Brian O'Donnell, ZOO's director of English services recently spoke with the Audio Description Narrators of America about what makes him so passionate about his work, why AD should be more than an afterthought and why (sometimes) it's good to break the rules when it comes to best practice.

The COVID-19 pandemic has flipped the traditional dubbing industry on its head. Lockdown of recording studios means directors no longer have full access to voice artists and content owners have lost a dependable means of dubbing movies and shows. While some localization providers scrambled together disaster recovery solutions, ZOO was able to offer a safe pair of hands.

Magnolia Pictures worked with ZOO to bring together an entirely remote cast of voice actors and shift the recording studio online. Using cloud-based technology, ZOO produced the English dub for crime-comedy, The Whistlers, using a dispersed cast of dubbing talent. Despite the restrictions of lockdown, the cast were brought together virtually and performed perfectly as one.

Whip Media Group, a market-leading enterprise platform that provides a broad range of integrated services to the world’s largest entertainment organizations to more efficiently manage, distribute and monetize their digital content, today announced a strategic supply chain partnership with ZOO Digital, a leading provider of cloud-based dubbing, subtitling, localization and distribution services to the TV and movie industry.

ZOO is working with universities around the world to train the next generation of localization talent. The goal is to help grow a new wave of dubbing artists and adaptors, to support our clients and the industry as a whole. University of Malta is the latest partner to adopt ZOOdubs technology into its teaching and has discovered some encouraging insights about the future of media localization.

To ensure we deliver top-quality localization services, our English services team plays an integral role within Team ZOO. We not only have insanely talented editors as part of our in-house team, but we also have some pretty awesome freelance editors around the world. Together, we create first-class subtitles, scripts and other services for global content owners.