Rob has been a part of the Saskatchewan film industry since its infancy. He was music director/performer on a regional 1974 CBC-TV series called “Easy Chair”, produced at CBC’s studios in Moose Jaw. He was audio post supervisor/band leader on the 1984-1987 CBC network series “Country West”, which featured performers such as k.d. lang, Shirley Eikhard, Prairie Oyster, Ronnie Hawkins, Colin James, Connie Kaldor, Shari Ulrich, the Good Brothers, Spirit of the West, Ian Tyson, Valdy, Murray McLauchlan, and many more. During that period he also composed the songs and supervised the mix for over 100 different pieces for “Sesame Street”, and its Canadian version “Sesame Park”. Rob was the in-house composer and sound designer for dozens of productions at Regina’s Globe Theatre from 1979 to 1996. This includes a number of musicals for which Rob composed the songs, including “The High School Show”, “The Good Life”, “Mandarin Oranges”, “Mandarin Oranges II”, and “Resuscitation of a Dying Mouse”; as well as “Prairie Wind”, which was presented before Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh during their 1987 visit to Saskatchewan. Visitors to the Sask Pavilion at Expo86 would have heard the musical “The Big Story” (with songs by Rob), presented multiple times a day by a talented cast of young Saskatchewan performers. He composed the music and songs for the 1988-1990 CTV series “Puttnam’s Prairie Emporium”. And in 1989, Rob joined forces with composer Jim Folk as Audio Image, creating the music, audio, and final mix for such ground-breaking Saskatchewan productions as “The Great Electrical Revolution”, “Eli’s Lesson”, and “Guitarman”. In 1995 they formed Talking Dog Studios, with Rob as President. During the following decades Talking Dog grew to become one of Canada’s largest audio post facilities, running ProTools in 14 studios and suites throughout the building, and creating the sound and music for dozens of feature films and hundreds of television episodes, including all five seasons of “Incredible Story Studio” and all six seasons of CTV’s hugely successful series “Corner Gas”. Rob was nominated ten times for Canada’s Gemini Awards, 5 times for “Best Sound for a Dramatic Program” and 5 times for “Best Original Music Score for a Dramatic Series”.
In the last few years Rob has been the sound designer/sound editor/foley recordist/re-recording mixer on such films as “Dangerous” (Scott Eastwood and Mel Gibson), “Cagefighter” (Gina Gershon, Chuck Liddell), “A Score to Settle” (Nicolas Cage, Benjamin Bratt), “Daughter of the Wolf” (Gina Carano, Richard Dreyfuss), “A.R.C.H.I.E” and “A.R.C.H.I.E. 2” (Michael J. Fox), “Distorted” (John Cusack, Christina Ricci), “The Humanity Bureau” (Nicolas Cage), and “The Recall” (Wesley Snipes). Rob was also sound editor/re-recording mixer on the Saskatoon reality television series “Paramedics: Emergency Response”, which completed its seventh and final season in 2023. In 2023 he also composed the score and edited/mixed the sound for the award-winning documentary film “I Plowed the Sacred Soil”, written/directed by Mark Dieter and produced by Birdsong Communications; and in 2024 he completed the sound design and 5.1 mix for the Minds Eye feature film “Die Alone” – a Lowell Dean zombie movie starring Carrie-Anne Moss.
Rob is a past president of SMPIA, and the founding vice-president of SRIA (now known as SaskMusic). He gratefully acknowledges the financial participation of Creative Saskatchewan in these more recent productions.
