After three years of intense work, UK studio design consultancy White Mark Ltd has completed a massive project in Moscow that involved designing and building a new, state of the art film sound facility for Russian company CineLab Ltd.
The new complex has 14 studios including three dubbing theatres built and accredited to Dolby Premier Licence criteria and a 5.1 mixing room for pre-mixes and TV/DVD work. It also features multiple edit and pre-production suites, sound design rooms and a large orchestral studio.
All three dubbing studios and the orchestral studio are equipped with Euphonix System 5 consoles. The 5.1 mixing room is equipped with an Avid Icon Pro Control console. Pro Tools technology is available throughout and every room in the facility is linked via a central audio and video storage server, which is backed up and configured to the highest security standards. This makes it possible for projects to be worked on in multiple studios concurrently.
CineLab is putting the finishing touches to an extensive and highly specified Foley suite and orchestral studio, which will be completed by summer 2013. Designed to accommodate traditional working methods where the sound engineer is located in a separate control room, as well as more current working methods where the engineer works alongside the artists in the recording / performance space, this studio will have a wide selection of indoor and outdoor props and surfaces. It will also have comprehensive facilities for working with water, all domestic environments, car interiors and controllable variable acoustics.
White Mark was commissioned to handle the entire project on the basis of its international reputation for designing and delivering world-class audio facilities.
Cinelab’s Managing Director Vadim Nerukov says: “We did a great deal of research before allocating this contract and in our view White Mark was the best acoustic design company on the market. Our faith in the company has been more than satisfied by the work they have done. We are delighted with the new facility and with the way in which White Mark helped us overcome numerous technical issues during the construction stage to achieve the results we wanted.’
David Bell, managing director of White Mark, adds: “This was a marathon project that involved the complete renovation of a former cold store building on the banks of the Moskva River in Moscow. The entire three-storey building was totally gutted so that every studio in the new complex could be built without compromise. We had some interesting structural issues to overcome as the existing roof needed to be raised and various floor pillars removed. The builders also had to contend with the extreme cold of Russian winters, which made pouring concrete into the foundations difficult – a problem they eventually overcame by using 400kW of heating to create the correct conditions for the materials to set.’
