Sound in film: The ‘uber geniuses’ of the invisible art you just can’t cheat
Oscar-nominated actors like Cillian Murphy and Carey Mulligan might be the headline-grabbing stars you’ll hear mentioned everywhere ahead of this Sunday’s ceremony.
Lesser known are the names of the “uber geniuses” who’ve made audiences sit-up and listen in what’s been a stand-out year for sound in film.
Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer. Pic: Universal Pictures
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 typically one of the least discussed categories at the Academy Awards, but this year there’s plenty to talk about.
On paper the nominees couldn’t be more different, there’s the team who had to work out how noisy Tom Cruise‘s death-defying Mission Impossible stunts should be, those tasked with setting the right tempo for Bradley Cooper’s Maestro mood swings, not forgetting the nominees who somehow conjured up what a future war with robots might sound like in The Creator.
But sound designer Johnnie Burn is arguably the one to watch having already won a BAFTA for his work The Zone Of Interest.
“This reaction to me is surprising,” 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 wasn’t really aware that sound was doing such an enormous load.”
The concept was director Jonathan Glazer’s idea to use sound to show the banality of evil unfolding through what we hear, challenging viewers to really listen to scenes of domestic bliss set against the muted sound of execution gunshots in the distance.
Sandra Huller in The Zone Of Interest. Pic: A24
As Burn explained: “It was a lot of research, it was reading witness testimony and understanding what happened to Auschwitz in 1943.
“Understanding what the motorbikes and the guns sounded like… Reading events of torture and murder that I could imagine would have a sound attributed to them, then going and re-enacting that as best as possible using sometimes actors but more so trying to find sound in the real world that’s similar and repurposing that, because that’s more credible than having an actor pretend.”
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Not only did his team have to meticulously research the details of what the concentration camp would have sounded like, they also had to contend with a cast whose performances were being recorded on hidden cameras.
Unable to use booms they had to wire the house that’s at the centre of the film with three-quarters of a mile of microphone cable to capture their dialogue.
Johnnie Burn. Pic: Reuters
While there is a quiet power to 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 the Oscar last year for Top Gun: Maverick and was nominated for Banshees Of Inisherin before that – had a massive task on his hands.
“On a car chase in Rome you’ve got 450 elements over a series of minutes, then you’ve got music with all the layers,” he said.
“It’s a kind of layering process… even a simple scene would have 20 layers of sound effects, whether it’s birds, footsteps, a door… Often you speak to family members or friends and they’re surprised that what they hear or see isn’t just recorded on location.”
Chris Burdon. Pic: PA
When cinema transitioned from silent movies to talkies, filmmaking was transformed by the addition of sound. Cinema-goers quickly developed an insatiable appetite for musicals and gangster films.
The entire experience was a brand-new sensation – from hearing the mobster machine guns ring out across the cinema seats to the screeching tyres in a car chase.
Nowadays the addition of sound is something most of us take for granted but it remains an invisible art. And while a filmmaker can actually quite easily swap out a dodgy actor, they can’t cheat bad sound.
Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan in Maestro. Pic: Jason McDonald/Netflix
According to The Creator director Gareth Edwards, experts in the field are “worth their weight in gold”.
“Tom [Ozanich] and Dean [Zupancic] who did our sound mix for The Creator are also nominated for Maestro, that’s no accident… These people are these uber geniuses of the industry.”
It is perhaps more obvious that a film about composer Leonard Bernstein had to be note perfect in terms of its audio, but how did the same duo set about figuring out what a war between humans and robots with artificial intelligence would sound like?
Gareth Edwards. Pic: Europa Press/AP
Edwards said: “The tricky 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.
“You’ve got to try to find sounds that are one step away from what we know those sounds to be now.”
Whoever wins, while few watching this Sunday’s ceremony at home will recognise their faces, it’s highly likely you will have heard their work.
Instinctively while we may see filmmaking as a visual medium, this year’s brilliantly diverse range of films nominated for their sound demonstrate the transfixing and transporting hold it can have over an audience, often without us even realising it.
The mother of Cassie Ventura has told a court she felt “physically sick” when her daughter told her Sean “Diddy” Combs had threatened to “release two explicit sex tapes” after discovering his long-time girlfriend was dating someone else.
Giving evidence on Tuesday, the seventh day of the trial, Regina Ventura said she did not initially understand the email Cassie sent her in December 2011, saying, “The sex tape threw me, [Diddy] was trying to hurt my daughter.”
The email said Combs was planning to release two explicit videos of her and send someone to hurt her and the man she was seeing, rapper Kid Cudi, whose real name is Scott Mescudi.
Regina said the family took out a home equity loan and paid Diddy $20,000 to recoup money he had spent on Cassie “because he demanded it,” angry that Cassie was now dating Cudi.
She said the money was returned days later.
During her evidence, jurors were shown photographs of bruises on Cassie’s body Ms Ventura said were taken when her daughter returned home for Christmas in 2011.
Regina’s time on the stand was fairly brief, as the defence declined the opportunity to question her.
Scott Mescudi, aka Kid Cudi, who dated Cassie in 2011. Pic: Reuters
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs trial: Day 7 – As it happened
Prosecutors say Combs, the founder of Bad Boy Records, forced women to take part in days-long, drug-fuelled sexual performances known as “Freak Offs” from 2004 to 2024, facilitated by his large retinue of staff. Combs, 55, has pleaded not guilty.
The rapper faces five criminal counts: one count of racketeering conspiracy; two counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion; and two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution.
Combs and Cassie pictured in 2015. Pic: Reuters
Last week, the prosecutors’ star witness, Cassie Ventura, who dated Combs for over a decade, spent four days giving evidence.
Combs’s legal team has sought to show jurors that his relationship with Ventura was complicated, and while they acknowledge he was an abusive partner, and had substance issues, they say the sex acts described by the prosecution were consensual.
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A male exotic dancer nicknamed “The Punisher” also gave testimony, telling jurors that in the autumn of 2012, Cassie contacted him asking him to “create a sexy, erotic scene” Diddy, and using the pseudonym “Janet”.
Male exotic dancer Sharay Hayes, aka The Punisher. Pic: Reuters
Sharay Hayes said he went on to have eight to 12 more encounters with the couple, having sex with Cassie, while Diddy watched from a distance.
He described the hotel rooms as routinely being dressed with electric candles and sheet-covered furniture, and says Cassie told him not to “acknowledge” her husband, and to “try not to look at him and no communication”.
He says Diddy would often wear a cap, and he could not see his face, but he later realised it was the famous rapper.
“The Punisher” mentioned using a “considerable amount of baby oil” during the performances, saying “[Diddy] wanted us to keep our bodies covered, to shine”.
He later described the acts as “a fetish type thing,” and while he said he believed Cassie was fully consensual, he also said he “did occasionally see her sigh or wince” and said she would frequently look at Diddy “for cues”.
Paid between $1,200 (£900) and $2,000 (£1.500) for each performance, he said he was not called back after struggling to get an erection during one encounter.
He said he never saw Diddy use drugs or saw filming during any of the performances.
Car park dispute with Suge Knight
David James, Diddy’s ex-personal assistant, also completed his evidence and testified that he never saw physical violence between Cassie and his former boss.
David James, Combs’s former assistant. Pic: Reuters
James, who worked for Diddy for two years, said he left Diddy’s employment after he realised his “life was in danger” following a dispute in a car park with rival record label owner Suge Knight, which culminated in Diddy bringing three handguns to try to find Knight and his entourage.
He also detailed an altercation between Diddy and his personal chef, Jourdan Atkinson, and said he refused to file a police report after Diddy told him to say “Chef Jourdan hit him first”.
The final person to give evidence was a special agent responsible for planning the March 2024 raids on Combs’s Miami home on Star Island.
Steve Gannon showed photos of items taken during the raid, including sex toys, high heels and loaded guns, and explained how an armoured vehicle was used to break down the mansion’s front gate to gain entry while the family was away on a trip.
Combs has been held in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn since September and faces at least 15 years or possibly life in prison if convicted.
The trial is set to last for around two months.
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