This is the end of the Ben Burtt Special. In the Extras of the DVD of Wall-E there are an amazing documentary called “Animation Sound Design: Building Worlds From The Sound Up”. You have to see it! Don’t worry if you don’t have the original DVD, I found that video on YouTube. The embed was disabled but you can see it through this links: Part 1 | Part 2.

Finally, let’s check another interview with Ben Burtt at Time Out London:

Does a sound designer have to be as much librarian as artist?

‘Absolutely. The elements and resources that a sound designer works with are collected from the world around us, and I’ve been collecting sounds for years. Putting in sounds from the real world creates the illusion that these fantasies are credible. So I was always gathering sounds. Animals at the zoo, going out on an aircraft carrier to do motors and airplanes. Travelling around the world, I would always have my recorder with me. If there was a thunderstorm I’d record the thunder. If I got a flat tire I could get a good sound of the rubber slapping the road. I’ve found that almost every sound I’ve recorded, I’ve found a way to use.’

Did you actually invent the term sound designer?

‘Some people think I did. I was one of the first, I may not have been absolutely the first. The film industry in sound was originally divided quite sharply between those that recorded sounds, sound editors that synchronised the sounds and sound mixers who were blending everything together. And what George Lucas wanted me to do was record, do the sound edit and then be around to supervise the mixing, so there was one vision throughout. Because the problem with the process was that it wasn’t coordinated properly.’

How was it making the switch to digital?

‘There are many good things about switching from analogue to digital, mainly the fact that an individual with a collection of desktop equipment can record, edit and do a lot of elaborate mixing. It’s much more artist friendly. The negative things about it? There are some, because you can do things so quickly. Almost anybody can assemble a noise, pile things into a track without much thought. I say, let’s be careful about what we do here, let’s have a plan, let’s be simple if we can. Pick the right sound. Keep your objectivity, discipline yourself.’

How did you become involved with ‘Wall•E’?

‘When I finished “Revenge of the Sith”, I was pretty worn out with science fiction and laser guns and robots. I said to my wife, no more robots. But Jim Morris, the producer of “Wall-E”, called me up and invited me over to Pixar to meet Andrew Stanton who was going to pitch his idea. And I said, ‘What’s it about?’ And he said, ‘It’s a robot movie!’ So driving over there I had my doubts. I love Pixar, I had respect for their work, but I wanted to work on something that’d be new territory. But he sold me on the idea, I thought it was charming. The whole idea that the sound design would include developing lots of vocals, languages, be key material in a film which had relatively little conventional dialogue was a real attraction creatively. [...]

Do you see yourself as a figurehead for the latest generation of sound technicians?

‘Well, I think “Star Wars” had a big impact. It made producers put more time and energy into their soundtracks. I’m proud of it, but it wasn’t just me, I wasn’t the only one who did the sound work on those films, there was always a team of people. I’m not capable of doing it all myself. But I think my calling has always been as the principal inventor. Somebody says, I’ve got a robot, or I’ve got a spaceship, or I’ve got an exploding volcano, get me something that’ll sound good. And that’s probably where I’m the happiest. Inventing something.’

Full Interview here.

The last part of the Ben Burtt – Star Wars Special. This time with Episode II: Attack of The Clones. I have two interesting articles to share to you. First article is from Film Sound, a really interesting interview with Ben Burtt talking about the sound of Episode II:

It sounds like an enormous undertaking.

The thing about any ‘Star Wars’ film, especially the ones that we’re doing now, is that post-production is almost like making two feature films at the same time. You’re doing a live-action feature film, with all the necessary logging and storytelling-through-editing, and all the data that needs to be managed for a regular feature film. You’re also really doing a full-length cartoon because almost every shot in the movie involves animation, which has a different approach to how you design a shot and where the images come from. In the end, every shot becomes a special effects shot — and there are thousands of them. So anyone coming on in post-production on this picture side is faced with managing these three huge areas: normal feature, fully animated feature, and then the two of them being interlaced with one another in complicated ways.

When did this whole process begin for you?

We’ve been on the film for two years. In March of 2000, I started previsualizing sequences. I would get a verbal description from George of a sequence, like the “Speeder Chase,” and then begin creating images for it and cutting things together prior to going to Australia so that he could react to it. We did a lot of editing up front that helped George to design the sequence, to pick out camera angles and to develop the action in the sequences. By the time we got to filming in Sydney, there were three or four pieces already edited as what’s called a “videomatic version” of a sequence, which was a good reference for George while he was shooting. A lot of decisions had to be made ahead of time about what angles, what coverage, and what kind of motion would make the sequence work the best. George traditionally likes to work out as much of that as possible before he gets on the set. [...]

About how many layers of video were you dealing with for each shot?

On the average, we probably had five or six layers of video for every shot of the movie, and sometimes many more. You very rarely had everything in front of the camera. The whole movie was shot in pieces. So the editing room activity for me became a great deal of constructing images, as well as cutting together the story with those images. Also, you could cut a scene together and see what worked and didn’t work. Then, to make corrections, you could start altering the image and changing the timing, changing the location of a character or actor on the screen, cutting them out and moving them over a little bit, shrinking the whole frame so they could paint a bigger set around it, or adding and subtracting characters. It became a very complicated editorial process.

When you do see something differently, how do you communicate that?

I’m diplomatic. I’m tactful. I’m honest. Generally, I will say something to the effect of, ‘What do you think if…?’ or ‘How about trying…?’ He’s willing to listen to a lot of that and go with it. I never pound my fists and leave in anger. That never happens. As I say, he has a certain viewpoint. There are obviously ideas he’ll have that I’ll initially think aren’t going to work. He’ll be persistent, and quite often it’ll eventually work! There are also things in the film I would do differently if I were the director.

I learned years ago, when I was doing sound design for George, not to take the rejections of things too deeply. There isn’t an artist or a person in this company — an animator or a composer, or anybody — that doesn’t have to submit to his judgment, because this is his movie. He created it, he’s responsible for it, and he’s very opinionated about it. For me, his management style is mild. He never insists on something; he just gets his way because he’s the boss.

What was one of the most difficult aspects of working on “Attack of the Clones”?

I think the hard part about ‘Star Wars’ is that, as an editor, you basically sit in judgment every day. You have to look at and critique what’s put on the screen in front of you. Is it good? Does this tell the story? Is this clear? Can you see it? I don’t like that eye-twitch. Why was the movement not good enough? You’re always critiquing it. You’re paid to be a judge, to sit there and pick it apart and make it better. After a long, long time with this film and these scenes, you’ve picked it apart so much that sometimes, all you can do is look at it and see what you thought it might have been, but it isn’t. It’s a long time to be on a project, I have to say. It’s the amount of work of doing at least two feature films. It’s like having two jobs.

What scene in the film was the most fun to edit?

Until it’s done, I can’t tell you that. But I’ve learned that it’s not the end result for the filmmaker; it’s the journey along the way. There were a lot of things in this film that were really fun to shoot and to edit. Many of them were changed as we went along. In ‘Phantom Menace,’ we had a 25-minute pod race, but we could only put a seven- or eight-minute pod race in the movie or it would be out of proportion. We had to lose 15 minutes of fantastic action. There are things like that in this film that would have been nice to include, but they’ll be on the DVD. (laughs) You have this other venue now where you can have the outtakes and other things that you couldn’t tolerate in a regular movie. There are things I liked as the sound designer because they allowed me to really express myself with the sound effects — things like the asteroid chase.

Read the Full Interview here.

Second is from Mix Magazine. An article talking about the Sound of Episode II: Attack of the Clones.

Sound Editing

Burtt started work in early 2000, and when he finished in mid-April 2002, he had been on the film for 26 months. In addition to picture editing and sound design, he also had his hands full directing second-unit photography. As early as the previsualization in early 2000, shooting and putting sequences together on videotape, Burtt was “always thinking of sound. There was a period of about a few weeks prior to going to Sydney when I put together a library that I wanted to use. I went there with a few CDs of sounds, and even back then there were a few scenes that I cut back in Sydney to which I added music and sound effects. Being a Star Wars film, it was best to evaluate it as a movie. Sound was never out of the picture.”

Eventually, Burtt turned his attention full-time to creating the sound, though he admits that he did less sound editing personally than on previous movies, giving more latitude to his editors on the spotting of scenes. “In the past, I might have really specified to the editors each laser hit and each explosion; here, I tended to work more on giving them menus to choose what they liked from this set of materials. They would then go through the library and make choices that they would audition for me.”

Throughout his 27-year involvement with the Star Wars films, Burtt has been depicted to the public recording sound effects, from striking high-tension wires in the mid-‘70s to moving an electric razor in a bowl for Episode I on the TV show 60 Minutes. He says that “those examples are harder to come by on this film because I didn’t record or create as many things that were relatively simple examples of what you can do at home in your kitchen! Much of what I made was complicated composites on the [Symbolic Sound] Kyma and on the [SampleCell] keyboard–techno-based rather than the old tabletop of sound effects devices.” (See “Ben Burtt on Sound Design,” below.)

Having said this, Burtt does note that much of the Zam speeders, in the reel 1 chase in nighttime Coruscant, were made from musical instruments, including electric guitars, cellos and violas. The infamous electric razor was also brought into play to vibrate viola, harp and bass strings. “I was thinking that it was traveling magnetically, it was being pulled along the streets with changing magnetic fields rather than by self-propulsion.”

Because Burtt was in the “danger zone” of making tonal sound effects for the speeders, he had to be careful of the interplay with John Williams’ music. “I originally did a temp version of that mix, using nothing but musical sounds for the speeders. My thought was that the music score would be percussion-based, along with tones for the ships. I temped it that way, but John Williams didn’t quite do that, and his heavy orchestral piece necessitated rethinking the tonal aspects of the vehicles. In some cases, the musical tones that I made conflicted with the orchestra. Which was a disappointment for me, because I wasn’t able to push it into a new area. My reasoning was that we’ve done an awful lot of high-energy chase scenes, and I wanted this to be offbeat and strange. But it didn’t really happen.”

During this project, Burtt went back to original Star Wars library and redigitized some of it yet again, this time at 24-bit resolution. Although Skywalker Sound has upgraded the facility to a shared FibreChannel system in which sounds are pulled from a centralized server both in edit rooms and on mix stages, Wood and Burtt organized Episode II editorial around “sneakernet” local drives, primarily for security purposes.

Continue reading the full article at Mix Online.

Episode II: Attack of the Clones at IMDb

Star Wars Official Website

Sound Designer Ben Burtt talks about the elements of the original Star Trek TV show that he tried to emulate in the new movie…

Two things in the original Star Trek effects were revolutionary: Roddenberry had his team create lots of detail. Every room in the ship sounded different. Every button made a noise, when you pressed a lever or a switch. Not only were there sounds articulating all these things to make them sound like they were real, but they were very musical sounds. Somebody pressed a button, there was a little melody. That was not in the movie at the point I came on: you’d just hear a little beep. If it was Star Trek, it needed to sing a little bit and feel like it was alive. You really felt there was a complex operation going on and it was fun to listen to. The ships and the weapons and the ambiences of the places they went to were a form of music. When they went to planets there was always a tone going on, like a ringing bell, or chimes in echo. I tried to create sounds in that style.

The other thing that was used a lot in the original show a lot was shortwave radio recordings and sounds off of transmissions and Morse code, things you can pick up in-between the dials on a shortwave radio.

I love that sort of thing and I’ve collected it for years. There’s some of that in the original Star Trek television show – and the whole beginning of the movie, that first minute or two where the Kelvin is coming into view, is all short wave radio sounds. It reads to the audience that you’re way the heck out at the edge of the universe, barely in contact. Things are far away: there’s these disembodied sounds that are being transmitted back and forth. That’s not the way the sound was, but I wanted to make it seem like the ships were way out there. They’re supposed to be encountering something new so I tried to capitalize on this legacy in science fiction of using radio.

Motion Pictures Editors Guild published an interesting terview with Ben Burtt, called “More Sound Trekking: Ben Burtt’s Further Explorations of Audio Frontiers“. Let’s see:

You’ve been a sound designer, picture editor, mixer, writer, producer and director. How did that career path evolve?

I think it was the constantly evolving filmmaker in me, which started when I was a child adding sound to my family’s home movies. When I began my career, I was recording sounds and said, “Now, if I was also the sound editor, I could control what sounds were used.”

So I became a sound editor; but that wasn’t good enough. I then figured that if I was the sound mixer, I could really completely control what the movie sounds like. Well, that still wasn’t good enough, so I then looked at the influence that the picture editor had, and thought that if I could do that, I could inject a lot of ideas about how to use sound correctly in the first cut of a picture. Then I felt that if I was a director, I could tell everybody what to do, including the editor, and get it exactly my way [...]

We’ve talked about the library of sounds you created for J.J. Abrams’ upcoming Star Trek. Can you talk about how you re-created some of the iconic effects for the movie? Let’s start with the hand phaser.

In the original series, the steady blast of the phaser was derived from the hovering sound of the Martian war machines made for the 1953 version of Paramount’s War of the Worlds. The original was made with tape feedback of an electric guitar and a harp. You can achieve a very similar sound on a Moog synthesizer by modulating a steady sine wave with pink noise. The phasers in the new movie are more like the blasters in Star Wars in the sense that they are flying bolts or tracer bullets, rather than a steady beam. The steady sound just wasn’t the right way to go because the visuals are so different, so I made something that recalls it, but features a Doppler effect and is shorter and sharper. My sounds were added to those that had already been supplied by Mark P. Stoeckinger and Alan Rankin.

Which recent films do you admire for their sound design work?

I loved Saving Private Ryan; I think it was one of the best sound design jobs ever. It was a film with quiet and loud segments and left plenty of space for music and sound effects to have their turns. Steven Spielberg and Gary Rydstrom made excellent choices as to when to let sound tell the story. For much the same reason, I loved Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Richard King did a sensational job of recreating the 18th-century world of great ships, starting out with all those great ambiences. I also thought Gladiator, Cars, and The Matrix were outstanding.

Are there still new worlds for you to conquer?

I’ve always been associated with big tentpole sci-fi and action films, which I love. But I yearn for challenging new assignments, such as Munich (2005). WALL-E (2008) was a sound designer’s dream. I would like to have a few projects with more realism and historic or social significance. However, I am delighted to be at Pixar because I know they are committed to entertainment that is both wholesome and hopeful. I’m always looking for ways to create voices and sounds for things that have never been heard before—to entertain, to escape and to give life to the magic of the moving image. There is always a new audio frontier for me to explore.

Read the full interview…

Star Trek Ofiicial Website

Star Trek at IMDb

Let’s check this four videos of a 30 mins demonstration on how Ben Burtt brought Wall-E to life and he answered a ton of questions from all the visiting journalists.

Part 1

Original Videos By Collider

And another video… Chuck the Movieguy interviews Ben Burtt for the DVD of Wall-E:

The Star Wars Special continues with our featured sound designer Ben Burtt. Let’s talk about the sound desgin of Episode I: Phantom Menace.

Ben Burtt left Lucasfilm in 1990 to pursue other interests as a freelancer: writing, directing, editing. He went back to Sound Designer’s chair again for the Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition.

“I was the only one who could remember where most of the stuff was, where the tapes were, what we had done,” he says with a smile.

“It was exciting to go back and get in touch with the picture again, the old friends who were there. R2-D2, and the lightsabers.”

Following the Special Edition project, Ben Burtt stayed on board for Episode I. Even though he could draw from an extensive library of sounds, including those used in the Star Wars and Indiana Jones trilogies, for the Episode I project Burtt went out to record new samples.

He also drew upon the large collection of sounds he has recorded during the last decade. In all his travels, from his back yard to the far reaches of an exotic country, Burtt has carried his recording equipment with him, capturing everything and anything on digital tape.

“You have to be constantly ready,” he says, “because good sounds often come to you by accident: lightning storms, strange vehicle noises, glaciers breaking apart…it can happen anywhere.” These recordings, most of them never used before, have provided Burtt with fresh raw material to mold into new Star Wars sounds.

While creating innovative atmospheres, Burtt takes great care to stay true to the original Star Wars ambiance.

“We’ve got lightsabers, we’ve got lasers, we’ve got so many signature effects which reoccur in this movie, and I think it’s only appropriate to touch on those because they’re familiar to the fans.”

One of Burtt’s goals are to establish a set of sounds which could stand the test of time.

“I think we’ve achieved that with Star Wars,” he says. “We’ve created a ‘world of sounds’ that’s coherent and can endure the passage of time…it’s been over 20 years, and Star Wars still has a distinct sound to it.”

Continue reading at Film Sound | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

And… I can’t pass this Article/Interview by Maria L. Chang talking with Ben Burtt about the sound of Star Wars. Very interesting!

HOW DO YOU CREATE SOUNDS FOR A FANTASTIC UNIVERSE?

A sneak moment from this summer’s blockbuster movie The Phantom Menace, the latest installation in the Star Wars saga: Jedi knight Obi-Wan Kenobi duels with the evil Darth Maul. Their sword-like lightsabers flash and sizzle as they clash. The warriors lunge at each other, yet their footfalls are barely audible on the metal floor.

Now imagine the same scene–but instead of the lethal buzz of lightsabers, you hear cracking wooden sticks. Instead of the thud of fighters’ leaps on metal, you hear thumps on a creaky wooden stage set. Sound like a big yawn?

Just as dazzling visual effects turn a sci-fi fantasy movie into near-reality, sound effects add the finishing notes. In the past few years, powerful computers, advanced software, and synthesizers (keyboard-like instruments that produce electronic sound signals) have elevated sound effects to new heights. After all, how believable is a computer-generated invading army of androids when you don’t hear a single stomp or whir?

MAY THE SOUND BE WITH YOU

Whether or not you’re aware of it, sound plays a key role in how you perceive reality. Picture a scene where a solitary car races down a stretch of empty highway. But what you hear is the churn of a motorcycle. Your brain instantly alerts you to the fact that what you hear doesn’t match what you see. In other words, your senses are in conflict–a phenomenon called cognitive dissonance. In a movie, this would immediately distract a viewer. Popcorn time?

Directors know that realistic sound is vital to hooking an audience. But what do laser cannons or a mobbed alien marketplace sound like? This was the challenge faced by The Phantom Menace’s sound designer Ben Burtt.

SOUND BYTES

Burtt and his crew created up to 1,300 new sound effects for The Phantom Menace. “Each sound is for a specific weapon or a particular robot’s head revolving around,” Burtt says.

You might think the best way to create extraterrestrial sounds would be to invent them on synthesizers and computers. But Burtt’s most essential tool is the common tape recorder. “The style of Star Wars has always been to use an organic soundtrack,” says Burtt. “That means we collect real sounds that exist out there in the real world. We’ll go out and record racing sports cars or a roaring aircraft.”

Burtt’s secret trick is to alter recorded sounds so they’re not recognizable. How? After recording the thrust of a speeding plane, for instance, Burtt rerecords the sound into a synthesizer, which converts the sound signal into a digital signal of 1s and 0s. A plane engine’s sound is normally high-pitched and whiny. Pitch is how high or deep a sound is and depends on the frequency (the number of complete vibrations of a wave in one second). The higher the frequency, the higher the pitch.

Using the synthesizer, Burtt lowers the frequency and deepens the engine’s pitch. “It still sounds powerful, like a vehicle roaring along, but you don’t recognize it as a World War II fighter plane,” he says. Add an explosion or thunder to the sound, and you’ve got a booming spaceship.

BACK TO BASICS

Say the spaceship accelerates across the screen to jump into hyperspace. Would it maintain a steady sound? Not really.

Think of a wailing fire truck speeding by. As the fire truck approaches, the siren’s frequency increases and its pitch rises. As it passes, the frequency decreases and the pitch drops. This phenomenon is known as the Doppler effect (see below). New computer software easily simulates the Doppler effect. Programs alter the pitch so you get the sensation of an object flying by at breakneck speed.

But there are more imaginative ways to create the same effect. Take the motion of Star Wars’ lightsaber, for instance. Believe it or not, its sound came from the motor of an old movie projector and a sputtering TV picture tube. Combining the two sounds produced the humming tone of a steady lightsaber. But to simulate a swinging lightsaber in a duel, Burtt played the original sound over a speaker, whipped a microphone past the speaker, and rerecorded the resulting whish. “You get a big Doppler shift in the sound, as if it’s a sword swinging through air,” Burtt says.

Creating all the sounds necessary for The Phantom Menace has taken Burtt and his crew about three years to complete. Was it worth it? The audience’s ovations will tell.

COMING SOON TO THEATERS: 3-D SOUND

Sound designers Ben Burtt and Gary Rydstrom labored for more than three years to create the fantastic sounds in The Phantom Menace. To ensure that the soundtrack doesn’t sound flat in theaters, LucasFilm THX and Dolby Laboratories created Dolby Digital-Surround EX, a new movie sound format (see right).

Surround EX, which will debut in theaters at the same time as The Phantom Menace, adds extra speakers and a rear sound channel on the back wall. (Current Surround Sound systems separate sound into left and right channels, so you hear sounds move from one side of the screen to the other.) “I wanted to develop a format that would place sounds exactly where you would hear them in the real world,” Rydstrom says. With Surround EX, audiences can actually hear a plane, for example, fly around them.

Will the new system make movies even louder? No, says Kurt Schwenk, director of THX. “Surround EX just allows more precise placement of the sound.”

Q&A

What exactly does a sound designer do?

I create a “library” of sounds for everything you see and don’t see in a film. I have to create sounds that are totally believable. And the sounds need to orchestrate well together. You fool the audience into thinking everything is real.

How did you get interested in sound effects?

When I was 6 in Syracuse, New York, my father gave me a tape recorder. My friends and I filmed little dramas and I’d create music and sound effects to go with the movie. It was just a hobby.

What did you want to be?

I really wanted to be an astronaut. I have a physics degree from Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. But in college I made a few amateur films that won national awards. Then I studied film production in graduate school at the University of Southern California.

How did you get a job as a sound designer?

I got a job as a sound recordist because there weren’t too many people in the field. I made the sounds for the very first Star Wars film. LucasFilms asked me to come back for The Phantom Menace.

What’s one of the most unusual sounds we’ll hear on The Phantom Menace?

There’s an underwater monster with a big roar, which is the voice of my 18-month-old daughter. At one point she had a growl in her voice when she was crying. So I recorded that and then lowered the pitch way down in the computer.

Any advice for kids who’d like to work on movies?

Filmmaking is a combination of practically every subject you can study–art, writing, history, music, etc. To be original and creative, major in a subject other than filmmaking.

What do sound designers earn?

You can earn up to $100 an hour in a major film.

Ben Burtt, 50. Movie Sound Designer at Skywalker Ranch, California.

Star Wars Official Website

Star Wars – Phantom Menace at IMDB

“WALL•E” Sound for Film Profile with Ben Burtt from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.

When nobody thought that Ben Burtt could return with his robots and laserguns, He strikes back (and even stronger) with WALL-E, an amazing animation film with the perfect dose of sound design that groups all the incredible knowledge, experience and talent of Ben Burtt in one place.

Is well as I did with Star Wars, I’m gonna divide the WALL-E Special in three parts:

1. The Definitive Interview
2. Sound Design – Making Of
3. Animation Sound Design Revolution.

I called this “The Definitive Interview” because I made a mixture of the best videos, interviews, questions and information out there about WALL-E, all in one place. Below each part, you will find all references and links to all the complete interviews

Wait! Another film of robots!?

“I went to this meeting and said, ‘What is the movie about?’ ‘Robots!’ ” Burtt says. “At first I was a little frightened. I thought, ‘Is there another new voice that I could come up with, much less the half-dozen robot voices?’ ”
But he appreciated the fact that the Pixar filmmakers wanted him involved very early in development – much like George Lucas had done with “Star Wars.” Burtt became an employee of Pixar, working on a movie with more sound than any he had completed before. By the time it was over, he would also provide the voices for WALL-E and M-O, a cleaning robot who arrives later in the film. (Vía)

How long did you work on WALL•E? That’s a lot more sound work than you normally do.

For about nine months out of the year I spent time trying to create. I started creating the WALL•E voice, the EVE voice, the AutoPilot, MO and the others. What were the humans going to sound like in their gelatinous condition? Originally they were almost completely Jell-O. We made Jell-O voices that had shimmering, funny, shaking in the voices and stuff. That concept of the voices for the humans was eventually dropped as the sounds developed.

Out of these improvisations of taking sounds from both the real world and some synthesizations, I will fashion what you will hear in the movie. There are like 2600 sound files made for WALL•E, which is a lot; more than I made for any other movie. A Star Wars movie, which is huge, usually takes about 1,000 new sounds. Indiana Jones movies, maybe 700 or 800. So this was gigantic, partly because it just needed so much detail in the sound. Obviously nothing is recorded while you are making the movie. Everything has to be added after the fact. (Vía)

How did you come up with the sounds for WALL•E? I mean, he doesn’t speak, so you have to sort of make him sound unique.

Sometimes, most often, good sounds are just discovered when you are looking for one sound and you suddenly discover another. The sound we used for his treads, that is an army tank. Obvious choice; just go out and record something with treads. But it has been sped up so that it sounds a little tinnier. He does lots of movements in the film; lots of little driving this way, driving that way. We try to put a sound with everything and convince the audience that this character really exists; this illusion.

I needed some soft motors, something we could tailor to shape WALL•E’s movements. I was watching on Turner Classic Movies an old John Wayne movie and there was this army private cranking a generator. I said, “That is a great sound for WALL•E. How can I get one of those WW2 generators?” Well I got this on eBay. That’s what we used. (Vía)

How did you come up with WALL·E’s voice?

Well honestly I’m guided by Andrew, being the director. I would audition things for him, sets of sounds that might have initially just been motors and beeps and tones. Something I’ve never told him in fact, and now it relates to musical theatre, when he first showed me maybe 10 minutes or so of the storyboards cut together, and the opening of the movie, it had some music and some sound effects in it. That was kind of a way of enticing me into understanding the project. It was that opening song, the vocal in that song that appealed to me in a way that I sort of connected that with the WALL·E character.

There’s a feeling about that, so to some extent maybe the pitch of the voice started out that way, that kind of innocent feeling, that was a thread that I picked up on in that. As you know we went through lots of experiments trying WALL·E as just motor sounds only, some that were beeps and whistles, a little bit more in the R2D2 realm. Although We extracted bits from all of those experiments, when it came down to some of the more expressive vocals it was a little bit in that tone, from that singing voice. I’m not sure why, there was obviously something very charming and appealing about that song. I couldn’t quite pin it down. (Vía)

What are some of the sources of the sounds?

Well there are thousands of sounds. There were more sound files in Wall-E then any single feature film I’ve ever worked on, about 2500, because every character has a set of sounds and there are lots of movement and lots of dense activity. Stories of sounds, well let’s see – Wall-E’s treads, he drives around, he goes different speeds. When he’s going slowly, he makes a little whirring sound and that is the sound I heard it actually in a John Wayne movie called Island in the Sky on Turner Classic Movies. There was a guy turning a little generator, a soldier generating power. I said I like that generator sound, that is cool, and so where can I get one? I found one on eBay. I bought it. It came in its original 1949 box so we could take that into the studio and perform with it to tailor it to the speed of Wall-E. But that’s only good for when Wall-E is going slow.

When Wall-E is going fast, he needed something higher pitched and more energetic. Once again, I went back through my memory of things. I had recorded bi-planes a long time ago for Raiders of the Lost Ark. The old 1930s bi-planes have an inertia starter. It’s a mechanical crank that cranks the engine up. You do it by hand and then clutch – you connect it and it makes a wonderful whirring sound. So I thought I want to get that and do more with it. I couldn’t bring a bi-plane into the studio but on eBay I found an inertia starter, bought that again, and brought it in. So we built these props for many things. You know, it’s a tradition in animation to have sound effects machines. This goes back to the earliest days of Disney cartoons — like wind machines and blowing machines and things like that. We actually built several things so we could perform Wall-E sounds that way.(Vía)

Did you have a favorite robot or a favorite sound in WALL•E?

My favorite sound in WALL•E? Well I don’t know. I don’t know. I kind of fell in love with this character. [sound] Moe. I don’t know why. Someone I identify with Moe. Not that I am a good cleaner or anything, but I think that sort of feisty sort of sidekick character that he was appealing to me, and the fact that he has a big character change in the movie. He goes from a robot governed by his duties to a free thinker. That was part of the theme of the movie. (Vía)

Were Eve’s sounds more modern then?

Well, Eve is a very high-tech robot and so, unlike the motors and squeaks and metallic sounds you’ve got with Wall-E, Eve is held together with some sort of force fields and magnetism. A great deal of her sound is purely synthesized musical type of tones that I could make in a music synthesizer and treat it various ways, because her whole character was supposed to be graceful and ethereal, so she always has an electronic noise associated with her floating around. Sometimes she sounds angry if it’s a scene where she needs to be aggressive. Sometimes she’s very enchanting if it’s a more romantic moment. (Vía)

What about the interplay between the animators? Typically the voices are recorded before and the sound bytes are afterwards. How did it work with this?

You’re right. Normally in animation the dialogue is recorded and locked down, takes are selected, and the animators then use those as references for timing and performance. We did actually kind of the same thing here. I started working three years ago on the dialogue for this film and auditioning voices. At first I would make up sets of sounds as auditions for Andrew. I would play a voice and some motors and I’d say, “What do you think of this? Could this be Wall-E?” He might pick out the things he likes the most and we would keep that collection aside and I would string together little montages and then we started giving them to animators and animators would just freely animate to the sounds. Wall-E could come in and play with a ball, slip and fall, or do something, and we had numerous tests, and I could see immediately of course the huge input in a performance that the animation had.

In fact, you would think I would know better, but I was really surprised. They could do amazing things with just a pose, a little movement of the head and the sound seemed so much more authentic when it was sunc up so perfectly. So we went back and forth and developed a sound and picture together and so therefore we ended up with these little character studies. You could play it like a little audition tape. The character would come in, introduce himself and talk and show off their functions so you would hear it and see it. We got confident after awhile that this is what Eve should be and this is what Wall-E should be and then they could move ahead and start animating the movie itself and put it in the story so it was a back and forth process. (Vía)

How important is it to go back to the original sources of the sounds? I would imagine there is high tech equipment now that can be used to recreate those sounds.

Well, people think in this age of computers and digitization that we can now do anything, the way we see how visual effects have leaped to a much higher quantum level and it isn’t quite the same with sound. Sound is a really different creative dimension. The digital technology allows us to manipulate things and you can work quicker and you can practically do the sound for a movie on your laptop computer with a few additional pieces of equipment, whereas 25 years ago it required a huge studio with all kinds of engineers and many people. So, it’s a very personal tool now to do sound because it is digital.

The films that I worked on so much you’re always trying to create this illusion that in a fantasy world things are real, and the style I’ve always followed is to go out into the real world, get real sounds, and impose them into this fantasy world to convince people that these fantasy objects are credible. That has been successful to go out and gather real sounds.

I also love the history of sound effects and there is a great opportunity working for Pixar and Disney because you’re in touch there with a legacy of sound effects creativity that goes back into the 1930s. They used to build all kinds of machines. There is a machine that does flying insects, there is a machine that does a talking clock spring. They’ve got an archive of these machines out there in Burbank and I love that and I look at what a sound effects man does and I love the table top props and things like that. It’s the style.(Vía)

What’s your favourite moment from the film?

What’s the biggest explosion in the film? I really love the scene where they’re out in space together with the fire extinguisher, I think it’s the lyrical nature of that, the calm in the middle of the storm. That moment, there’s something about putting those two characters out there dancing in space that really takes me back to Peter Pan when I was a kid. I love that film, I think I was five years old when I saw it. I made my mother take me two or three times in one week which was unheard of in those days. It’s that wonderful ability to be transported to a wonderful place where you feel warm and completely secure. Where it occurs in the movie it feels that way to me, it’s great. (Vía)

When you talk about bringing the reality to the fantasy, do you find that as films have become more reliant on CG effects and things that aren’t actually there in camera your job has become much more important to ground us in terms of what we are seeing?

Certainly. As I said, in a fantasy film the sound is usually the thing – sound acts on people more invisibly because we are not asking you to be so aware of the process. I still think you can be a bit more of a magician being a sound person because people just aren’t aware of what you can do. It is a compliment when people look at a film and they stop and think “I guess that’s just what it sounded like.” Like there’s a mike hanging out there in the scene and they got it when in fact every sound, every footstep, every explosion – somebody had to decide what it was going to be and create it. (Vía)

That’s all folks! I hope you like it!

WALL-E Official Website
WALL-E at IMDB

The second part of the special about the sounds of Star Wars, created by Ben Burtt. Let’s take a look of the sounds of the characters in the film: Darth Vader, R2-D2, Chewbacca and the amazing Ewokese language.

Chewbacca

“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)

R2-D2

Burtt said that he would come up with equivalent lines in English for what R2-D2 would be ’saying’ and twiddle the filter and other knobs of a synth whilst reading the lines out loud, to try and articulate the words using the synth.

Burtt used the sounds of an ARP 2600 synthesizer and his own voice to produce R2-D2′s silicon salvos. The ARP in question was recreated virtually via Symbolic Sound’s lofty Kyma system for more recent Star Wars movies.

Darth Vader

“The concept for the sound of Darth Vader came about from the first film, and the script described him as some kind of a strange dark being who is in some kind of life support system. That he was breathing strange, that maybe you heard the sounds of mechanics or motors, he might be part robot, he might be part human, we really didn’t know. And so the original concept I had of Darth Vader was a very noise producing individual. He came into a scene he was breathing like some wheezing wind mill, you could hear his heart beating, you move his head you heard motors turning. He was almost like some robot in some sense and he made so much noise that we had to sort of cut back on that concept. In the first experiment the mixes we did in Star Wars he sounded like an operating room, like a, you know, emergency room, you know, moving around.”

Excitingly Burtt recreated this for us on the spot using a scuba oxygen tank. The intense breathing sound of Darth Vader is the microphone placed inside the respirator while breaths are taken through the respirator. Produces that distinctive electronic rushing of air.

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)

References: MusicRadar / Filmsound / Oliolioli

Star Wars – The Sounds [Part 1]

Ben Burtt doesn’t have a large list of films, but when he made the sound design of Star Wars, he created a new wave of sound making, introducing new techniques and certainly a new world of sounds.

I’ll divide the information about Star Wars Sound into five parts:

• The Sounds [Part 1]
• The Sounds [Part 2]
• Phantom Menace
• Attack of the Clones

Let`s begin with the first part: The Sounds. Ben Burtt revolutionized sound design with these creations. Take a look of the main sounds created for Star Wars.

The lightsabers

“The lightsabers are one of my favorite sounds, and in fact it was the very first sound I made for the whole series. For some reason after I read the script even though my assignment was to find a voice for Chewbacca, and then a voice for Artoo, and then, well maybe come up with some sounds of laser guns and other things. The lightsaber fascinated me at the time when the script had first come out, they had some paintings that Ralph McQuarrie had done. So that there were some concepts visually of what some of these things would look like, and those pictures were very inspiring because they gave an idea of the direction we were trying to go in the look of the film and it was inspiring to me to therefore think of sounds that might fit that kind of visual style.

I could kind of hear the sound in my head of the lightsabers even though it was just a painting of a lightsaber. I could really just sort of hear the sound maybe somewhere in my subconscious I had seen a lightsaber before. I went to, at that time I was still a graduate student at USC, and I was a projectionist and we had a projection booth with some very, very old simplex projectors in them. They had an interlock motor which connected them to the system when they just sat there and idled and made a wonderful humming sound. It would slowly change in pitch, and it would beat against another motor, there were two motors, and they would harmonize with each other. It was kind of that inspiration, the sound was the inspiration for the lightsaber for the lightsaber and I went and recorded that sound, but it wasn’t quite enough. It was just a humming sound, what was missing was a buzzy sort of sparkling sound, the scintillating which I was looking for, and I found it one day by accident.

I was carrying a microphone across the room between recording something over here and I walked over here when the microphone passeda television set which was on the floor which was on at the time without the sound turned up, but the microphone passed right behind the picture tube and as it did, this particular produced an unusual hum. It picked up a transmission from the television set and a signal was induced into it’s sound reproducing mechanism, and that was a great buzz, actually. So I took that buzz and recorded it and combined it with the projector motor sound and that fifty-fifty kind of combination of those two sounds became the basic lightsaber tone, which was then, once we had established this tone of the lightsaber of course you had to get the sense of the lightsaber moving because characters would carry it around, they would whip it through the air , they would thrust and slash at each other in fights, and to achieve this addtional sense of movement I played the sound over a speaker in a room.

Just the humming sound, the humming and the buzzing combined as an endless sound, and then took another microphone and waved in the air next to that speaker so that it would come close to the speaker and go away and you could whip it by, and what happens when you do that by recording with a moving microphone is you geta Doppler’s shift, you get a pitch shift in the sound and therefore you can produce a very authentic facsimilie of a moving sound. And therefore give the lightsaber a sense of movement and it worked well on the screen at that point.” (Vía).

Laser Blasts

“Tapped with a wedding ring, it produces that lovely recoiling sound as the impact zaps up and down the metal. Recorded using a contact microphone.” (Vía)

We climbed to the top of a hill where there was a small radio tower in the hopes that the wind would make some interesting sounds in the tower or the support cables.  I picked up a rock and banged on the cable just for fun and Ben said,  “That sounds like the imaginary laser gun ought to sound!”

SO he recorded the sounds there and later in California he looked around for other towers and finally found one that he especially liked in the Mohave desert in California. There was a broken brace hanging on the cable that added a special quality to the sound and that was the one he used in combination with some other sounds to create the sound of the laser gun. (Full history here)

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.

Star Wars Official Website

Ben Burtt at IMDB

Second Part Soon!

I was waiting for this… For September I’m gonna make an special of Ben Burtt, one of the most renowed sound designers, and known to many as  “the father of the modern sound design”.

Bio (wiki)

Benjamin “Ben” Burtt, Jr. (born July 12, 1948) is a four-time Academy Award-winning American sound designer for many famous and noteworthy films, including Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and WALL-E, as well as a film director, screenwriter, editor and voice actor. He is most notable for creating many of the iconic sound effects heard in the Star Wars films, including the “voice” of R2-D2, the lightsaber hum, and the heavy-breathing sound of Darth Vader.

Burtt earned a college degree in Physics from Allegheny College. In 1970, he won the National Student Film Festival with a war movie called Yankee Squadron, reputedly after following exposure to classic aviation drama through making an amateur film at Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome, under guidance from its founder, Cole Palen.[1] For his work on the special effects film Genesis he won a scholarship to the University of Southern California, where he earned a Master’s Degree in Film Production.

Burtt pioneered modern sound design, especially in the science fiction and fantasy genres. Before his work in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, science fiction movies tended to use electronic-sounding effects for futuristic devices. Burtt sought a more natural sound, blending in “found sounds” to create the effects. The lightsaber hum, for instance, was derived from a film projector idling combined with feedback from a broken television set, and the blaster effect started with the sound acquired from hitting a guide wire on a radio tower with a wrench.

Burtt has a reputation for including a sound effect dubbed “the Wilhelm scream” in many of the movies he’s worked on. Taken from a character named “Wilhelm” in the film The Charge at Feather River, the sound can be heard in countless films: for instance, in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope when a stormtrooper falls into a chasm and in Raiders of the Lost Ark when a Nazi soldier falls off the back of a moving car.

One of Burtt’s more subtle, but highly effective sound effects is the “audio black hole.” In Attack of the Clones, Burtt’s use of the audio black hole involved the insertion of a short interval of absolute silence in the audio track, just prior to the detonation of “seismic charges” fired at the escaping Jedi spaceship. The effect of this second or less of silence is to accentuate the resulting explosion in the mind of the listener. Burtt recalled the source of this idea as follows: “I think back to where that idea might have come to me…I remember in film school a talk I had with an old retired sound editor who said they used to leave a few frames of silence in the track just before a big explosion. In those days they would ‘paint’ out the optical sound with ink. Then I thought of the airlock entry sequence in 2001. I guess the seeds were there for me to nourish when it came to the seismic charges.”

Some Awards & Nominations

• Academy Award for Sound Effects Editing – E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
• Academy Award for Sound Effects Editing – Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
• Special Achievement Award (Academy) for Sound Editing – Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
• Special Achievement Award (Academy) for sound editing – Raiders of the Lost Ark
• Academy Award Nomination for Best Sound and Sound Effects Editing - Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi
• Academy Award Nomination for Sound Effects Editing – Willow
• Academy Award Nomination for Best Sound – Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
• Academy Award Nomination for Best Documentary, Short Subjects - Special Effects: Anything Can Happen
• Academy Award Nomination for Best Effects, Sound Effects Editing – Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
• Academy Award Nomination for Best Sound and Sound Effects Editing – WALL-E
• Golden Reel Award for Best Sound Editing, Sound Effects, Foley, Dialogue and ADR Animation in a Feature Film – WALL-E
• BAFTA Film Award for Best Sound – Star Wars

Featured Work

• Star Trek (2009) – Sound designer and Sound editor
• WALL-E (2008) – Character voice designer, Sound designer, Sound re-recording mixer and Supervising sound editor
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) – Sound designer and Supervising sound editor
• Munich (2005) – Sound designer and Supervising sound editor
• Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005) – Sound designer and Supervising sound editor
• Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002) – Sound designer and Supervising sound editor
• Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) – Sound designer and Supervising sound editor
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) – Re-recording mixer Sound designer
• Howard the Duck (1986) – Sound effects editor and Sound re-recording mixer
• The Dream Is Alive (1985) – Sound designer
• Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) – Re-recording mixer and Sound designer
• The Adventures of André and Wally B. (1984) – Sound designer
• Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi (1983) – Sound designer and Sound re-recording mixer
• The Dark Crystal (1982) – Sound designer and Special sound effects
• Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) – Sound designer
• Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980) – Sound designer and Supervising sound effects editor
• Star Wars (1977) – Sound designer, special dialogue and sound effects
• Death Race 2000 (1975) – Sound designer (uncredited)

Ben Burtt at IMDB
Ben Burtt at Wikipedia