White Mark Designs And Installs Dolby® Atmos™ For The EIKON Group

Acoustic consultancy White Mark Ltd has designed and installed a Dolby® Atmos™ screening theatre for technology solutions and servicing company the EIKON Group.
The 12-seater theatre, which now forms the centrepiece of EIKON's 3,000 square foot London post production facility, is the first of its kind that White Mark has built in the UK.
David Bell, White Mark's Managing Director, said: "The Dolby® Atmos™ Premier film mixing theatre that we built for Cinelab in Moscow was our first experience of designing a facility for this new format. Since then we have seen a significant increase in interest, not only from companies like EIKON that deliver services to the cinema industry, but also from companies that deal with cinema advertising."
"The fact that it is a cinema-only format and can't be replicated in the home makes it very important for the film industry – one that could give it a whole new lease of life," he said. "You only have to look at the recent Oscar success of Gravity to see how well 3D Atmos sound can complement 3D pictures, and how much cinema audiences appreciate this enhanced experience. EIKON's screening facility may be the first Atmos theatre we have built in the UK but it certainly won’t be the last as we are already working on designs for six more."
Located in London's Poland Street, EIKON specialises in creating foreign versions of feature films for major studios and independent distributors. The company also handles VFX for foreign localisation, soundtrack replacement, censor editing, subtitling and Digital Cinema Package mastering.
Equipped with an Alcons Audio professional sound system, EIKON's new theatre was completed at the beginning of this year and is already being used as a client screening room and quality control facility for grading and mastering.
Laurence Claydon, EIKON's Director of Technology, said: "Our screening theatre supports the latest cinema picture and sound formats and was built with optimum viewing quality in mind. As the first ground-up, purpose-built Atmos facility in the UK, we were able to adhere perfectly to the specification set down by Dolby and create the best possible listening and viewing environment for our customers."
Claydon, who also runs the internationally acclaimed technology consultancy Cinefilm, has worked with White Mark on a number of projects in the past. These include the design and build of two preview theatres at NBC Universal's international headquarters in London.
"White Mark consistently achieves excellent acoustic isolation on all their builds and I have never been disappointed with any of their facilities," he says. "Internally, their studios always have incredibly tight bass, and just the right balance of absorption and diffusion for a perfect listening environment. You really can hear every detail."
Claydon adds that client reaction to EIKON's screening theatre has been very positive.
"We recently completed mastering work on foreign versions of Robocop, and our client, Sony Pictures, was incredibly happy with the result," he says. "There is definitely something special about our White Mark room. Another customer commented that, having seen and heard a recent feature film over 50 times in various venues, he’d not heard or seen it better than in here."
www.whitemark.com
(CD/MH)