Watch How the All-Female Sound Team of ‘Sirāt’ Never Lets the Viewer Go

It’s hard to think of a more joyful challenge for a sound designer than a rave. You have to create walls of noise and blaring music, of course, but there are so many layers beneath that: key object sounds, noises to track the dancing and the characters, sometimes even — horrid thought — dialogue.

Oliver Laxe’s “Sirāt” opens with an outdoor rave sequence in the desert, and the film‘s sound team was determined, in the words of supervising sound editor Laia Casanovas, to grab the audience in the very first minute and not let them go until the very last one.

How they achieve that — and they absolutely do — is all about the devils they find in the details. For instance, when it comes to that rave sequence, Casanovas said that the timing and ritual of the speaker setup were as important as getting the right levels of bleed and feedback and fuzz coming from those old speakers. But recreating the exact, crunchy character of the rave music was no mean feat, either.

“To set the music, first, we tested some plugins to simulate the sound of the speakers, but it didn’t work because it felt fake, like [it was] added after. It didn’t have the veracity the visuals had. We started testing and recording all that music through [our] studio speakers. The issue that we had then was that the sound was too good. In the end, the speakers from the sound system [in the film] are handmade, each has its own peculiarity, and so we looked for a sound system like the one in the movie, and we recorded the music through it,” Casanovas said.

A sense of intentional authenticity guided the choices of the entire sound team, from production sound mixer Amanda Villavieja stealthily recording wildtracks, which inject a sense of movement and chaos in key moments, to re-recording mixer Yasmina Praderas subtly adjusting the ambience of the desert and sculpting the bass of the film. It’s the sort of soundscape you can truly appreciate in an Atmos theatrical setting. Sound was recorded with ambisonic technology so that the team could be incredibly precise about how they wanted to fill the space. They could create a tidal wave of music or, as Casanovas said, “work the sound from the camera’s point of view, if we wanted a more documentary-style sound.”

In the IndieWire-exclusive video below, watch how the “Sirāt” sound team, through careful editing and Dolby Atmos mixing, created a level of immersion that makes the desert of the film feel endless. The film was recently shortlisted in five Academy Awards categories, including Best Sound and Best Original Score, ahead of the January 22 Oscar nominations.