"Another post and yet another introduction, this time a nice little piece by Matt Marks (an audio student at The Art Institute of Austin) on Ben Burtt and an award he was recently given. Enjoy, - Sam"
We all know Ben Burtt as the Golden Ear who created some of the worlds most recognized movie sounds – the Star Wars Lightsaber hum, R2-D2’s voice, Indiana Jones’ Whip, WALL-E’s vocabulary, and of course Darth Vader’s deep breathing. Because of his accomplishments within the sound world, Ben Burtt has received numerous awards including Special Achievement in Sound Editing Oscars® for “Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” – and on November 12th, 2009 his legacy was honored once again when he received The Charles S. Swartz Award from the Hollywood Post Alliance.
“Star Trek” Director JJ Abrams presented the award, following a short presentation commemorating some of the iconic movies and sounds credited to Mr. Burtt. The acceptance speech itself is inspiring and full of advice - by the man of the hour himself. For anyone interested in Skywalker Sound, its roots, or just the legend that is Ben Burtt – this video is a must see:
Happy new year Skywalkers!
I was fortunate enough to have been contacted by a few readers regarding my last post. That means that this new year you'll also be reading new contributors.
So, let me introduce to you Mr. Noah Jurcin, aka Phonaut. He is not only a lover of all things Skywalker Sound but also a sound designer himself, working on the videogame industry. Without any further ado, I'll let you read this wonderful post he prepared for us.
- Sam
Editor
The Lightsaber sound. What more can be said about one of the most iconic sounds in one of the most iconic sagas in film history? Rather than retread what has already been discussed about these futuristic swords of light, this month's blog entry is a convenient roundup of resources available on the web about how this sound was created, and how you can make similar sounds using easily available and inexpensive gear. Let's start with Ben Burtt's own comments about how he discovered and created the components of the basic lightsaber humming noise:
As mentioned in the video clip, the lower-pitched component of the saber-hum originated from a Simplex projector with interlock motors, while the brighter, buzzing component came from the quite serendipitous action of walking around a cathode ray tube while he was holding a microphone. The interference from the CRT as captured by his particular microphone created a textural sound which, when combined with the projector noise, created the lush drone we all know as the lightsaber sound. You can approximate these effects without having access to these exact pieces of equipment. Radio Shack stocks an inexpensive ($8) item called the "Recorder Telephone Pickup" which you can use to make the basic humming loop.
I plugged one of these into my handheld recorder and captured a multitude of strange, otherworldy electronic noises simply by walking around my apartment. All electronic gear creates an electronic field just begging to be tapped into by anyone interested enough to tap into it. Check out this small collection of sounds produced by commonplace household devices such as a laptop, microwave, a CRT computer monitor, and a clock. You will hear that my loops contain the all-pervasive 60Hz hum that wall-outlet electronics in the USA create (or 50Hz outside the USA).
The next step brings us to the remarkably simple technique Burtt used to add movement and realism to the hum. This technique tricks the listener into thinking the lightsabers are moving around in space by adding subtle doppler shifts to the humming loop. Just play one of the steady loops out through a speaker in a room while holding a microphone in your hand. A shotgun mic might work better because of the elongated shape. By swinging the mic toward and around the source speaker playing the loop, you will add slight doppler shifts to the microphone recording you are making. I approximated this effect by moving my telephone pickup device in various ways around my kitchen microwave. This method didn't add doppler shifts per se, but did add textural variations of interference which mixed in different ways depending on the position of my pickup device.
For sound designers ready for a much more meticulous and detailed account of recreating lightsaber sound effects, I highly encourage you to stop over and read the Lightsaber Sound Cookbook put together by Derrin Blondin.
Since there isn’t many news lately (and I was getting bored of only posting news anyway) I decided to take a look at some previous films. Today it is Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull, the latest installment on the Indy series.
Ben Burtt, who did sound design for all the previous movies, tells about the process he followed to revisit that world of Indiana Jones once again.
Hello there audiophiles! I’m so sorry that I left this blog somewhat abandoned, life always manages to get in the way. But I decided to administer all the info and news in order to have more posts and less waiting time.
So let’s see, a few days ago the official Star Wars website released a very very interesting sound related feature.
The Star Wars Soundboards. It’s an interactive interface in which you are provided with a lot of individual original sounds (without background music or ambience!) from the trilogy, to mix them as you want in a two channels mixer. In fact, I don’t really understand what’s the fun of doing that, because there is no music or other elements to play with. You have lots of voice snippets from all the main good characters (Luke, Han, Leia), R2-D2, Chewbacca, even the Tie Fighters and X-Wings, which is all awesome. But I don’t get what fun you can get playing with those sounds with the tools they provide you with. But I guess I don’t have to tell how much more fun you can have if you download/record those individual sounds into your personal library. I’m sure they are not in HD quality, but they sound pretty good anyway, and I bet most of the sounds (the voices mainly) haven’t been available before.
If you do anything interesting with them, let me know, so I can post it here. May the sound be with you!
Today the 81st Academy Awards (Oscars) nominations were announced. The sound categories are as follow:
Achievement in sound editing
“The Dark Knight” (Warner Bros.), Richard King
“Iron Man” (Paramount and Marvel Entertainment), Frank Eulner and Christopher Boyes
“Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight), Tom Sayers
“WALL-E” (Walt Disney), Ben Burtt and Matthew Wood
“Wanted” (Universal),Wylie Stateman
Achievement in sound mixing
“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), David Parker, Michael Semanick, Ren Klyce and Mark Weingarten
“The Dark Knight” (Warner Bros.), Lora Hirschberg, Gary Rizzo and Ed Novick
“Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight), Ian Tapp, Richard Pryke and Resul Pookutty
“WALL-E” (Walt Disney),Tom Myers, Michael Semanick and Ben Burtt
“Wanted” (Universal), Chris Jenkins, Frank A. Montaño and Petr Forejt
The nominated films which had it’s sound post production services provided by Skywalker Sound are:
Which means big congratulations are in order for Frank Eulner (Supervising sound editor on Iron Man), Christopher Boyes (Sound designer on Iron Man), Ben Burtt (Sound designer, re-recording mixer and supervising sound editor on Wall-E), Matthew Wood (Supervising sound editor on Wall-E), David Parker (Re-recording mixer on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), Michael Semanick (Re-recording mixer on both Wall-E and Benjamin Button), Ren Klyce (Re-recording mixer and supervising sound editor on Benjamin Button), Mark Weingarten (Sound mixer on Benjamin Button) and Tom Myers (Re-recording mixer on Wall-E).
Also, while the film itself wasn’t post-produced at Skywalker Sound, The Dark Knight does have great mixing by two usual suspects from the Technical Building. So, congratulations as well to Lora Hirschberg (Re-recording mixer on The Dark Knight) and Gary Rizzo (Re-recording mixer on The Dark Knight).
I personally love this about the Oscars, that this sound awards are part of the main show. And if you are sound film lover as me, you get to see your sound heroes live and kicking (if they win, that is). Let’s cross our fingers for the talented folks of (and from) Skywalker Sound which always manage to deliver great work on their films.
What better way to start this blog post than showing Skywalker Ranch's Main House (aka George Lucas office and LucasFilm HQ) in it's Christmas light splendor.
And what better way to follow that up than with our holiday card for our readers:
Finally, a little gift to Skywalker Sound fans. A nice amount of main characters voice files from E.T. The Extra Terrestrial. All of them free of background music and other sound effects, just the voices. You'll probably find that E.T.'s voice, created by Ben Burtt, of particular interest. Download them here in convenient mp3 files!
Hi there, So, I had some more news left I wanted to share. Once I'm done with that I hope to post something a bit more interesting (other than just news) and I'm also preparing a little something for this holidays.
Ok, let's get to the news and close some tabs.
We can never get enough of good ol' Ben right? Check out this fun little Q&A with the always wonderful Ben Burtt.
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Matthew Wood (right) and David Acord (left) got interviewed by TheForce.net and the resulting podcast (or Force-Cast) is really funny. It's very insightful as well. Get it HERE.
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Well, that's all for now. A couple of things about this blog. I don't really have an agenda (besides posting news more or less as they appear), there are things I know I want to do, but beyond than that is a mystery. Dear reader, you are more than welcome to leave your requests in the comments. If you'd like me to post about a specific thing regarding Skywalker Sound, whether is a sound designer, or a film, or a technical thing, just let me know and I'll see what I can do.
The other thing. Blogger users, dear loyal readers, I invite you to "follow" this blog (so I can have extra motivation for posting). It's right down there on the white sidebar. Did you just clicked on it? Thanks! you are the best.
There is a wonderful series of videos of a talk Ben Burtt did at Pixar. Collider was there and managed to get video footage of that amazing event. You DON'T wanna miss it. He seems like a rockstar in there, and he really rocked the house with a cool show, sharing a little bit of what he did for Wall-E and other films. I'd love to be his friend, not only does he knows tons about sound design and sound for movies in general, but he also seems to be a very nice and funny man. Go watch it NOW. (I don't really like the videoplayer they used, when I played sometimes it simply stopped).
- - - On November 6, the winners of the Hollywood Post Alliance awards were announced. This are awards given in categories all related to post-production. The one that interest us is the category for Outstanding Audio Post in Feature Film, as the award went to Ben Burtt (from Pixar. He seems to be a Pixar employee now, therefor not really working for Skywalker Sound for the time being. But since both companies always work toghether, I bet he'll never be far away from Skysound) and to Tom Myers, Michael Semanick and Matthew Wood (from Skywalker Sound). The Skywalker Sound Blog (that's us) wishes to congratulate them for this achievement. Well done gentlemen! You can check the rest of the categories over here.
Hi there, it's been a while. I've been a bit busy with work and many own projects, but I'll try to post more often.
So, a bit of news and stuff I've been gathering lately:
Last August an album recorded at Skywalker Sound' Scoring Stage was released. Thinking About Bix by Dick Hyman. A HDCD recorded by Keith O. "Prof" Johnson using custom-made mikes and equipment. I've listened to some of it at Amazon, and it sounds delightful. Musical-wise it's the kind of jazz I sometimes need.
Matthew Wood and David Acord, the gentlemen responsible for the mix of Star Wars: Clone Wars, were recently interviewed at CW31. Pretty great to see sound designers and re-recording mixers on tv!
Sennheiser/Neumann's Mike Pappas gave a recording seminar recently at the Scoring Stage. You can read all about it HERE.
The debut album of Court Mast, called Sausalito Summer, was also recorded at Skywalker Sound, and released on July 29. You can read about it HERE and preview it/download it HERE.
TimesOnline visited what they call "Star Wars HQ", which is actually Industrial, Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound. About our beloved place they say: "Over the hills and far away... well, about a 45 minute drive across the Golden Gate Bridge, way up into Marin County, Lucas' reknowned Skywalker Sound is housed in the grounds of Skywalker Ranch. It's a beautiful spot. Made all the nicer by enjoying a glass of the locally produced organic wine. Okay, maybe two glasses. Fine, I'll have the bottle. The plantation-style building overlooks Ewok Lake (no, really) and there are AT-ATs patrolling the area. Ok, maybe no AT-AT's but there are other, more subtle security measures. Where are all the cameras? Well maybe they're hidden in some of the fake boulders placed at strategic points around the grounds. But those rocks look real! Yes, well the guy does have the best special effects team in the world at his disposal."
HDFilmtools had a very HD interview with Matthew Wood. Mostly about the job of a Supervising Sound Editor. You can also see the ProTools ICON console. Very neat. Watch it/download it HERE.
The last thing for today (there is more, but I'll post it later) is another album recorded at Skysound, which will be released tomorrow. Speak Low by Boz Scaggs. More good jazz, awesomely recorded (I assume, since I haven't heard it yet). "The sense of intimacy you get there is quite remarkable," Scaggs says. "You think you can get closer to the music in a smaller room, but that's not always true. At Skywalker, the vastness brought us all together.... The quiets in that room are much quieter, and all of the dynamics are really vivid. It's a great room to sing in." You can purchase it HERE.
That's all for today folks, I'll be coming back soon (I hope) with more things Skywalker Sound
The recently released Pixar's Wall-E has caused a unique phenomenon. I don't know of other occasion in which a sound designer was interviewed as much as Ben Burtt was regarding Wall-E.
We can never get enough of good ol' Ben right? 
