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Cold Mountain feature
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There is a tiny elite of UK facilities that deserves to be accorded ‘legendary’ status. De Lane Lea in Soho meets the criteria with ease.

In the recent past it has dubbed feature films including Dirty Pretty Things, The Four Feathers, Ned Kelly, Stomp, Swept Away and Cold Mountain. At the time of writing, it was about to embark on dubbing a new film by director Bernado Bertolucci called Dreamers.

Known for films including Little Buddha, The Last Emperor and Last Tango in Paris, Bertolucci revisits France’s capital city for Dreamers, a tale of love and sex set against a backdrop of the student riots in 1968.

Coincidentally, the ‘French connection’ goes back 50 years, when Jacques de Lane Lea started the business. An influential figure in film dubbing and film post production, he came to own a string of sites in London.

During the 1960s De Lane Lea studios recorded major pop artists including the early Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix. Today however, the company is based at 75 Dean Street, where it concentrates on film and TV post production.

We spoke to De Lane Lea’s managing director, Huw Penallt-Jones, what makes the facility successful, he says: “We’ve constantly changed as the demands of the market have differed over the years. Back in the seventies and early eighties, we were almost exclusively involved in feature films. Then there came a mixture of film and TV. We developed our Studio 5 – which had originally been a radio studio – and that became a TV dubbing studio.”

Central London’s tightly packed Soho is not a wealth of expansion opportunities. However, De Lane Lea managed to amalgamate with a smaller facility, allowing for the development of Studio 6, which is used for TV and ADR.

But the crowning glory is Studio 1, the biggest in-town dubbing theatre, built on what was previously a TV studio. Before that, it was an orchestral recording studio.

“We’ve ended up with six studios from small but very practical TV studios, right up to a large film-sized theatre, with all the sizes in between,” comments Penallt-Jones. “So, the fact that we can bridge the gaps and serve different parts of the industry is one of the reasons we are a busy and successful company today.”

The film theatres have AMS Neve DFC consoles installed, whereas the broadcast-orientated rooms are based around AMS Neve Logic desks. Equally important are the four Pro Tools|HD2 Accel systems we own supplied by GearBox.

“As Pro Tools becomes more of a standard, it’s almost taking us back to the days when everybody worked 35mm,” Penallt-Jones comments. “It gives us one system that everybody knows”.

“Pro Tools is a system that is constantly evolving, so it’s not as if you are stuck on one level. Everyone now wants to record 24-bit and it’s going to be 96kHz [as a working standard] soon. But these systems are future-proof in a way that a lot of the older systems weren’t, despite the fact we own four systems ourselves, demand is so high we are constantly renting in additional systems from GearBox”.” Penallt-Jones concludes.

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De Lane Lea