For the second year in a row, a Dolby Atmos® movie won the Academy Award® for best sound editing and, for the third year in a row, a film with Dolby Atmos sound won the Oscar® for best animated feature. American Sniper took the sound editing award, while Big Hero 6 won the award for best animated feature.
Last year, Gravity won for both sound editing and sound mixing, along with five other Oscars. Last year’s winner for best animated film was Frozen. Two years ago, the award was won by Brave, the first film ever to feature Dolby Atmos sound.
Dolby Atmos allows filmmakers to place and move sounds anywhere in the theatre, including overhead, enveloping the audience in sound and helping draw them deeper into the movie.
“These awards are a great demonstration of the momentum Dolby Atmos has built in a relatively short time, ” said Doug Darrow, Senior Vice President of Cinema at Dolby. “Dolby Atmos gives filmmakers new capabilities that they’re using to tell their stories in new and creative ways.”
Last year, we brought Dolby Atmos to home theaters and mobile devices, such as the Amazon Fire™ HDX 8.9. A number of movies have been released or announced in Dolby Atmos sound on Blu-ray Disc™, including Gravity, Unbroken, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, and John Wick.
American Sniper’s sounds of war
For American Sniper, the story of legendary Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle, the sound team faced the challenge of creating unique and natural sounds of Kyle’s time both at war and at home.
Discussing Dolby Atmos with Below the Line, rerecording mixer John Reitz said, “It’s the clarity for me.” Dolby Atmos let the filmmakers separate sounds like music and dialogue that otherwise would have been fighting for the same space. “We call it ‘opening up the mix.’”
“In the theater where I saw it, the Dolby Atmos sound made me feel the rumble of the tanks vibrating through my entire body, ” wrote Anne Helen Petersen in BuzzFeed. “Every time Kyle made a shot, I felt the kickback in my spine.”
The sound editing award went to supervising sound editors Bub Asman and Alan Robert Murray. Rudloff, Reitz, and sound mixer Walt Martin were nominated for the best sound mixing award, which was won by Craig Mann, Ben Wilkins, and Thomas Curley for Whiplash.
Big Hero 6
In Big Hero 6, tech prodigy Hiro Hamada and his giant inflatable robot, Baymax, team up with Hiro’s friends to form a band of high-tech heroes. The Dolby Atmos movie also won the award for best animated film from the Cinema Audio Society, which rewards movies for achievements in sound mixing.
