Oscar-nominated actors like Cillian Murphy and Carey Mulligan may be the headline-making stars you’ll hear about everywhere ahead of this Sunday’s ceremony.
In this year when sound has come to the fore in movies, the names of the “uber geniuses” who make audiences stand up and listen are less known.
From the small matter of recreating the sound of the atomic bomb being dropped on Oppenheimer, to the subtle but menacing turmoil of the concentration camp crematorium in the Point of Interest.
Voice is often one of the least discussed categories. Academy AwardsBut there’s a lot to talk about this year.
On paper, the candidates couldn’t be more different; There’s the team having to figure out how loud it is. Tom CruiseDeath-defying Mission Impossible stunts should be the ones tasked with setting the right tempo for Bradley Cooper’s Maestro mood swings, not forgetting the hopefuls in The Creator who somehow imagined what a future war with robots might be like.
But sound designer Johnnie Burn may be one to watch, having already won a BAFTA for his work The Zone Of Interest.
“This reaction is surprising to me,” Burn told Sky News on the red carpet before his win.
“We are a small team of people who have been working together for a year and a half, and I really didn’t realize that sound was such a big burden.”
The concept was director Jonathan Glazer’s idea of using sound to show the banality of evil manifested through what we hear; encouraging viewers to truly listen to scenes of domestic bliss set against the muted sound of distant execution gunshots.
As Burn explains: “There was a lot of research involved, reading witness statements and understanding what happened to Auschwitz in 1943.
“Understanding how motorcycles and guns sound… Reading about torture and murder, I can imagine that there might be a sound attributed to them, and then I go and re-enact that as best as possible, sometimes using actors, but more often trying to portray it more in the real world.” Find a voice like that and repurpose it, because it’s more believable than an actor acting.”
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Not only did his team have to meticulously research the details of what the concentration camp would sound like, they also had to deal with a cast whose performances were recorded on hidden cameras.
Unable to use booms, they had to wire three-quarters of the length of the house at the center of the film with microphone cable to record their dialogue.
While The Zone Of Interest has a quiet force in how and when sound is used, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, at the other end of the spectrum in terms of cinema, is packed with action and noise.
Sound engineer Chris Burdon, who won an Oscar last year for Top Gun: Maverick and was nominated for Banshees Of Inisherin’ before that, had a big task on his hands.
“In a car chase in Rome, you have 450 elements over the course of a few minutes, then you get a soundtrack with all the layers,” he said.
“It’s kind of a layering process… Even a simple scene has 20 layers of sound effects, whether it’s birds, footsteps, a door… A lot of times you’ll be talking to family members or friends and they’ll be surprised at what they’re hearing or seeing that’s not just recorded on the ground.” .”
When cinema transitioned from silent films to talkies, filmmaking was transformed by the addition of sound. Moviegoers quickly developed an insatiable appetite for musicals and gangster movies.
From hearing the mafia machine guns ringing in the cinema seats to the screeching tires in the car chase, the entire experience was a whole new sensation.
Nowadays, the addition of sound is something most of us take for granted, but it remains an invisible art. And while a filmmaker can easily replace a dodgy actor, he can’t fool bad voice.
According to The Creator’s director Gareth Edwards, experts in this field are “worth their weight in gold”.
“Tom [Ozanich] and Dean [Zupancic] “The people who mixed our sound for The Creator were also nominated for Maestro, which is no coincidence… These people are the uber-geniuses of the industry.”
It’s perhaps more obvious that a movie about composer Leonard Bernstein had to be sonic-perfect, but how did the same duo go about figuring out what a war between humans and artificially intelligent robots would look like?
“The difficult thing about doing sound design for a sci-fi movie…is that if you go too far, you don’t even know what you’re listening to,” Edwards said.
“You should try to find sounds that are one step away from the sounds we know now.”
Whoever wins, you’ll likely have heard of their work, although few people watching this Sunday’s ceremony at home will recognize their faces.
While we instinctively view filmmaking as a visual medium, the diverse range of films nominated for this year’s voices show how it can have a captivating and moving effect on the viewer, often without us even realizing it.