Silent

"Silent" is an animated short film created by Academy Award® winning Moonbot Studios ( http://http://moonbotstudios.com). It celebrates how storytellers, inventors, and technology work together to create cinema magic.

About the film
The story follows two street performers who dream of bringing their "Picture and Sound Show" to life. When they discover a magical contraption inside an old theatre, they embark on a cinematic adventure of sight and sound to find the audience they always wanted.

The sound was created by Oscar® nominated sound designer Steve Boeddeker ( http://www.skysound.com/bio/steve_boe...).

"Silent" debuted at the Scientific and Technical Academy Awards on February 15, 2014.

Learn more about Dolby Laboratories and its newest cinema technology, Dolby Atmos: http://www.dolby.com

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Behind the Scenes


One of the movie’s stars is Morris Lessmore from Moonbot’s Oscar-winning film ''The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. ''As one-half of a struggling team of street performers, Morris does the pictures, while his partner, a young girl, plays music on the keyboard. A rainstorm drives the pair into an abandoned theatre, where they find a magical contraption that leads them through an adventure of sight and sound. The adventure takes them through a virtual history of film and its genres, from silent movies to horror films, children’s stories, and thrillers.

“We took those two characters and put them on a journey that represents the evolution of film technology,” says director Limbert Fabian.

It should come as no surprise that a Dolby ®  production comes complete with fabulous sound. The film’s sound editor is Steve Boeddeker, who has been nominated for his first Academy Award ®  this year for the sound editing of All Is Lost.

Silent’s theme of picture and sound working together appealed to the sound specialist. “People don’t realize how much emotion and storytelling they get from what they hear,” Boeddeker says. “They think that it mostly comes from what they see.”

“Sound is one of the things now that really binds you into that world, envelops you completely,” says Moonbot cofounder William Joyce. “I mean it takes [a movie] from just being the flat plane in front of you to literally surrounding you. And there’s nothing else like that.”

Silent is mixed in Dolby Atmos, the cutting-edge cinema sound system that lets filmmakers place and move sounds anywhere in a theatre. And it employs Dolby Vision, the new technology for creating more lifelike images by improving brightness, contrast, and color. The film’s initial audience on the Web won’t get the full effect of those technologies, but we’re looking forward to creating opportunities for movie fans to get the complete experience in both Dolby Atmos™ and Dolby Vision™. Gallery