Dolby Creator Talks

We're taking a few weeks off of our regular posting schedule to put together some exciting new episodes for you. We will be back to our regular schedule at the end of October with our special coverage of "Dune." We recently sat down with director Denis Villeneuve and his all-star sound team, Mark Mangini, Theo Green, and Ron Bartlett, to discuss their approach to this unbelievably ambitious projec...

Today we're speaking with the creators of "Come From Away," the Tony Award-winning Broadway show, and the latest to get a streaming release, this time on Apple TV+. Joining us are the creators and writers of the book, music, and lyrics, David Hein and Irene Sankoff, and director Christopher Ashley. The show is set in the week following the September 11 attacks and tells the true story of what tran...

Dr. Michelle Fournet and Dr. Ellen Garland, the scientists featured in the new Apple TV+ documentary "Fathom," believe the songs of the humpback whales to be perhaps the oldest form of verbal communication between intelligent life on planet Earth. A language and culture which may predate humans' by millions of years.  You may think scientific curiosity then set out to decipher this language s...

WandaVision was a breakout hit this past year, and it appropriately has a whopping 23 Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series, and more for Writing, Acting, Directing, and a couple of well-deserved nods in the Sound Editing and Sound Mixing categories. And if you've seen the series, it should be clear why — this show mixes stylistic formats in some truly bizarre, but al...

As we continue our coverage of the 2021 Emmy Awards, we recently sat down with the Emmy-nominated editor and sound team for the fantastic nature program / retrospective biography / urgent and dire warning for humanity, "David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet." The film pulled material from over 50 years of Sir David's career to create what many believed to be his final big documentary. And worki...

As we begin our coverage of the 2021 Emmy Awards, we're excited to sit down today with Sound Designer, and 3-time Emmy Winner, (and returning guest) Craig Henighan, and Supervising Sound Editor and Dialogue Editor, as well as 4-time Emmy Winner, Brad North — who are nominated again, this time for their incredible work on the Netflix animated anthology series, LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS. They are nominate...

"Nine Days" is an unusual and remarkable film. A kind of supernatural fable about aspiring souls enduring a rigorous interview process in order to get chosen for life. It is an incredible debut from gifted filmmaker Edson Oda, and we are very proud to see this film finally get a theatrical release, as it was a recipient of the Dolby Institute Fellowship, which gives independent films funding to mi...

Netflix's "The Crown" picked up a whopping 24 Emmy nominations this year, including one for Best Drama Series — which is understandable, considering just how innovative, understated, and tragic the storytelling on that series is.  This week, we're speaking with two of the nominees responsible for some of that incredible storytelling, longtime collaborators Yan Miles ACE, the Editor, and Lee W...

This week we bring you a remarkable story about how Carlos López Estrada, the director of the Dolby Institute Fellowship winner "Blindspotting," attended a spoken word poetry performance and was so inspired by what he saw on stage, he decided to make a wild, low-budget indie feature capturing some of the magic he witnessed that evening. With the help of Executive Producer Kelly Marie Tran, he turn...

How do I break into the film business? That is the number one question we get asked, so we figured maybe it was time to finally answer it. For the past few months, we've asked some of the top professionals in the fields of cinematography, animation, sound, producing, and directing how they got their start and the answers were surprising even to us!  "The world has a way of opening doors and c...

Adapting stage musicals for the cinema is an often tricky process and "In the Heights," the latest adaption from Broadway phenom Lin Manuel Miranda, was no different. Director Jon Chu certainly did not shy away from the epic scale of the theatre production, if anything he made it even grander, which (as you might've guessed) had a number of unique challenges. Primarily, how did they manage to capt...

As games go, chess is maybe not the most exciting thing to watch as a spectator. Its complexities make it difficult for non-experts to truly appreciate. And yet, in Netflix's limited series, "The Queen's Gambit," the filmmakers somehow manage to not only make it exciting, but downright riveting. How did they pull that off? Well, we recently sat down with editor Michelle Tesoro, ACE, and sound desi...

We're joined today by prolific showrunner and creator Neil Cross and re-recording mixer / supervising sound editor Ron Bochar to discuss their new series "The Mosquito Coast." The show tells the story of a grueling journey of a family on the run and it turns out the production was just as challenging. We discuss some of those challenges (and how they overcame them) along with some insights into ho...

Besides "we'll fix it in post," perhaps the most common joke in film editing suites is, "the music will carry it." Meaning, a film almost always has the score to help with the emotional impact of any given moment. But what about films without a traditional score? That is the case with "The Killing of Two Lovers," a tense new indie drama from director Robert Machoian. But interestingly, the directo...

The cult classic "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" came out just a little over ten years ago, and to celebrate the anniversary, the filmmakers (and Universal Pictures) decided to remaster the film in Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos for a theatrical and home video re-release this year. Dolby had the privilege of sitting down with the director, Edgar Wright, and the Sound Designer, Julian Slater, to talk a...

Short films don't get a lot of attention these days, but it is one of the best opportunities for filmmakers to experiment with new storytelling techniques. Recently, the Dolby Institute was invited to the Aspen Shortsfest, an Oscar-qualifying festival for short films, to run a workshop on sound design. Well, the submissions blew us away with their creativity and techniques, so we wanted to share t...

We conclude our 2021 Oscars coverage with the nominees for Best Animated Feature! Once again we've invited all of the nominees in this category to speak with us and we are thrilled to share them with you. Here's a table of contents for each interview, along with the names of all the nominees, this time in reverse alphabetical order: 00:01:22 - WOLFWALKERS - Tomm Moore, Ross Stewart, Paul Young, an...

We continue our 2021 Oscars coverage with the nominees for Best Cinematography! We have once again invited every nominee to join us, and we were very pleased to sit down with three inspiring cinematographers: Sean Bobbitt, Erik Messerschmidt, and Phedon Papamichael. (Unfortunately, the other two nominees, Dariusz Wolski and Joshua James Richards, were unable to find time, as they are on location f...

Perhaps unsurprisingly for the Dolby Institute Podcast, we begin our 2021 Oscars coverage with the nominees for Best Sound! This is a very special episode for us because it is the first time we've interviewed all the nominees for a category and edited them together into a single podcast. Our hope is that if you are an Oscar voter — either as an Academy member or as a fan participating in your annu...

As if filling out an Oscar ballot wasn't challenging enough, 2021 has a ton of rule changes with regards to how the Academy will be voting. Most notably for us here at Dolby, the Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing categories have been combined into one: Best Sound.  Today Glenn sits down with Teri Dorman, Kevin Collier, and Scott Millan — the current Board of Governors of the Sound Bran...

At Pixar, just about everyone's a critic. And that is one of the reasons why they continue to raise the creative bar with every film they release. Pete Docter, the director of "Soul" and CCO of Pixar Animation Studios joins us along with the film's producer, Pixar veteran Dana Murray, to discuss the challenges of making such an incredible animated feature, including their exhaustive development pr...

We are always delighted when independent filmmakers get access to our technologies because they tend to use these tools in such fascinating and creative ways. Very often in ways, we'd never imagined. Dolby Vision® and Dolby Atmos® are often perceived as tools for big-budget, tentpole action movies, which is why we created the Dolby Institute Fellowship, in partnership with the Sundance Institute:...

"Mank" has been a personal passion project for David Fincher for several decades now. His own father wrote the script, about the famously self-destructive writer of "Citizen Kane," and Fincher was determined to make the film feel as authentic as possible. Almost like it was an undiscovered artifact from Hollywood's "Golden Age," insisting for years to film it in black & white, 1:33, and in mon...

Because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s Sundance Film Festival is entirely virtual. But what exactly does a virtual film festival look like? Glenn sits down with Keri Putnam, CEO of the Sundance Institute, Tabitha Jackson, the brand new director of the Sundance Film Festival, and Michelle Satter, director of the Sundance Labs, to answer all these questions and more. It’s a fascinatin...

You've found us! The Dolby Institute Podcast has moved! And we have a brand new title: Sound + Image Lab: The Dolby Institute Podcast Please subscribe to our new dedicated podcast feed right here, or wherever you get your podcasts . Our next episode will be our FINAL episode on the old Soundworks feed, so please subscribe to this new feed straight away, as we have many exciting improvements coming...