Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1529989
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 73 embraced by a film, and I love the immersive aspect of sound. I really feel like Dolby Atmos sound is the closest we've come to natural sounding surround sound in cinema and for me, it's an amazing tool when creating an enveloping experience. And it can be absolutely fantastic for both loud action movies and quiet subtle movies. I wish more independent movies used it as well. Hopefully, that's just a question of time. For the movies I've done in Atmos, I've tried to approach them in a very dynamic way. For me, dynamics are not just about quiet and loud but also about the width and depth of the soundscape. From the very first film I've done in Atmos, The Idealist, I spent a lot of time on building very wide and layered ambiences that mixer Lars Ginzel then spread out throughout the speaker system. And then we also had several really powerful moments where the speakers were pushed to the max, like a plane crash where we used the full-range surround speakers to make subsonic sound waves move through the entire cinema which is something you could never do before Dolby Atmos was invented. The dynamics, detail, and depth of Atmos is in a league of its own. And I really enjoy mixing subtle dramas in Atmos as the environments and atmospheric sounds really shine. The most extreme Atmos mix I've made is Evil Dead Rise. Director Lee Cronin said that he wanted the film to feel epic, even though it was taking place inside an apartment, and he wanted the sound to be so enveloping and so big that you felt like you were totally surrounded. We even had doors opening in front of you and then going to the surround speakers. It really feels like being there because it feels like you are enveloped by all the sounds around you. And all the creepy sound textures in the movie were moved around the speaker systems in all kinds of crazy ways. We had a lot of fun. I mentioned to Lee very early on that I thought the background sounds should really be a priority for the film. He mentioned Panic Room by David Fincher as a reference because he really liked how in that film, even though we are in the same place for one night like in Evil Dead Rise, it feels like every room has its own signature sound. So that was definitely an inspiration, trying to find signature sounds for every room, but also playing around a lot with how rain and thunder were surrounding you and how much you heard of it. I was playing with textures of thunder and pitching it down a little bit and then moving it Peter recording in Joshua Tree National Park, 2008. Peter recording buffaloes for the movie Valhalla: The Legend of Thor (2019).