How Gisle Tveito Relies on Acon Digital to Mix Norway's Finest Films

Gisle Tveito has spent more than three decades shaping the sound of Norwegian cinema. Academy member, co-owner of Storyline Studios, and one of the most decorated sound designers in Europe, he talks about craft, collaboration, and why the tools he reaches for keep coming from a company just down the road…

A Film on the Desk at Cannes

A film is currently sitting on the desk of the Cannes selection committee. Gisle Tveito knows this, and he is not especially relaxed about it. "It requires 24/7 dedication," he says, with the measured understatement of someone who has been in post-production long enough to know that calm is a professional skill, not a natural state.

That pressure is familiar territory. Tveito has been navigating it since he moved from music into film in 1989, and the list of productions he has shaped since reads like a survey of the best Norwegian cinema of the past three decades - Force Majeure, The Innocents, Out Stealing Horses, The Worst Person in the World and many more.

Awards have followed: the European Film Award for Best Sound Design, the Norwegian Film Critics' Award for Best Technical Achievement, and the Aamot Award for outstanding contribution to Norwegian film. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He is also, in practical terms, one of the people who helps decide what the best film sound in the world actually sounds like.

Building the Machine

Gisle is Supervising Sound Editor, dubbing mixer, and co-owner of Storyline Studios in Oslo, a post-production facility that emerged from the 2009 merger of Norwegian Film Studio and Chimney Pot Oslo. The place operates as a genuine one-stop shop: camera department, editing suites, colour grading, sound, and mix stages. Nine editing rooms, each running 7.1.4 audio, with projectors or 100-inch screens in every room.

What Gisle has built inside that facility is a workflow philosophy as much as a technical infrastructure. Every room runs the same plugins and the same gear. Sound Editors are expected to arrive at the final mix having already done serious work: dialogue pre-mixed, equalisation applied, reverb and effects in place. Nothing is left for the last minute because, in Tveito's world, the last minute does not exist as a creative space. It is a delivery window, not a production phase. "Everything is fixed before the final mix," he says. "The mix builds from day one."

That integration into the editorial process is something Gisle has pursued deliberately throughout his career. "Directors that I frequently work with consider me part of the initial editing process," he says. The results are visible in the work. On Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier's 2025 Cannes Grand Prix winner and the first Norwegian film to take the Oscar for Best International Feature Film, Tveito was building mix templates during the editorial phase. Certain scenes were "fully done in surround" two months before picture lock.

Craft Over Content

Gisle is direct about the state of the industry and what he sees concerns him. Mainstream cinema, he argues, has become increasingly preoccupied with volume over quality. "More and more boring," he says, watching an industry that once prized singular vision drift toward the algorithmic safety of endless series. He sees a self-reinforcing cycle where attention migrated to streaming, streaming demanded content, content eroded craft, and craft became the casualty nobody officially acknowledged.

He is not without hope. The trend toward shorter series and the growing appetite for documentary suggest the audience is correcting. "There will be some grassroots, some underground thing" emerging if the decline continues, Gisle says, and he expects that to benefit audiences even if it challenges the current industrial model. What he will not do is adjust his own standards to accommodate the trend. Gisle deliberately takes on projects beyond his existing knowledge base, forcing himself to learn new things. He changes his approach between films to avoid repetition. He once mixed an entire film without using any EQ, not as a stunt but as a diagnostic. His reasoning: if the sound is too busy, it is too loud, and if it does not work, the sound itself is wrong. Fix the problem at source, not in the mix.

The Norwegian Connection

Acon Digital entered the professional world through a route that, in retrospect, feels entirely logical. He found out there was a Norwegian plugin company and got in touch with them. What followed was a proper collaboration. Gisle contributed directly to the development of Extract:Dialogue 2, specifically requesting an EQ section to shape the residual noise remaining after dialogue extraction. The goal was not silence but the quality of silence. "Less artifacts, but a more pleasant noise," he says. By equalising what remains after processing, he can reduce the harshness of the noise floor without stripping the audio of its natural life. For a sound supervisor working in dialogue-heavy drama, that distinction is between a tool that helps and one that creates new problems.

He uses our Extract:Dialogue 2 and DeClick plugins as live inserts, running continuously in the chain with settings that, once dialled in, require no further attention. "Set to forget," as he puts it. In the high-volume, fast-turnaround world of modern post-production, that reliability is a structural requirement. The last thing a sound supervisor needs two weeks before picture lock on a potential Cannes contender is a noise-reduction tool that requires constant management.

The Tools That Stay in the Chain

His relationship with Verberate Immersive 2, our reverb designed for surround and spatial audio, goes deeper still. He inserts it directly into auxiliary buses, blending with faders and running an equal number of instances on each bus type. 

The input and output EQs built into the plugin give him the shaping he needs without adding another processor to the chain. That consistency matters across a facility where nine editing rooms are all running 7.1.4, and where the whole workflow depends on every room sounding like every other room.

He owns licences for competing tools, including iZotope RX. He reaches for Acon Digital. The reason is not proximity or loyalty to a Norwegian company. "It sounds so much better," he says, without qualification. He is not a person who makes that kind of statement carelessly..

The purchase model matters to him as well. He is not interested in subscriptions. Software you buy has what he calls "intrinsic value." It is on your system, and it does not disappear when a company decides to reprice its tiers or restructure its offering. In a professional environment where tool continuity is part of workflow stability, that permanence is worth paying for.

Sentimental Value won the Grand Prix at Cannes, collected nine Academy Award nominations, and became the first Norwegian film to win Best International Feature Film. The sound on that film was shaped, in part, by tools Gisle helped design, running inside a workflow he built from the ground up at a facility he co-owns. When the result is work of that quality, the tools in the chain are worth knowing about.

A huge thanks for Gisle for the interview, you can find out more about his work at Storyline Studios here.