It’s hard to say whether anyone is truly destined for anything. But in some cases, it seems clear early on what will drive a person’s work and what they love most. For Honnie Korngold, that is the power of sound in visual storytelling. Not sound on its own, but what it does to an image on screen, shaping what an audience feels long before they can explain why. “There’s a reason they call it an audience and not a vid-ience,” she says. “What we hear matters more than what we see.”
From a sharp, instinctive ear in her formative years to where she is now, CEO and founder of CineVantage Productions in Athens, Georgia, founder of Georgia StoryLab, and co-founder of PhilanthroFilms, her work has pointed toward one conviction: that music and sound are not background to a story but part of how the story is told. She has long been a driving force in Georgia’s film ecosystem, and under her guidance, the marriage of sound and image has come to define what she sees as the true heart of storytelling.
That passion is not one she keeps to herself. Honnie Korngold is called to share it, and in the current day, her partnership with the Coca-Cola Refreshing Films program puts her firsthand guidance directly in the hands of a hungry new generation of filmmakers. But to understand the magnitude of what she is building now, the context of what came before reveals something deeper, a generational inheritance of sound in film that was never merely a coincidence.
The last name she carries resounds with historical weight, one tied directly to the origins of Hollywood and the evolution of filmmaking as we know it today.
The Korngold name, which Honnie came to inherit through marriage, is deeply woven into the legacy of cinema. Her husband’s grandfather, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, is regarded as one of the fathers of the “Hollywood Sound,” the sweeping orchestral score that gave the studio era its emotional voice. The language he pioneered has influenced composers of every generation since and remains the vocabulary of film scoring as we know it today. A composer of operas, symphonies and concertos in his native Austria, he was a figure of Mozartian stature.
Erich Korngold was exactly where he wanted to be. But when Warner Bros. asked him to fly to Los Angeles to adapt their 1935 production of, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” he saw little reason to refuse; after all, it was a theatre staple.
Pleased with his work, Warner Bros. came back with another ask: would he score their enormously expensive picture, “The Adventures of Robin Hood”? Korngold’s answer was an assured no. He had no interest in the unestablished, unpredictable world of film. The classical stage was his domain.
But that answer began to soften when Hitler invaded Austria, leaving Korngold with nothing to return home to. A firm no became a mumbled, “I suppose.”
That willingness born not of ambition but of circumstance solidified the legend he is now known as. And the mantle Honnie Korngold now carries.
It is a mantle she carries forward with intention. Most recently, CineVantage has become a technical partner for the Coca-Cola Refreshing Films program, mentoring the next generation of filmmakers in the art of sound design and music composition.
For those unfamiliar, the Coca-Cola Refreshing Films program gives current college students and recent grads from more than 60 partnered schools the opportunity to create branded content for the big screen. Among the eligible Georgia institutions are Emory University, Georgia State University, Georgia Tech, Morehouse College, the Savannah College of Art and Design’s Atlanta and Savannah campuses, the University of Georgia, and the University of West Georgia. Applicants submit a one-page script, centered around a theme that almost always highlights the movie going experience with the classic combo of an ice cold Coca-Cola and warm popcorn and those selected receive funding for production, including access to state-of-the-art camera equipment, professional mentorship and connections that will last a lifetime. This year drew more than 500 eager submissions, with just three finalists chosen from that talent.
It is a unique challenge for these students, who normally center their work around narrative-driven films. Once selected, it would be easy to view the finished product as nothing more than a commercial. But the real lesson is learning to find the story within the brand in Coca-Cola’s values, its purpose and developing the working relationship between creative filmmaker and client.
Korngold and her CineVantage team coached the finalists on the impact audio brings to their Coke stories. The visuals and dialogue matter, of course, but it is the audio, the score, the music, that makes an audience feel something.
Imagine the sound of ice crackling, carbonation fizzing, a projector rolling and the first crunchy bite of buttery popcorn, all of it woven into the swells of a score. It is truly cinematic. An experience meant to be shared on a global scale.
Korngold has helped reshape how the students perceive their own work. They are not making a branded commercial. They are capturing a sensation, the lived experience of what the iconic pairing of movies and Coca-Cola means. It is, in its own way, exactly what Erich Wolfgang Korngold understood a century before her: that sound is not accompaniment. It is the story itself.
And this mentorship is no one-way street. It has been equally an opportunity for Korngold herself to witness the finalists refuse to settle, to watch them be resourceful with what they have, to see their rallying spirit in action. She is hopeful for the future of filmmaking, seeing it rooted in the persevering grit of the next generation.
Korngold and Coca-Cola make for an unstoppable combination, like soda and ice, in guiding young filmmakers forward. Their shared hope is to inspire and enable the next wave of creators to continue exploring the medium, giving back to the big screen that lets its audiences dream, cold beverage in hand.
Erich Korngold gave Hollywood its voice. Honnie Korngold is making sure the next generation knows how to use it.
