Earshot
Film sound design

Sound reaches the audience before thought does.

Earshot is an Oscar winning sound design and mix studio. Authored sonic worlds for Glazer, Lanthimos, Boyle, Peele, Zhao, Shults, Roher and Affleck, amongst others. Sound that doesn't decorate the image — it deepens it. Founded by Johnnie Burn.

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Academy Award Best Sound
BAFTA Award Best Sound
European Sound Designer of the Year
Cannes Vulcan Award
p.01 — Approach

The work begins before the obvious stage.

Earshot designs sonic worlds that are felt before they are understood. Founded by Johnnie Burn, the studio brings an authored approach to every silence, texture and distant shape — each carrying narrative weight across intimate and epic work alike.

The team works as a close creative partner to the director — shaping tone, rhythm, silence and perspective with the same narrative intention as cinematography or editing. Earshot is built around a deeply dedicated core team, most of whom have worked together as a unit for over ten years. That continuity brings trust, shorthand and a shared creative standard that is difficult to replicate.

The approach to immersive audio is grounded in storytelling, not spectacle: placing the audience inside a character's emotional reality. The work pushes beyond conventional sound design into something more sculptural, more psychological.

Sound should create a feeling in someone's space.

That idea runs through every project — from the severe psychological pressure of The Zone of Interest to the unstable sensuality of Poor Things and the vast airborne dread of Nope.

01

Built from story, not presets

The most effective sound work begins before the obvious stage. Research, editorial thinking and tonal design start early, often well before final post. The goal is not to add sound after the fact, but to help shape the film's language from within. Reading the script is essential — it often contains buried cues for thematic sound design, and early attention to these details can unlock creative possibilities while also identifying cost savings in production sound design.

02

Silence is part of the design

Impact does not come from constant noise. It comes from contrast, omission and control. Earshot favors the exact sound over the large one, and knows when to pull the floor away so the audience starts listening harder.

03

World-building with emotional intent

Whether the frame asks for realism, abstraction or something in between, the work is designed to alter how a scene feels, not merely how it sounds. Atmosphere is never background. It is storytelling.

p.02 — Selected work

A body of work in contemporary cinema.

Collaborations with Jonathan Glazer, Yorgos Lanthimos, Danny Boyle, Jordan Peele, Chloé Zhao, Ben Affleck, Trey Edward Shults and Daniel Roher. Formally ambitious, emotionally exact, unmistakably authored.

Jonathan Glazer

Under the Skin

Radical, sensory and alien — a landmark collaboration where sound and score blur into a single psychological field.

Yorgos Lanthimos

The Lobster

Deadpan absurdism grounded in precise, clinical sound — a world where emotional suppression is made audible in every surface and silence.

Francis Lee

Ammonite

Elemental and restrained — wind, sea and stone rendered with forensic intimacy to mirror an interior world of longing and isolation.

Yorgos Lanthimos

The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Clinical sterility punctured by creeping unease — sound stripped bare to amplify the surgical precision of an impossible moral trap.

Trey Edward Shults

Waves

A fluid, music-driven soundscape that breathes with the emotional rhythm of family, fracture and grace.

Yorgos Lanthimos

The Favourite

An unruly period soundscape stripped of polish, alive with friction, texture and sharply pointed detail.

Jordan Peele

Nope

Expansive sonic storytelling that turns emptiness, sky and distance into threat, awe and spectacle.

Jonathan Glazer

The Zone of Interest

An off-screen architecture of dread, built through research, restraint and the moral force of what is heard but not shown.

Academy Award BAFTA Cannes Vulcan European Sound Designer
Yorgos Lanthimos

Poor Things

A sound world of invention, tactility and strange biological beauty — balancing absurdity, intimacy and scale.

Ariane Labed

September Says

Intimate and atmospheric — a sensory rendering of adolescence where nature, tension and silence carry the weight of unspoken feeling.

Yorgos Lanthimos

Kinds of Kindness

Three tales of control and submission bound by a sound palette that shifts between the banal and the deeply unsettling.

Trey Edward Shults

Hurry Up Tomorrow

A nocturnal sonic landscape where rhythm, paranoia and vulnerability collide in an immersive, genre-defying experience.

Danny Boyle

28 Years Later

Visceral, relentless and raw — a return to primal terror where every sound signals threat, decay and the collapse of the familiar.

Yorgos Lanthimos

Bugonia

Bold surrealism pushing beyond conventional sound design into something more sculptural and psychological.

Chloé Zhao

Hamnet

Language, loss and Elizabethan texture woven through sound — a poetic evocation of grief and the power of words unspoken.

Daniel Roher

Tuner

Precision and obsession rendered in sound — an exploration of craft, control and the fine line between mastery and madness.

Features

Sound design, supervising sound editorial, re-recording and creative sonic development for feature films.

Directorial partnership

Long-form, close creative relationships with filmmakers who treat sound as part of the film's authorship.

Recognition

Academy Award, BAFTA, Cannes Vulcan Award, European Sound Designer of the Year, and international critical recognition.

Early to final

Conceptual sonic thinking from script or early edit through the final theatrical and nearfield finish.

p.03 — Services

From first thought to final print.

Earshot can embed early in development, join at editorial, or lead the sound process through the mix. Creative sound work for cinema and commercials. Deliberately focused.

Sound design

Original sonic concepts, palette-building, tonal research, world creation, scene-led narrative design and bespoke signature moments.

Supervising sound editorial

Shaping the entire sound strategy across dialogue, effects, backgrounds, Foley and structure with a unified authored point of view.

Creative development

Early collaboration with directors and editors to establish the film's sonic grammar before habits set in and options narrow.

Final mix collaboration

Support through pre-dubs, printmaster and premium-format finishing with close attention to translation, detail and dramatic intent.

Commercial sound design

Crafting award-calibre sound for advertising — from iconic campaigns like Guinness "Surfer" and Honda "Cog" to recent work with Emma Stone for Squarespace and George Clooney for Grubhub. The same cinematic precision applied to shorter formats where every frame counts.

01

Briefing

Understand the director's vision, tonal intent and where sound can carry story weight.

02

Research

Field recording, archival exploration and palette-building before the edit room.

03

Design

Crafting the sonic world — textures, silences, spatial character and emotional architecture.

04

Refine

Iterating with the director, stripping back, sharpening contrast and dramatic intent.

05

Deliver

Final mix, theatrical and nearfield formats with precise attention to translation.

p.04 — Contact

Selective work.
Early conversations welcome.

For enquiries about collaborations, availability or a film's sonic approach.

johnnie@earshot.studio

Current availability

Earshot favours long-form creative partnerships with directors who treat sound as integral to their filmmaking.