Setting the right tone
Adlershof can look back on an impressive legacy in sound
Sound brings life to a film, according to Michael Kaczmarek, manager of K-13 Kinomischung. For almost a hundred years now, multifaceted sound artists from Adlershof and Johannisthal have been breathing life into German and international films. The sound design creates a certain ambience such as singing birds or stormy weather; they clean up the soundtrack when clattery traffic noise disrupts the pastoral forest setting of the script; or actually make their own sounds because, as Dominik Rätz of Tonbüro knows: “The original soundtrack is never enough.“
Adlershof and Johannisthal can look back on an impressive legacy in sound. Germany's first generation of directors shot ”Nosferatu“ here, and ”The murderers are among us”, the first all-German film of the postwar period. Over 7,000 movies and series were dubbed in the DEFA-Studio für Synchronisation until 1989. This tradition is being upheld today by companies such as TV-Synchron, Tonbüro, K-13 Kinomischung or Effendi Audio Solutions.
TV-Synchron has brought together creative teams of writers, directors and voice actors for the dubbing of hundreds of films and thousands of series. The greatest challenge in dubbing is to ”get the slang right,” says Carmen Molinar who is a voice actor and teacher that offers professional training at the Adlershof studios of TV-Synchron. Musical films are a great passion of the sound engineers at K-13. They produced the score for the opera movie ”Hunters Bride” together with the London Symphony Orchestra. Visitors of the exhibition ”The First World War” at the German Historical Museum were guided by audio and multimedia produced by K-13.
Christian Riegel and Dominik Rätz founded Tonbüro together with the musicians Eike Hosenfeld and Moritz Denis, which is responsible for the entire audio postproduction of film and television productions. Only recently, the leading actor of the German crime series Polizeiruf, Maria Simon aka Chief Detective Olga Lenski, visited the Tonbüro studios to record the overdub for the episode ”Bug and Princess”. Tonbüro also took care of the whole audio postproduction of the five-part documentary series ”The East Germans”, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Ethem Bozkurt's Synchron-Studio is active in audio book production, such as ”Moldin, the Sorcerer's Apprentice” which won the audio book award ”Ohrkanus”, music production, sound editing for cartoon series like ”Max Steel”, sound design for movies, and dubbing as for the Scorcese documentary on George Harrison, or other documentaries on the Bagdad-Train and the fall of the Berlin Wall. A huge variety of topics find their way into his studio. ”Dubbing broadens the mind,” says Bozkurt and smiles.
By Franziska Hönow for Adlershof Special
www.k13.net
www.tonbuero.com
www.tv-synchron.de
www.efendi-audio.de