White Mark builds sound facility for Russia’s CineLab

Russian company CineLab Ltd has built a new, state of the art sound facility with the help of UK studio design consultancy White Mark Ltd.

The new CineLab complex houses 14 studios which include three dubbing theatres, accredited to Dolby Premier License 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 the studios are equipped with Euphonix System 5 consoles. The 5.1 mixing room is equipped with an Avid Icon Pro Control console. Pro Tools is available throughout and every room is linked to a central audio and video storage server.

CineLab is also adding a Foley suite and orchestral studio, which will be completed by this summer. The Foley studio will have a wide selection of indoor and outdoor props and surfaces and will have extensive facilities for dealing using water and a variety of domestic environments, car interiors and variable acoustic environments.

CineLab’s managing director Vadim Nerukov commented: “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, explained: “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.”

White Mark worked closely with local architects and builders to achieve the results CineLab wanted. “Having designed audio facilities all over the world, we have developed a working method and drawing system that allows multi-lingual work forces to build accurately from our documentation,” Bell added. “We successfully applied these methods to this project and the results speak for themselves. CineLab is one of the biggest projects we have ever undertaken and we are very proud of what has been achieved.”