You can shut your eyes. You can't shut your ears.
Johnnie Burn is a Supervising Sound Editor and Sound Designer based in London. His work on The Zone of Interest earned an Academy Award, a BAFTA, and the Cannes Soundtrack Award. His collaborations with Jonathan Glazer and Yorgos Lanthimos span two decades.
Viason is the studio that carries that practice forward. It is named for the idea at its centre — to see through sound — and it is organised around a single proposition: that the sound of a film is not a final polish to be applied at the mix stage, but a parallel narrative written alongside the picture from the first draft.
We engage at the script. We record the world before the camera sees it. We build the acoustics of rooms that never appear on screen. And we mix in the box — a documentary approach that prefers the truthfulness of the recorded material to the convenience of the temp.
The five propositions we return to on every production.
Begin at the script.
The unseen film is written, not added. We read at the outline, track with the shoot, and arrive at the mix with the material already in conversation with the image.
Record the truth.
Field recording is a form of research. Room tone is evidence. We prefer the particular to the generic, and the accidental to the pristine.
Architecture over fixing.
Sound is spatial. We build rooms, walls, weather. A mix is not a cleanup — it is the finishing of a structure that was designed from the first principle.
Stay in the box.
A documentary method means trusting the recording. We don't wallpaper; we compose. The discipline is subtractive.
The ear arrives first.
Sound reaches the brain before thought does. What the audience watches with their ears is already shaping the body by the time the image is understood — so the unheard is never absence. It is the loudest thing in the room.
Best Sound · The Zone of Interest · 2024
Best Sound · The Zone of Interest · 2024
The Zone of Interest · 2023
Excellence in Sound · The Zone of Interest
Nominated · Poor Things, Under the Skin
Technical Achievement · Sound