Mike Prestwood-Smith is undoubtably one of the most successful film dubbing mixers the UK has ever produced. In the last five years he has mixed over thirty features including; Alfie, Corpse Bride, Cold Mountain, Dirty Pretty Things, The Brothers Grimm, The Constant Gardener, and both Harry Potter 3 and 4.

Mike has been a long time user of Pro Tools. He recently set-up his own Digidesign ICON D-Control based studio in Somerset, we caught up with him at his new facility and asked him to tell us some more about his new venture.

Mike explains: “The studio is called Liondubbs Studio. It’s only a few miles from Longleat house and there was a lion painted on the wall, so it seemed appropriate. The converted barn, which locates the studio was the Duke of Somerset’s old workshop from where he maintained the village of Witham Friary.”

It’s a bold move for a dazzling urbanite like yourself, more used to working in De Lane Lea and Goldcrest in Soho to relocate to more sedate surroundings. What prompted the move?

“I’ve always enjoyed living in the country and never felt entirely at home in London. Higher internet speeds and new technology have made huge changes to the way people work and I am very much a part of a trend of people leaving the city for the country. In fact there are two other recording studios within 10 miles of me.”

What kind of work are you hoping to attract to Liondubbs, and how have you designed the studio to accommodate the work that you’ll do there?

“The studio has been designed for film mixing. With more and more of film premixing being done by editors, particularly FX, I was keen to try and offer a studio that was a step up from a cutting room, but still cost effective. The room has been Eq’ed to simulate the Dolby mixing stages I am used to working in, and great care has been taken to design the screen and speaker positioning to match a large scale mixing theatre.”

Mike continues: “We went to great lengths to position the main LCR speakers behind the viewing screen and installed an acoustically transparent screen for this purpose.”

Film mixing is well known for being a collaborative process; do you envisage other people coming down to Liondubbs to work with you?

“Whilst a lot of the nitty gritty dialogue premixing can be done without other members of the creative team being present, I am keen to get people along for the mix - there are some fantastic hotels locally and clients will have a selection of rooms bundled with their studio booking. I am hoping that it will be a much more relaxed experience, with less pressure on time and hourly rates and more emphasis on creative and technical issues.”

Over the last few years you’ve worked on a great many major budget feature films. What’s the scale of the projects you see Liondubbs handling?

“Whilst I feel confident that I could Final Mix pretty much any scale of film in the studio, the main bulk of the work will be premixing. The ICON is a fantastic surface for the sort of ‘micro mixing’ involved in dialogue balancing and as such I am hoping that I can dialogue premix most of my future film work down here. The theory is that I can mix dialogue and foley here whilst the FX premix is done in town with a couple of days to pull the mixes together before everyone turns up for a final mix.”

Mike elaborates: “Because the ICON mixing is ‘in the box’ things are much more flexible on the Final Mix stage and with a bit of spare cash saved in the premixing we can spend longer finaling, so everyone’s happy! There are several projects lined up to go. Anthony Minghella’s ‘Breaking and Entering’ kicks things off in February, closely followed by Paul Greengrass’s ‘Flight 93’ in March/April. There seem to be a lot of productions circling in the summer that have pretty much all shown an interest, which is great.”

What made you choose ICON D-Control as your mixing environment for Liondubbs?

“Pro Tools is the de facto DAW these days for film mixing. I have been using an array of Plug-ins for several years now, but always as outboard, preferring to buss/Eq/compress on an external mixing console.”

Mike continues: “I’ve worked a lot on the Neve DFC and seriously considered a small DFC for Liondubbs. However the flexibility and sound quality now offered within Pro Tools|HD really made it a straight-forward decision. The quality of the mix buss and the advent of some really great sounding EQ and Reverb Plug-ins has made mixing in the box totally possible. As a first in control surfaces, ICON offers large scale, mixing specific features that makes Pro Tools software feel almost transparent.”

What are the specific features that D-Control offers that made you choose ICON rather than just having a Pro Tools|HD system with no control surface?

“I am quite old school when it comes to mixing and find it very tough to mix with a mouse and an edit window, so faders and buttons have always appealed to me. Until I used ICON, I found the lack of touch sensitive knobs prohibitive and the first control surfaces felt very much like a bolt on to the software. ICON actually feels like a console. You can do nearly everything that you would do on screen on the surface from I/O routing to setting up aux sends, and within a few days of use it feels natural to do things this way. The mix automation has improved significantly and having buttons to do things like ‘to end’ and ‘automation suspend’ makes it very intuitive. The custom fader function was also a clincher.”

Having been a Pro Tools user for quite some time, do you have any particular favourites when it comes to plug-ins?

“I have been a long-term Waves user and my dialogue path always includes a couple of Waves Faves (C4, Q10 etc). TL Space is a fantastic convolution reverb, with the all-important zero latency, and surround output. I think that the new Digidesign EQ3 sounds great and is very DSP efficient, which is a bonus, but the icing on the cake is definitely the new TC VSS3. I have used the TC System 6000 since it first came out and love the transparency and flexibility of the TC reverbs… (Hogwarts sounds particularly Danish) and am delighted to have it finally arrive on Pro Tools TDM. I can import all my System 6000 hardware presets straight into the software and when it has surround capability it will be close to perfection.”

You’ve chosen a Dynaudio BM15As system as your studio monitoring in Liondubbs. What prompted this decision?

“I think that BM15A’s are commonly regarded as one of the best all-round midfield monitors money can buy. They have amazing top end detail and can effortlessly handle the kind of dynamics that occur within film mixes. I sit about 3 metres away from my screen and often have SPLs over 100dB and I’ve not seen a red light yet.”

The ICON D-Control commissioning and on-site install was carried out by Andreas Rimroth from Digidesign and Yan Gilbert-Miguet from GearBox. How did it go?

“The install all went very smoothly. In fact they had the ICON out of the crate and up and running within a few hours, which, given that it all happened in the hazy vortex between Christmas and New Year, was exceedingly good going. I have always bought and hired my gear from Gearbox. Their support has been fantastic. I’m not sure that there is anything I would wish to know about Pro Tools that Yan doesn’t already know.”

For further information please visit:

Liondubbs Studio
48 Witham Friary
Frome, Somerset
BA11 5HF

Tel: 01749-850593
Email: enquiries@liondubbs.com
Web: www.liondubbs.com

Mike Prestwood-Smith - IMDB