Blues which featured Rockland favorite Shemekia Copeland. The music video is maturing from pop to high art. MacLachlan is in the right place at the right time to take advantage of the evolution.

In addition to recording events, MacLachlan hopes to move into creating instructional videos and is expanding his working universe. He collaborates with Maine Screen Video in Rockland as well as Maine Coast Photo and Digital. He also has plans to work with Rivier College near Nashua, New Hampshire. That project would create an instructional video “addressing the newest section of the SAT (an essay writing section to be first offered in spring 2005). The video will try to alleviate the panic of high school students and their parents by offering strategies on how to prepare for it.”

Gordon MacLachlan’s entrepreneurial scheme is by no means as fanciful as it might appear at first glance. Although he may be new to the business of business, he has a truly formidable arsenal of experience to help him succeed creatively in his chosen field. Further, he has the knowledge and the equipment to provide a needed service to a public which is conditioned to record the births of babies and every subsequent event till the child’s marriage (including all youth sports, various birthdays, and graduations). If anyone needs their head examined in regard to the need for the services offered by SoundOnScreen, it surely is not Gordon MacLachlan.

FMI: SoundOnScreen Video Services; Gordon MacLachlan; 207.354.0975. Email: <gordon@soundonscreen.com>; Web site: www.soundonscreen.com.