For his work on the 2022 film All Quiet on the Western Front, production sound mixer Viktor Prášil earned a 2023 BAFTA Award for Best Sound as well as a 2023 Academy Award nomination in the same category, utilizing an Lectrosonics Octopack loaded with four SRc receivers and teamed with SSM, HMa, and SMDWB transmitters to capture audio on the project.
A native of Prague, the Czech Republic’s capital city, Prášil works mainly on film projects in his country. He determined his career direction early by shooting documentaries while still in high school. After specializing in sound at the Miroslav Ondříček Film Academy in Písek, Czech Republic, he was hired by Soundsquare, a sound studio in Prague. There, he worked mainly on post-production sound effects before shifting gradually toward more interesting work in production sound.
As a production audio professional, Prášil has amassed a resume that includes the 2023 feature film release Blood and Gold for Netflix, 2020 TV series The Letter for the King (also for Netflix), 2020 feature film biopic Havel, and many more. Many of his works have earned nominations for Best Sound by the Czech Film and Television Academy, while All Quiet on the Western Front also won Best Sound in the 2023 German Film Awards and a Best Sound nomination from the Cinema Audio Society. From his first contact with Lectrosonics in school, he has built his systems around the brand as his career climbed ever higher and his awards collection grew more numerous.
The staging of All Quiet on the Western Front ranged from armistice talks around a negotiating table in a railroad car to full out trench warfare and violent infantry charges. Capturing the disparate dynamics of these scenes, Prášil used both body miking with lavs and beltpack transmitters, and boom miking with a plug-on transmitter. Post-production could make their choice from both close and boom mic sound alike.
The filming was “really challenging for all departments,” he says. “In the intense battlefield scenes as well as the calm table scenes, we could rely on Lectrosonics.” Actors in battlefield scenes had a DPA lav mic in their helmets and another concealed in their costumes. Boom mics used HMa plug-on transmitters because it was simply not feasible to use cables in battlefield scenes.
All the transmitters, including the belt packs on the battlefields, survived and proved their durability. Adds Prášil, “Throughout the entire filming of All Quiet on the Western Front I was convinced that Lectrosonics was the right choice.”
