The room after the shoot

Mix, foley, voice and eleven-language delivery, in Braamfontein.

Who works in the room

Ameshoff Sound is four people and two rooms on the second floor of an old printing works off Ameshoff Street. Reinier mixes, Nozipho runs the voice booth and the language sessions, Deon builds foley in the pit downstairs, and Wandile holds the diary and the delivery specs together. We have been in this building since 2016, and the jingle house that had the rooms before us left behind thick walls and a goods lift big enough for a piano, which is most of what a sound studio actually needs.

What happens here

Voice and ADR

A booth that seats three, with a clean line to Cape Town or London when the actor cannot get to Braamfontein in time.

Foley pit

Gravel, brick paving, a stripped Corolla door and roughly four hundred pairs of shoes, all of it in the basement.

Eleven languages delivered

Script, casting and record in all eleven official languages. You get the session files back, not only the final mix.

Same-week turnarounds

A thirty-second spot booked on Monday goes out Thursday. Long-form we quote a real date and then hold to it.

Broadcast-spec mixes

Delivered to R128 at minus twenty-three LUFS, with the stems and a separate M and E, checked before anything leaves.

Ads, series and long-form

Retail and telco spots, one broadcast drama, three feature documentaries, and whatever December brings in.

What we are building toward

A second mix room by the end of 2027, so a series can be finished in one room while an ad is finished in the other and nobody waits until Tuesday for a playback. After that, a standing casting list for isiZulu, Sesotho and Xitsonga voice, paid at a rate we are willing to publish and kept current, because the slow part of an eleven-language delivery has never been the audio. We would rather grow the booth than the client list.

How a mix actually runs

You send a locked picture and the production audio. The first day goes on dialogue, because almost everything that sounds wrong in a rough cut turns out to be a dialogue problem and not a music problem.

Then the room fills up. Foley goes in against picture, atmospheres get laid under it, and anything the boom lost gets recorded again in the booth with the actor watching their own mouth.

The mix itself is the short part. A day for a commercial, three to five for an episode. You sit in for the playback, changes happen in the room while you are still in it, and you leave with the file and the stems on a drive.

Nothing goes out of here without a listen on small speakers and on a phone held at arm length. That is where most of it will actually be heard.

Agencies

Nine Johannesburg and Cape Town agencies book the room directly, most of them sending the brief and the picture on the same morning.

Broadcasters

Drama and documentary strands for two local channels, cut to their spec sheets, their loudness and their delivery dates.

Production houses

Long-form work for houses in Parktown North, Woodstock and Maboneng, from rough assembly through to final M and E.

Direct clients

Brands who cut in-house and only need the sound finished properly. We are happy to be the last room on the job.

They found a generator hum sitting under forty minutes of interview and never once made it our problem. The episode went out on the night and nobody watching will ever know it was there.

Lerato Mokoena, series producer at Ekhaya Pictures