Title	ETIHAD: REIMAGINE
Brand	THE BARBARIAN GROUP
Product/Service	ETIHAD AIRWAYS
Category	A09. Sound Design
Entrant	MEDIAMONKS Hilversum, THE NETHERLANDS
Idea Creation	THE BARBARIAN GROUP New York, USA
Production	MEDIAMONKS Hilversum, THE NETHERLANDS

Name	Company	Position
-	The Barbarian Group, New York	Agency
-	MediaMonks	Production

Brief Explanation

As the user travels through the incomparable interiors of Etihad's A380, we had to captured both dialogue and environment sounds aboard the real plane. Tasked with crafting a head-tracked mix that combines truthful realism and a sense of dreamlike luxury was as much an engineering challenge as it was an artistic one. Cinematic audio for VR playback is a new sonic medium. One challenge arising from this was that non-diegetic film music often feels out of place in VR, so instead we tuned layers of real airplane noise into a harmonic sonic incense that could convey the desired sense of luxury. Subtly enhancing the sound of things like rich leather and cutlery helped further convey Etihad's sophistication, while we ensured that the spatial positioning of all sounds remained extremely accurate. This sound production was the subject of a white paper presented at the 2016 AES convention in LA.