Fire reported at Skywalker Ranch

Sadly, no sound news today. Yesterday afternoon a chimney fire started at the Main House in Skywalker Ranch.

“The private Skywalker fire crew called for help from the Marin County Fire Department, which called for backup firefighters from San Rafael. No one was injured, said county fire Battalion Chief Mike Giannini. The cause was under investigation, but Giannini said the fire apparently started in the area of a fireplace.
Giannini said the extra firefighters were called in to make sure the fire didn't spread throughout the building.”

According to a Lucasfilm spokeswoman, the fire incident caused  “little to no damage”.
You can read more about it here.

The sound world of Cars 2

Pixar's Cars 2 was released today and as usual in all Pixar films the sound was handled by Skywalker Sound.
This movie brought again the collaboration between director John Lasseter and sound designer Tom Myers (just like in Cars). Hear from Myers, sound effects editor Al Nelson and score composer Michael Giacchino about the making of the soundtrack for this new adventure of Lightening McQueen and Mater.

G4TV visits Skywalker Ranch

Hello there 2011, we are back for some more. If I'm not wrong (the camera moves a bit hectically so I'm not 100% sure), the room that Matthew Wood shows, used to be the sound designer room mainly used by Gary Rydstrom and later on by Randy Thom.

There is little to be learned from this, but it is always neat to catch a fresh glimpse from the ranch and the great people that work there.

Sound of The Social Network

David Fincher’s new film, The Social Network, tells the story of Mark Zuckerberg and the origin of Facebook. It’s not often that we get sound news and profiles about dialog heavy films that make virtually no use of visual effects. This kind of films are usually very interesting sound-wise and also hard to do, as the soundscape has to be believable and unobtrusive.
Responsible for mixing this film were Ren Klyce, David Parker and Michael Semanick. In charge of sound design and supervising sound editing duties was Ren Klyce, who also did sound design for most of Fincher's films (including Seven, Fight Club, Zodiac and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button).

Also worth checking out is the soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Certainly not your everyday music for film, and rather something that fans of Nine Inch Nails will particularly enjoy.

The Sound of Inception

While Inception isn’t graced with the sound services of Skywalker Sound, the staff includes a handful of amazing Skywalker regulars. This includes Lora Hirschberg and Gary Rizzo.

Inception is the latest film by Christopher Nolan (director of Memento and The Dark Knight, among other great films), which deals with the world of dreams.



And here is also Mix’s article, which gives you a more detailed tour of the sound for Inception.

The Sound of Toy Story 3

Toy Story 3 has just opened and this is the first installation in the series in which Gary Rydstrom wasn’t involved. This time sound designing duties have been taken by the always magnificent Tom Myers (who also has a long relationship with Pixar, having done a few of the post-Rydstrom Pixar shorts), he was an assistant sound designer on Toy Story and sound designer on Toy Story 2. Joining Tom on supervision and re-recording mixing is Michael Semanick (wonderful mixer), with whom they also did Wall-E and Up.



Update 7/9/2010:
A neat interview to the sound team, conducted by the guys at Designing Sound. Read it here.

What do you think of it being mixed in 7.1?

Sound Department (credits provided by SoundWorks Collection)
Sound Designer -Tom Myers
Supervising Sound Editors – Tom Myers & Michael Silvers
Re-recording Mixers – Michael Semanick & Tom Myers
Sound Effects Editors – Dustin Cawood, Teresa Eckton, Al Nelson, Tim Nielsen
Foley Editors – Pascal Garneau & Dee Selby
ADR Editors -Steve Slanec & Gwendolyn Yates Whittle
Assistant Supervising Sound Editor – Mac Smith
Assistant Sound Effects Editor – Frank Clary
Assistant Sound Editor – Benny Burtt
Foley Artists – Jana Vance & Dennie Thorpe
Foley Mixer – Frank Rinella
Foley Recordist – Sean England
Mix Technicians -Tony Sereno & Jurgen Scharpf
Digital Transfer – Marco Alicea & John Countryman
Recordist – Ron Roumas
Video Services – John “J.T.” Torrijos
Engineering Services – Steve Morris & James Austin
Digital Editorial Services – Tim Burby, Dave Hunter, Danny Caccavo

How Your Dragon Sounds

 
This week we bring you some insight into the sounds created for the animated feature ‘How To Train Your Dragon’.

I really liked this movie and also enjoyed the fact that the dragon sounds were very distinct and different than the classic dinosaur-like sounds usually used on creatures like this.

Here is sound designer Randy Thom talking about the film:

For further detail I highly recommend this insightful interview with Thom, Jonathan Null and Al Nelson, conducted by Designing Sound.

On a more colorful note, “Paco” a famous Chihuahua on YouTube was recorded by the folks at Skywalker Sound and used on this movie.

You can read more about it here.

The Sound of Pandora

Hello there! I had this blog terribly abandoned, I know. I’ve noticed we’ve have many more readers, so welcome to all of you!
Ok, let’s try to catch up on the doings of Skywalker Sound.

Here it is Chris Boyes talking about sound design for Avatar:


and also this quite interesting sound panel featuring Mr. Boyes, James Cameron, Gary Summers, Andy Nelson and producer Jon Landau.

Finally, you can read even more about the film’s sound on this Mix Magazine article.

It’s been so long since I last blogged that the film has come out already on BluRay/DVD. It has no extra features or anything really, just the same film you saw on the theater. A longer cut with additional features will be released later this year (and next year, probably a 3D version and 10 years later an anniversary edition).

What did you thought of the sound for Avatar?

Ben Burtt awarded The Charles S. Swartz Award.

"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 12^th, 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:

The Lightsaber Sound

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.

Happy Holidays!

Hello there skywalkers. Again, I apologize for the long absence of new posts, more on that in a bit.

My last post was a very well received tour of Skywalker Ranch. Recently, professional photographer and filmmaker Philip Bloom did an awesome video of the ranch. It’s not much of a tour as it is more of a beautiful display of breathtaking imagery in superb quality.

You can read all about it’s making and Philip’s visit to the ranch over here.

And as a sounding present for our readership I bring you “Alma”, an excellent animated short by Pixar animator Rodrigo Blaas.

Sound services provided by Skywalker Sound. With sound design by Tom Myers (my personal favorite) and David Hughes.

By the way, “alma” is not only the girl’s name but also a spanish word that means “soul”.

Finally, I wanted to talk a bit about the blog. Since I’m clearly not getting any extra spare time, I would like to see if any of our readers would like to jump in and help me keep this blog updated. You wouldn’t have to search for information or material, as for the most part I have accumulated information for a year worth of blogging. As for news, they also come my way. So, basically I would need someone who would like to write and put a blog post together. The only requirements would be an interest in Skywalker Sound affairs and a minimum knowledge of professional audio, since some blog posts might require a little bit of tech-talk. For anyone interested, be so kind to contact me.

Oh, I almost forgot. Be sure to check out James Cameron’s Avatar (as if you needed to be told), which also features Skywalker Sound’ services and Chris Boyes sound design.

Happy holidays!

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.

View Larger Map
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!

Star Wars: Soundboards

 
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!

News and Updates

Hello there! It would seem that Skywalker Sound wasn’t lucky on this years Oscars, but that doesn’t mean their work was anything other than awesome.

Let’s bright up things with some news.
 
Today it was announced that Randy Thom will be doing a keynote speech on this year’s SIGGRAPH.
SIGGRAPH is known as one of the most important events in which advances in computer graphics technology are showcased. This year however they decided to take on a much broader direction and include sound in the picture as well.
Here is a video of what to expect for the 2009 event:

The conference will occur 3-7 August and the exhibition from 4-6.
We will post the exact date and time of Randy’s keynote address as soon as we know.

Read the press release.
Learn more about SIGGRAPH.

- - -

 
A new album recorded at the wonderful Scoring Stage was relesed on January 27. Zuill Bailey – Russian Masterpieces for Cello and Orchestra. With compositions by Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich. It really sounds quite intimate and close. It was engineered, edited, produced and mastered by Adam Abeshouse.
Here is a sample of the album:


And Zuill Bailey talking about it:

- - -

Another album relesed around the same time, and also recorded at Skywalker Sound is Tim Gorman’s Cowboy. Do I need to tell you it sounds very nice? No, I don’t. Listen for yourself:

And while we are at it, here is some songwriting advice from Tim himself:

And that’s all for today. See you soon with more!

Sound Oscar Nominations

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.

The Oscars will be on this February 22nd.

Randy Thom on “Sound Design”

Randy Thom is the Director of Sound Design at Skywalker Sound (a position that was previously held by Gary Rydstrom under the title, Director of Creative Operations). He is most famous for having won 2 Oscars and doing sound design and mixing for such films as Ratatouille, Contact, Forrest Gump, Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom. This year will have his sound design work on the upcoming Coraline.

He is also very eloquent when it comes to talking about his craft, which makes it always a delight to read his words.

Following is an e-mail Randy recently sent to his colleagues, which I think is very interesting.

An Argument For Reinventing The Term "Sound Design"

Happy Holidays!

 

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!

Hope you enjoy it.