History
Kim Aubry, ZAP's founder and owner, is the former Vice President for Technology and Post Production at Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope in San Francisco. Prior to his 16 year collaboration with Coppola, Kim worked as a documentary film sound mixer, sound engineer and production trainer. Before that, he enjoyed a celebrated career as a public radio journalist. Filling in for a sound engineer friend on the re-recording of Gardens of Stone, Kim made his first acquaintance with Francis Ford Coppola.
"We got to speaking after a session one day. Francis learned I had come from radio, and I think that idea was interesting to him since I was coming from 'outside' the feature film world," remembers Kim.
Francis put Kim in charge of post production in 1989, and they worked together on The Godfather Part III, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and other films. In addition to supervising post production on all Coppola's films, Kim was instrumental in Francis' experimentation with and development of the emerging technological approaches to filmmaking. As Kim points out, "Francis Coppola has been a pioneer in the field of the Electronic Cinema, and many techniques and processes that are commonly used in feature film post and television production were first developed at American Zoetrope in the 1970s and 80s."
Over the years, Kim has collaborated with developers of non-linear editing systems, co-developed an automatic film-to-video tape logging system for film editing, and has designed and supervised construction of a number of state-of-the-art facilities for post production and broadcast. His experience and expertise have brought him on lecture and presentation tours around the world, including film technology conferences in Barcelona, Hong Kong, Norway, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro and London.
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