music & movies top Atmos scenH55
BELFAST (2021)
The opening scene.
Belfast's sound team isn't always literal with the soundscape here, giving subtle hints that we are hearing through a child's ears. Voices of authority figures are pitched down to appear scarier, and unrealistic effects that 10-year-old Buddy would have heard only in films are sometimes used, such as the Western-style train in the opening scene. The lack of a traditional score opens space for sound effects and dialogue, weaving a rich, hyper-real tapestry that bubbles around Buddy.
As he heads home, he clocks the familiar sound of a train. Something is amiss though, and as the camera tracks around a bewildered Buddy the noise of the train evolves into swirling, slow-motion noises of rioters, melding with an expansive undulating low tone that fades down into Buddy's breath before anarchic violence bursts out from all sides, raining rocks overhead. The composed mixing of this scene keeps the chaos cohesive, helping the audience access both the narrative and Buddy's confusion without explicit explanation.
DUNE (2021)
The sandworm reveal…
To help ground its complex plot and surreal visuals, Dune‘s sound design is used to construct a believable world that the audience feels part of, and protective toward. It's a carefully-sculpted sonic world, deeply rooted in authenticity, delicately engaging the audience with a sense of intimacy as much as scale. For this scene's Ornithopter flight, the sound team manipulated organic insect and feline sounds for the purring of the dragonfly-like aircraft flying high above the desert. With the giant sandworm's arrival, Atmos is used expertly to create the stunning sensation of the craft dive-bombing deep into the sandstorm.
What follows is an incredible, all-encompassing sonic cocktail of moaning desert winds, tinkling granular dust, colossal monsters and glitching ethereal voices that flow in succession across a dynamic range that stuns. There's very little dialogue, but the storytelling is clear and compelling, while Hans Zimmer's magnificent score adds even more layers of texture and emotional punch, and is pulled around the space in a way that integrates, rather than dominates.
NO TIME TO DIE (2021)
The chase through Matera.
In the spectacular chase through the Italian town of Matera, there are plenty of wonderful details to be found from a Dolby Atmos system. After swinging off a bridge and flying into the air on a motorbike, there's a moment towards the end of this scene where a rain of bullets heads for the Aston Martin while Bond, thinking he's been betrayed, belligerently sits inside with Madeleine. It's exquisitely rendered in the Atmos hemisphere from both an exterior and a cocooned interior perspective, interwoven with the vertiginous sound of the village's relentless church bells. As the shots are fired, each concise crack and crunch varies, keeping the relentless onslaught dramatically interesting until the sound of crystals fragmenting hints to the audience that the car, like Bond himself, is not indestructible.
The sound of No Time To Die supports the film's larger-than-life visuals and hits all the beats a well-versed audience demands, yet it is still bursting with original, narrative soundtrack work.
THE BATMAN (2022)
The Batmobile chase.
Drawing its cinematic aesthetic more from 2019's (by way of ‘70s noir) than previous Batman outings, this offers us a grittier, grounded, and more expressionistic Gotham. With a Dolby Atmos system, the outstanding sound design lets viewers dip in
