Niv Adiri

Niv Adiri was born and raised on a farm in Kfar Vitkin, a village in central Israel. As a child, he milked cows before school and often went to the local disco after classes to work as a deejay.[1]

After completing his army service, Adiri moved to Tel Aviv, where he worked as a DJ and sound mixer until age 25. He said he was fascinated by the origins of sound, its emotional effects on listeners, and the way it could be broken into separate components.[1]

At 25, he moved to England to attend school and subsequently made his home there. By the time of the 2014 reports, he was living in England with his British wife and their two sons.[1]

Before working on Gravity, Adiri contributed to 127 Hours and Slumdog Millionaire. He then joined the team responsible for mixing and creating the audio for Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, in which Sandra Bullock plays an astronaut lost in space.[1]

The central creative challenge was representing space, where sound does not travel.[3] Adiri explained, “First we had to create the background to space, where there is no sound, but we had to fill it up with something. It’s a sound that you hear but you don’t know you’re hearing it.”[1] The team constructed an audio palette from vibrations and layers of sound, extracting vibrations from frequencies audible to humans and reducing them to basic components. The effects included Sandra Bullock’s heartbeat and her breathing inside a spacesuit.[3]

At the time of the 2014 coverage, Adiri and his team were scheduled to work on The Book Thief, a film set during the Holocaust, and Black Sea, a British thriller starring Jude Law.[1]

For Gravity, Adiri received the BAFTA award for sound alongside Skip Lievsay, Christopher Benstead, Chris Munro, and Glenn Freemantle.[3] The film’s sound team also won a Cinema Audio Society prize and a Motion Picture Sound Editors award before the Academy Awards.[2]

At the 2014 Academy Awards, Adiri won Best Sound Mixing with Lievsay, Benstead, and Munro.[2][3] It was his first Oscar, and he was reported at the time as the only Israeli nominated that year. After the win, he said, “I feel so lucky and proud! It was an amazing feeling standing up there, and more so to represent Israel, my home!”[2]