by Oscar-nominated actors Cillian Murphy and Carey Mulligan may be the main stars you hear about everywhere before this Sunday’s ceremony.
Less known are the names of the “uber geniuses” who made the audience sit up and listen during the year who stood out for the sound in the film.
From the small matter of recreating the noise of an atomic bomb going off for Oppenheimer, to the subtle but menacing churning of the concentration camp crematorium in The Zone Of Interest.
Sound is usually one of the least discussed categories of the Academy Awardsbut this year there is plenty to talk about.
On paper the nominees could not be more different, the team that was working out how noisy Tom CruiseA mission that threatens death There should be stunts impossible, those tasked with setting the right pace for Bradley Cooper Maestro’s mood swings, not forgetting the nominees who recognized how there could be a war with robots in the future in The Creator.
But sound designer Johnnie Burn is arguably the one to watch after already winning 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 worked together for a year and a half, and I didn’t really know that the sound was making a huge load.”
The concept was the idea of director Jonathan Glazer to use sound to show the banality of evil through what we hear, challenging viewers to really listen to scenes of domestic bliss against the muted sound of gunshots being executed in distant
As Burn explained: “It was a lot of research, reading eyewitness accounts and understanding what happened to Auschwitz in 1943.
“Understanding what the motorbikes and the guns were… They would have been audio-recorded reading events of torture and murder that I could imagine, then going and re-enacting that as best as possible sometimes using actors but more than that trying to find her sound in real life that is similar and re-purposed that, because that’s more believable than an actor pretending to be.”
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Not only did his team have to carefully research the details of what the concentration camp would look like, they had to contend with a team whose performances were being recorded on hidden cameras.
Unable to use a boom, they had to wire the house in the center of the film with three-quarters of a mile of microphone cable to capture their conversation.
While there is a quiet power in how and when sound is used in The Zone Of Interest, cinematically at the other end of the spectrum, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, is packed full of action and noise.
Sound engineer Chris Burdon – who won an Oscar last year for Top Gun: Maverick and was previously nominated for Banshees Of Inisherin – had a huge task on his hands.
“On a chase in Rome you have 450 elements over a series of minutes, then you have music with all the layers,” he said.
“It’s kind of a layered process… even a simple scene would have 20 layers of sound effects, be it birds, steps, a door… You often talk to family members or friends and they are surprised that what they hear or is not recorded see the site only.”
When cinema switched from silent films to talkies, filmmaking was revolutionized by the addition of sound. Cinemagoers quickly developed an insatiable appetite for musicals and gangster films.
The whole experience was a new sensation – from hearing the mobster machine guns ringing out across the cinema seats to the tires screeching in a car.
Nowadays most of us think about adding sound but it is still an invisible art. And while a filmmaker can easily swap out an attractive actor, they can’t fake a bad one.
According to director of The Creator Gareth Edwards, experts in that field are worth their weight in gold.
“Tom [Ozanich] and Dean [Zupancic] who did our sound mix for The Creator who is also nominated for Maestro, that’s no accident … These guys are these amazing people of the industry.”
It is perhaps more obvious that a film about the composer Leonard Bernstein would have to be noted as perfect in terms of sound, but how did the same two decide to find out what a war between humans and robots would look like with artificial intelligence?
Edwards said: “The hardest thing about sound design for a sci-fi film… if you go too far you don’t even know what you’re listening to.
“You have to try to find sounds that are one step away from the sounds we know now.”
Whoever wins, although many who will be watching this Sunday’s ceremony at home will not recognize their faces, there is every chance that you will have heard their work.
Intellectually though we may see film as a visual medium, this year’s impressively diverse range of films nominated for their sound demonstrates the moving and moving effect it can have on an audience, often without us to even understand.
