Sounddesigner
Ben Burtt's responsibility on Star Wars was to create specifically
unusual sounds - weapons, vehicles, character and key backgrounds.
Ben Burtt was
a film sound buff as a child (he recorded and replayed the sound
tracks of his favorite movies) Burtt enrolled at the university
of Southern California's film school with the intention of becoming
a director. He received a student job cataloguing the Columbia sound
library, which had been donated to the University. A call by Star
Wars producer Gary Kurtz to U.S.C. led to a successful interview
for Burtt. He was given carte blanche to work out of his apartment
near the U.S.C. campus in order to collect at a leisure pace those
sounds that might be useful.
He spent a year
recording anything that could be turned upside down and backwards
to make Lucas world come alive.
"In my first
discussion with George Lucas about the film, he - and I concurred
with him - that he wanted an 'organic', as opposed to the electronic
and artificial soundtrack. Since we were going to design a visual
world that had rust and dents and dirt, we wanted a sound which
had Squeaks and motors that may not be the smooth-sounding or quite.
Therefor we wanted to draw upon raw material from the real world:
real motors, real squeaky door, real insects; this sort of thing.
The basic thing in all films is to create something that sounds
believable to everyone, because it's composed of familiar things
that you can not quite recognize immediately" (Ben
Burtt in Film Sound Today)
Imperial
Walkers
The sound of
the Imperial Walkers were created by modifying the sound of a machinist's
punch press. Added to this for complexity, were the sounds of bicycle
chains being dropped on concrete. |How
to make new sounds|
TIE
fighter
The screech
of a TIE Fighter is a drastically altered elephant bellow.
R2-D2
50
% of the droid´s voice is generated electronically; the rest
is a combination and blending of water pipes, whistles, and vocalizations
by Burtt.
"R2-D2´s
motors covers every single move it does. They got buried most of
the time, but when they do surface it helps keep a consistent texture
that tells you that it really is a robot."(Ben
Burtt in Film Sound Today)
Chewbacca
Wookie
sounds are constructed out of pieces of walruses and other animal
sounds.
"You
have bits and fragments of animal sounds which you have collected
and put into lists: here is an affectionate sound and, here is a
angry sound and, just like with R2-D2, they are clipped together
and blended. With a Wookie, you might end up with five or six tracks,
sometimes, to get the flow of the sentence" (Ben
Burtt in Film Sound Today)
Burtt
blended the sounds of his TV set and an old 35 mm projector to create
the hum of a light saber. [more]
Speeder
Bike
Sound of an
Speeder Bike was achieved by mixing together the recorded sounds
of a P-5 Mustang ariplane, a P-38 Lockheed Interceptor, and then
record them
Luke
Skywalker's landspeeder
The whoosh of
Luke Skywalker's landspeeder was achieved by recording the roar
the Los Angeles Harbor Freeway through a vacuum-cleaner pipe.
Ewokese
language
A
language created by altering and layering Tibetan, Mongolian, and
Nepali languages
.
"I broke the sounds down phonetically, and red-edited them together
to make composite words and sentences. I would always use a fair
amount of the actual languages, combined with purely made-up words.
With a new language, the most important goal is to create emotional
clarity. People spend all of their lives learning to identify voices.
You became an expert at that, and somewhat impossible to electronically
process the human characteristic, and retain the necessary emotion.
To fool the audience into believing this is a real character as
the basis of the sound, although you may sprinkle other things in
there. It varies from character to character." (Ben
Burtt in Film Sound Today)
Reality
"hook" of a language.
The reality "hook"
of a language comes not from a part of an existing language, but from
a sprinkling of pidgin English here and there, as when Bibb Frotuna
said "Bargon no wachonga" which of course means " There will be no
bargain" How to make to
make new sounds
The unique
sound effects of Star Wars.
Burt has a keen
ear for the compelling sounds, but what makes his works special
is how his effects vault to a film's foreground. Normally, one only
perceives a sound effect on a subconscious level. See a sound; hear
a sound. Every time you see some action on the screen, your mind
expects there to be a complimentary sound. Sounds that, will seem
appropriate to that image and to its emotional context. But Burtt´s
skills go far beyond ordinary environmental stretching: his sounds
often literally tell the story and they bring pleasure in them selves.
Radio
Interview with Ben Burtt (28.8
Real Audio)
interviewed
by John Papageorge, Silicon Valley Radio
Ben Burtt: "In
Star Wars, I wanted to come up with a very massive rumble
for a spaceship flying overhead .. I recorded the air conditioner
in my motel rrom, slowed that sound down so it was even
deeper and that became the rumble for the spaceships"
,
Marc Mancini: "Sound Designer" in 
FilmSound.org
