Nigeria (March 17, 2025)—Sound designer and composer Lukas Panayi at Signals, a Berlin post production studio, used Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve Studio to mix Adam Bol, a co-production between Kazakh and Nigerian cinema.
Nigerian producers Kele Ikeata and Chimezie Imo, who supervised the Nigerian cut, enlisted Panayi, along with Signals’ colorist Claudia Maneka Maharaj, who both worked remotely from Berlin with DaVinci Resolve Studio for color grading and audio post production.
Tasked with both audio post and music scoring for the film, Panayi’s decision to use DaVinci Resolve Studio’s Fairlight was reportedly based on its handling of dialog and SFX editing, Foley, sound design and mixing. He used DaVinci Resolve Studio’s ability to differentiate the sonic landscapes of Nigeria and Kazakhstan, crafting soundscapes that complemented the film’s color choices. “I needed to bring these different spaces to life; Lagos had a vibrant and chaotic energy, while the Kazakh locations were much calmer and more serene,” he said.
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For the more technically demanding scenes, DaVinci Resolve Studio’s new dialog editing tools came into play. “The Fairlight page’s dialog leveler and voice isolation helped immensely in scenes where characters spoke at various intensities, often alternating between extreme shouting and soft whispering,” Panayi explained.
One particularly challenging scene involved a high-energy performance where overlapping dialogue, musical elements and background noise were involved and had to be balanced. “I selected the cleanest and best sounding dialog takes and minimized unwanted set noise while managing the blend of Russian, Nigerian Pidgin and English without losing the natural character or nuance of the individual performances,” Panayi noted. “Resolve’s integrated tools streamlined this, minimizing the need for third party plug-ins and making it easier to maintain a uniform sound quality and manageable session.”
DaVinci Resolve Studio also enabled Panayi to meet the technical demands of a cinematic release, allowing him to manage the various deliverables for 5.1 and stereo mixes efficiently. “The ability to create a customized 5.1 template in Resolve’s Fairlight page made it simple to adapt to the client’s specifications for both theater and digital formats,” he said.
