Case:
Voice-over, mixing, and mastering for the documentary film “…Where Everyone Must Play Their Role…”, dedicated to the 85th anniversary of the Murmansk Drama Theatre. Screenwriter and director: Svetlana Bokova. Runtime: 35 minutes.
Client: Rek.A Documentary Film Studio, Murmansk.
Task:
Using the rough multitrack sound edit of the feature-length documentary film, assemble several final versions for distribution on various platforms, in accordance with each platform’s technical requirements:
For hosting on various online platforms
For theatrical screenings at film festivals across Russia
Synopsis:
The Murmansk Regional Drama Theatre turns 85 — a long era with surprisingly few surviving traces. To audiences, a theatre is its performances, actors, and directors. But for the history of a theatre, titles and posters are not enough.
The theatre began in the 1930s as a touring branch of the BDT; its documents were destroyed in 1942 during the bombing of Murmansk. In the 1970s, it became an experimental space for young directors graduating from the Leningrad State Institute of Theatre, Music, and Cinematography.
Its actors came to work from Leningrad, Riga, Krasnodar, Novosibirsk, Vladimir, and Krasnoyarsk. And so we, too, gathered archival documents, photographs, memoirs, and architectural plans from across the country — Pskov, Minsk, Moscow, Vologda, Samara, St. Petersburg… weaving different threads into a single story: “…where everyone must play their role…”
Solution:
The AAF project was converted and synchronized with the film’s rough-cut video. All audio tracks were normalized to unified loudness parameters. Several key meaningful lines were cleaned of excess noise and placed into an alternate acoustic space.
To fully immerse the viewer in the narrative, SFX were added—both original and third-party.
Dynamic and spatial processing was applied to voices and ambience, depending on each scene’s environment and the director’s creative vision.
Documentary Film “...Where Everyone Must Play Their Role...”
Screenwriter & Director: Svetlana Bokova
Cinematographers: Valery Gavel, Alexander Znaskevich
Editor: Valery Gavel
Graphics & Color Grading: Alexander Znaskevich
Editor: Irina Mironova
Sound Engineer: Konstantin Omelchak (OMStudio)
Producer: Mikhail Broder
Production: Rek.A Documentary Film Studio, Murmansk, 2024