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:

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.

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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:

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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.

More Ben Burtt and awards

  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).

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You can have a bit more of Ben over here:


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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.

That's all for now,
May the sound be with you.