Crafts for adults
This is where the tone is set
Bruce Willis and Nicolas Cage are talking about running shoes? In the corridor in Johannisthal? Ethem Bozkurt doesn't believe his ears when he goes to get a coffee from the kitchen in that Johannisthal corridor. And he shouldn't. Because the voices belong to Manfred Lehmann and Martin Kessler – the German voices of the actors – who are in the building for a dubbing session. Bozkurt often has these types of listening experiences, because in his recording studio Efendi Audio Solutions the Hollywood stars (or at least their voices) pass the microphone around. Even Samuel L. Jackson – Engelbert von Nordhausen – has been to visit.
Ethem Bozkurt's studio is not very big. Three monitors stand in front of a specially made desk in and around which any number of technological devices are installed. Music players, amplifiers, computers, loudspeakers. From this desk, you can look through a window into the voiceover booth. This booth has a "swimming floor", reflection-proof walls and absorbers. In the middle there is a desk, a microphone and a stool, and in front of that a screen and the recording lamp. "You don't need anything else," says Bozkurt.
A maximum of four people work here: the director, the cutter, the sound engineer and the speaker. When they are making the recordings, they ensure that the dialogue "fits with the mouth", the "lips match", so that the words correspond to the lip movements and that "it sounds technically clean". "It's basically crafts for adults," says Bozkurt, adding "speaking is a greater challenge than acting in front of a camera."
Johannisthal, which is directly adjacent to the technology park, has a long tradition of being a part of films. The former airfield needed a new role after the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles. The hangars become film studios, and Germany's first directing team made "Nosferatu", "Dr. Mabuse" and "Mother Krause's Journey to Happiness". In the film studios, Wolfgang Staudte produced the first all-German film after the war, "Murderers Among Us", and the "Johannisthal Group" of the Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA) made "Jacob the Liar" – the only GDR production which was ever nominated for the Oscar for best foreign language film. From 1952, the DEFA dubbing studio was set up here, with more than 7,000 films and series being dubbed here in the years up to 1989. The area closed for the first time in 2004 after more than 85 years. As a part of the Kirch Group, dubbing in Johannisthal ceased operations.
At that time, Ethem Bozkurt had just graduated as a sound engineer. Bozkurt comes from a musical background. The band he formed with friends in 1992 was called "Kanacks with Brain". They were around for 15 years and wanted to polarise society and make rap music, but in Germany at least no label wanted to produce their music. So the band cleaned clinics in Istanbul. One record company dared to take on the experiment, and there were radio and television appearances. "But we didn't made any money from our music," says Bozkurt. What was left was an entry in the music lexicon in the protest culture section, the sample CD "Von Oi bis Turku" for use in schools and a love of sound and sound engineering.
When the band broke up, Ethem Bozkurt started studying to become a sound engineer. One of his first stations in the "sound business" was the Berlin radio programme Metropol-FM, with many Turkish listeners and advertisers. Bozkurt produced audio advertisements for them in Turkish. They were a great success, as Bozkurt produced them in Istanbul. The number of Turkish speakers in Berlin is limited, so advertisements quickly sound very similar. Bozkurt sent his speakers – mostly well known Turkish actors – to the studio in Istanbul.
Bozkurt still works for the programme regularly to this day, but now that's only a small part of his work, which now includes audio book production, such as the audio book "Moldin the Sorcerer's Apprentice" which was awarded the radio play prize "Ohrkanus", music productions, sound editing for cartoon series such as "Batman", sound design for films and dubbing: such as the Scorsese documentary on George Harrison or the Baghdad Railway and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. The most varied of subjects can be found on the (sound) table here. "Dubbing creates," says Bozkurt with a smile.
by Rico Bigelmann