Simon Hayes

Simon Hayes is a British sound engineer. Hayes won an Academy Award for Best Sound at the 85th Academy Awards for his work on Les Misérables. He won a BAFTA for Best Sound for the same film. In 2022, the 94th Academy Awards included Hayes as a nominee for Best Sound Mixing for his work on No Time to Die.

After starting work as a runner for a commercials production company when he was 16 years old, Simon Hayes moved into the sound department as an assistant and then boom operator before mixing his first feature film, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, at the age of 27. Hayes was the production sound mixer for the 2012 epic period musical film Les Misérables, for which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded him the Oscar for Best Sound Mixing at the 85th Academy Awards, alongside Andy Nelson and Mark Paterson. The director, Tom Hooper, required all singing in the film to be recorded live, which was widely deemed to be impracticable. Hayes and his team undertook complex recording, editing, and mixing processes to achieve Hooper's aim. They captured recordings of the actors amidst loud film sets, edited the vocals, then overdubbed the orchestration.

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