Skywalker Ranch Tour (#1)

Hello there. So, yesterday I was watching Fanboys (which was mixed at Skywalker Sound. Sound design by David Acord and Matthew Wood as supervising sound editor. Very neat movie indeed.) and I thought I should really blog about Skywalker Ranch.

Skywalker Ranch is the filmmaking paradise created by George Lucas. Contrary to popular belief Mr.Lucas doesn’t live in the Ranch (altough he probably stays there on occasion, he owns it after all). It is located in Marin County, near Nicassio, California.

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Naturally, the ranch is not open to the public and there are no paid tours or things like that.
Here is what it looks like to enter the ranch at night. The video is from the Haxan Films crew (creators of Blair Witch Project) who went to mix their latest film Seventh Moon. This actually looks a bit scary and BlairWitchProject-esque:

And now some pictures! The entrance to the ranch:
 
A map of the whole ranch:
The view from the Main House:
Skywalker Ranch’s own fire truck:
The Main House in the distance:
The Main House:
Ewok Lake:

Somewhere in the ranch:
The Technical Building, house of Skywalker Sound:
The Produce:
Skywalker animals:
A panoramic view of the Ewok Lake and it’s surroundings:

And that’s all for today I’m afraid. I have tons of more pictures that I’m going to be sharing in the coming weeks.

Indy is Back!

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.

Enjoy it!

Randy Thom’s Latest Adventures

Hello there. Again, sorry for the lack of updates. Let’s jump right into it.

Here is the featurette on Randy Thom’s sound design work for Ice Age 3:

Also, earlier this August, Randy was a keynote speaker at this year’s SIGGRAPH.

His speech entitled “Designing a Movie for Sound” dealed mostly about taking into account sound as part of a production of a film and not only as part of the postproduction. You can read more about it here.

Sound That Takes You UP

Hi there!
If you love Skywalker Sound then you possibly also love Pixar, or if you love Pixar then you should know that they are smart people sound-wise.
Today is the opening day for UP, Pixar’s tenth movie. I certainly and absolutely love Pixar and most of their movies, the last two (Ratatouille and Wall-E) had set the bar really high (in terms of making a blast at the box office and having an incredibly wide acceptance among critics) and UP seems to be no exception to that line of awesomeness.

The first thing of the day is the UP soundtrack, which was composed by the great Michael Giacchino.

The music wasn’t recorded at Skywalker Sound, but the curious thing is that this (digital only) album comes with three tracks of nothing but sound design (no music and no voices), which is a great opportunity to take close listen to some of the wonders Skywalker guys did. The downside to it is that you can’t buy these tracks separately, you have to buy the whole album to get them.

Last but not least, I bring you this terrific sound featurette on UP, in which you get to see Michael Semanick and Tom Myers (Tom is one of my favorite sound designers) among others…

So what are you waiting for? go see UP!