White Mark Assists With ENVY Facility

White Mark helped to deliver the design and acoustic treatment of ENVY Advertising's new facility on Mortimer Street, London.

The post-production company chose to relocate its Shortform and Advertising department to the new building. Over six storeys, with a seventh floor currently being added, the facility hosts 32 suites covering everything from offline to VFX. There are also meeting and production rooms, sound mixing facilities and a ground floor bar for clients and staff.

White Mark was commissioned to develop layouts and wall construction types for all spaces within the building. Emphasis was placed on the design of the sound mixing facilities, which include a 5.1 surround sound studio, a stereo voice recording suite and a Dolby Atmos Premix Studio – a first for ENVY and one that allows the company to mix projects into Dolby Atmos for the home or premix projects ready for Dolby Atmos in the cinema.

"With this new suite, we can place 128 different sound objects anywhere in a three-dimensional space with pinpoint accuracy. That puts you right inside the action, with nothing short of breath-taking results," said Arge, ENVY's Senior Dubbing Mixer. "Our clients have been absolutely blown away when we've taken their pre-existing cinema or TV ads and remixed them into Dolby Atmos. Their faces light up as we immerse them in the ultimate sound experience from our custom 9.1.4 Exigy sound system."

Natascha Cadle, ENVY's Facility Director, was responsible for the interior design of the building and worked closely with White Mark's Managing Director David Bell.

"It was a question of seeing what was possible and what wasn't with the space we had to play with," Natascha Cadle said.

"We were asked to design sound studios that featured our usual neutral acoustics in the booths and control rooms," David added. "The two big studios are the same size and in both cases the control rooms can accommodate a large seated number of clients. All three rooms have natural monitoring conditions and the same acoustic feel so that work can be easily transferred between each room, and between other rooms that we have designed in other ENVY Group buildings. We also provided space planning and acoustic performance standards for all other area in the building."

In terms of physical challenges posed by the building, the main issues White Mark faced were the limited height of the basement and the angular separation in the vertical plane required by the Atmos specification.

"Fortunately we had plenty of experience of buildings like this thanks to the many projects we've completed in Soho over the years, so these problems were far from unique," continued Bell. "Our history of working closely with mechanical systems designers from the outset of a project has allowed us to develop methods of maximising the height of rooms and accommodating air conditioning plant and ducts over common parts, whilst maintaining the high isolation requirements when nesting facilities close to one another and supporting the high sound levels that can occur in Atmos rooms. We are very happy with the performance and 'feel' of the finished suites and, more importantly, so are ENVY."

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(JP)