Monday, September 27, 2010
Ben Burtt answers questions about sound design of Star Wars
Q: When you watch a movie for the first time, are you constantly paying 
A: I think I can enjoy it just as a movie unless I know the person who did the sound, then I am often aware of the work unless it is truly a superior film and I am completely drawn in.
Q: When Anakin goes to see Watto in Episode II, there's a weird bubbling sound effect in the background. What is that?
A: That sound is boiling liquid nitogen recorded in my father's chemistry lab.
Q: Why was there no "breathing" at the end of Episode II like there was at the end of Episode I ?
A: The music in Episode II ended differently than in Episode I, and the juxtoposition of breathing seemed improper for the mood.
Q: When Luke is dropped on the ground by the Tusken Raiders in Episode IV, I swear I've heard that crunchy gravel sound before. Where is it from?
A: That is an old body fall effect used in many movies since the 1940s. You can hear it in some Bogart films like Passage To Marseille and many westerns.
Q: What animal sounds were used to create the roars of the acklay, nexu and reek?
A: Some dolphins and pigs were used, but actually a main component for both the acklay and the reek were made by dragging a huge wooden palette across the sound stage floor in
Q: Why was Obi-Wan's "You haven't learned anything, Anakin..." line outside the nightclub cut from Episode II? I remember seeing it in the trailer.
A: George Lucas made that decision. He was trying to reduce the contentiousness between the two Jedi at a tense moment when they were supposed to be chasing Zam rather than having a personal moment.
Q: Do you have a favorite sound effect?
My favorite sound is the "Robin Hood Arrow" from the 1938 Adventures of Robin Hood. I have many favorites. I could write a book on the ones I love and their stories.
Q: How did you decide to give Zam Wesell's speeder that howl? Is it based on its look? Where did that sound come from?
A: The howl of Zam's speeder was produced with an old electric guitar. I play drums in a church band and I asked guitarist Dave Weaver to make the sounds for me one day after practice. I chopped the sound up with a synthesizer program and ran it through an old time spring reverb system. The idea was to produce a sound as if Zam's speeder were not rocket-powered, but ran on some sort of magnetism, perhaps in a field produced by the automatic Coruscant traffic control.
Q: Who's voice was used for Darth Vader in the Special Edition of The Empire Strikes Back? I'm talking about the part when he says "Alert my Star Destroyer to prepare for my arrival."
A: That was James Earl Jones. The line was recorded for A New Hope but never used.
Q: During the meeting with the separatists, Wat Tambor fiddles with one of his dials and makes a noise that sounds like it's from the Q*Bert arcade game. Is this an inside joke, or mere coincidence?
A: This sound must be a mere coincidence. I made it using a vowel generator in a synthesizer device called the Kyma.
Q: I noticed that the Slave I sounds different in Clones and in Empire. There was an overlapping low whine that wasn't present in Clones. Is there a reason for this?
A: I expanded the library of sound for Slave I in Clones because the ship did a lot of new things. I used the sounds from Empire as a foundation, and made new sounds that would connect with the old.
Q: I think the whine you refer to was a sound I made on a trumpet for Slave I taking off in Empire. That sound, also combined with a Doppler pass-by of the horn from my old '71 Dodge Duster was not used prominently in Clones and you probably missed it.
A: I certainly tried to tie both old and new all together.
Q: When Zam Wesell falls prey to Jango's dart, she utters words in her native language which sound suspiciously like Sebulba's word for "slimeball". Do my ears deceive me?
A: Zam speaks Huttese at this point and the word "Slimeball" is indeed correct. For a full translation of the line see my book Star Wars Galactic Phrase Book and Travel Guide.
Q: When you're editing and things are cut and moved around, is it difficult to get the pre-recorded music to sync up?
A: The picture cut of the movie is always changing sync until the very last moment before release. Most often, the music is written and recorded for an earlier version of a scene than what appears in the final cut. Ken Wannberg, John Williams' music editor, has the difficult task of recutting the music to refit the new sync. This can be an extremely difficult job. He is the one solely responsible for making it fit after the fact.
Q: Why was Plo Koon and Ki-Adi-Mundi's commando raid on the Droid Control Ship cut from the final edit of Attack of the Clones?
A: The attack on the Droid Control Ship was filmed and edited together, but never completed with final special effects. A Jedi attack force battled its way up the ship's ramp, through doorways, down halls, and into the bridge of the ship. The scene was filled with much swordplay and stunts.
The sequence was dropped from the cut because it added another story to be intercut with what already was becoming too complicated and time consuming for the climax of the movie. Including the sequence also meant time needed to set it up and resolve it while the arena battle and the Clone War land battle proceeded simultaneously.
There was lots and lots of material in each one of these sequences that needed to be trimmed. There was lots of Jedi action in the arena fight dropped, more Jango and Mace, and even at one point a battle in space with the Droid Control Ships.
All of these would have been great to see, but choices have to be made for the priorities of the storyline.
Q: Do I hear the voice of Qui-Gon Jinn shouting, "Anakin, Anakin... No!", in Yoda's apartment after Anakin attacks the Tusken Raiders?
A: Yes indeed, the voice that Yoda hears is that of Qui-Gon Jinn.
Q: The sound produced by the seismic charges were simply awesome. How did you get that "twang" sound?
A: I prefer not to discuss in detail this sound at this time. After all, can't I keep a few secrets?
I will say that this is something I've wanted to do since A New Hope, we just never had a sequence which allowed the explosion to be featured in a way that I could exploit the idea of delayed sound in space... what I call an "audio black hole", an explosion so cosmic that the energy of the sound is unable to escape at the time of ignition, but is released a moment later.
I originally made a variety of similar noises for what I called "Space Ether Explosions" for A New Hope. I used them as experiments, especially for exploding TIE fighters in the scene when Han and Luke are in the gun turrets. They were mixed into a scratch mix for the sequence, but George Lucas did not like them so I halted research.
Now, many years later I revived the idea using some new material and it seems to have found its place.
A: I tried to make the hologram sounds relate to the character they depicted.
The Sith hologram tonality is partly made on an electronic synthesizer. Two low frequency sine waves of nearly the same frequency are played at the same time. The slight difference in frequency produces a phenomena called beats (you learn about this in Physics class). The result is a wavering up and down in pitch of the sound. I also mixed in some short wave radio sounds that you can hear between broadcasting stations. This is one of my favorite sources of sound. Finally I added a very very slowed down sound of a jet plane firing a Vulcan Cannon, an electronically driven machine gun that fires 100 bullets per second.
Q: Have the tasks of Sound and Editing enabled you to overlap skills and concepts?
A: Filmmaking is the blend of many skills and processes. I started out with an interest in writing, directing, music, special effects, sound, and editing. All of these tasks overlap and interrelate. I learned over many years of sound how to enhance drama with layers of sound. Now as a picture editor, I am asked to enhance drama with layers of images. The process of building up a complete dramatic sensation with sound is the same one I apply to picture editing. The key element in filmmaking is the juxtaposition of sound and picture elements to produce a desired emotional response in the audience.
I am really fortunate that Star Wars offers me the chance to straddle both disciplines. It is not the norm.
A: I love to write. If I was able to earn a steady income as a writer (I have two children in college) I would do it. I have several script and novel ideas I would love to pursue. I would really like to write a book on the history of sound effects in motion pictures, with the emphasis on the aesthetics and language of film sound, and a detailed account of my adventures in sound design over the past 25 years. >> Star Wars Galactic Phrase Book & Travel Guide
Q: Now that everything is digital, why do you still talk about editing and completing specific reels of the movie?
A: It is hard to let go of some traditions.
However, for organization reasons, we still break the movie into segments, or reels, because most storage systems, even digital ones, would be sorely taxed by having to hold all the picture and sound data for a two hour movie at one time and still run quickly and smoothly.
In addition, the film will still be printed in the lab in reels and shipped to the theater in reels. Film rolls, or reels, cannot be made spliceless in sizes much greater than 20 minutes in running time. The theater recieves the individual reels and the projectionist still splices them together into one big platter.
Q: What sounds, if any, from the classic trilogy could be re-used for Episodes I or II?
A: Obviously certain reoccurring characters such as Jawas, Tusken Raiders, and Artoo can be reused but added to as necessary in the new episodes. Jedi lightsabers, many lasers, and some environments like Tatooine can be "recycled" where appropriate. However, I am always getting new sounds and new ideas as I go along, and each film adds hundreds of new sound effects. I hope to keep expanding the sonic lexicon already built up over 25 years of sound design for these films.
Q: Are "natural" sounds easier to find and work with than those made from scratch digitally?
A: I prefer to record natural sounds as the basis for the audio in the Star Wars universe. Real "organic" sounds bring credibility with them. I try to create something that sounds "familiar" but unrecognizable. This gives the characters, vehicles, and objects the illusion of reality.
Q: How did you decide on the "personality" of the different engine sounds for each Podracer? What real-world noises did you use?
A: I definitely try to give each vehicle a personality. I consider the pilot of the craft and whether I want the audience to like or fear a certain ship or character.
A pod sound can be powerful, angry, comical, smooth, cool, hip, old-fashioned, goofy, or dangerous. I try to make a sound that will relate to that type of coloration. Pod sounds were made from race cars, boats, warbirds, electric tooth brushes, shavers, motorcycles, rockets, and helicopters.
Q: What sounds were used to create Chewbacca's famous voice?
A: Mostly bears, with a dash of walrus, dog, and lion thrown in.
Q: What process is used to create the languages for the different alien species?
A: The process is very complicated, but I usually start by finding a rare language that appeals to me and has the character of the alien species I'm working on. Inspired by the real language with all it's cultural signifigance and detail, I write out in phonetics the sounds which are the essence of that language. I then work with actors with special vocal talents and record them mimicking my "sound-alike" phrases. Often I process and combine their sounds with animals if need be to give the desired effect.
Q: I've been wondering for 20 years: How are the various lightsaber sounds made?
A: The lightsaber was, in fact, the very first sound I created for A New Hope. Inspired by the McQuarrie concept paintings, I remembered a sound of an interlock motor on the old film projectors at the USC Cinema Department (I had been a projectionist there). The motors made a musical "hum" which I felt immediately would complement the image in the painting. I recorded that motor, and a few days later I had a broken microphone cable that caused my recorder to accidently pick up the buzz from the back of my TV picture tube. I recorded that buzz, and mixed it with the hum of the projector motor. Together these sounds became the basis for all the lightsabers.
Q: When creating engine sounds, such as the hyperdrive engine for the Queen's ship or the submarine, do you base these sound designs in physics or simply come up with something that sounds 'cool'?
A: I earned my degree in Physics, so I invariably begin my imaginings of sound on a scientific basis. At first, I may often reason a sound out on the basis of scientific fact, in the end I will make my choice among the possibilities subjectively, not objectively. After all, I put sound in the vacuum of space! Now that violates the laws of physics. I guess I made a good choice, otherwise I would be out of a job.
Ben Burtt - Sound Designer of Star Wars
THE LEGACY OF STAR WARS, THE BIRTH OF MODERN FILM SOUND
In 1980, while at USC film school, I tried to be Ben Burtt. I was creating sounds for a student film about a TV game show and didn't want to use a synthesizer because I heard how for Star Wars Ben Burtt made those cool sound effects from real sounds. And I wanted to be cool. But I couldn't for the life of me figure out how he did it, and in the end resorted to a synthesizer. Soon after, my sound career began when Lucasfilm called USC asking for “another Ben Burtt.” Luckily, they didn't know how badly I had already failed at that. Years later, for Star Wars: Episode I, I was amazed when Ben made a video screen sound effect in the style of Flash Gordon by recording my wife playing her flute. Ben combines an aficionado's knowledge of film history with a knack for twisting real sounds into fantastic ones. After 25 years of working with him, I've learned that there never will be another Ben Burtt.
— Gary Rydstrom, Oscar-winning sound designer, Pixar director
BEN BURTT ON SOUND DESIGN FOR EPISODE II
"I call Matt Wood the 'digital architect,' and he only reluctantly takes on that term privately. I rely on him to keep me up with the technological present or future. [When we were starting work on Episode II], we were unable to get the support from the [New England Digital] Synclavier that we wanted, and the files did not interface comfortably with the rest of our system. Matt wanted me to get off of it and "update myself" to Sample Cell. I could essentially do the same things I did with the Synclavier, but simpler. This was especially true for taking sounds from Pro Tools into Sample Cell and then back into the Pro Tools session. We used to have to digitize them into the NED format, and if I made a sequence or made loops, we had to use S-Link to translate over and batch-digitize.
"The Synclavier was a performance-based instrument–I would put samples on the keys and then play with it. Coming from an older sound design and technical school, I don’t like to think out ahead of time that I want a sound to have this amount of delay, in that kind of an echo chamber. I just want to touch something, hear it, and react. A large part of the sound design job is making the right choice of a sound, and not really your technical knowledge. I like accidents and spontaneity, and I pick takes out of my performances that often lead to new ideas that I wouldn’t have been able to objectively reason out ahead of time. It’s a very subjective process for me.
"I may have a sound I recorded that I need to digitize from an original DAT. I may want to make samples out of pieces of it and play with it. Try it on the keyboard in different pitches, chop it up with the modulator on the keyboard and listen to it. Try it with different plug-in settings that I’ve made in Pro Tools. I don’t want to stop and think about how I’m going to do it–I just want to be able to synthesize with it as spontaneously as I can. To me, that’s the most direct and satisfying creative process. Out of those experiments or performances, I can select what’s good.
"Often, I’ll start out in the morning intending to make the sound of a certain vehicle pass-by in the film. As I experiment, I’ll come up with different sounds that I realize will work for something completely different–a door that I need in reel 11, say.
"From a strict library standpoint, I entered about 600 sounds in the library for this film. At the end of the film I make sure that everything that I’ve made, even outtakes, is given a name and label, so on the next Star Wars film I can access a database of everything that was done. That’s where I’ll pick up and start on the next one."
Ben Burtt - Sound Designer of Star Wars
Transcript of an excerpt from an interview of Ben Burtt in the Star Wars Trilogy: The Definitive Collection Laserdisc Box Set (If you want to see the full interview, rent it or buy it.)
Secondly, you'll have a sound editor and this is a person back in a studio who generally has a collection of sound and is able to go out with a portable tape recorder or something like that. And bring them back and edit them and fit them into and add them onto the soundtrack of the film itself.
The third person is a sound mixer. This is a person whose job is to blend together all the different sounds that come in to make up the soundtrack such as music, dialogue, and sound effects. These types of positions have really existed since sound films first came into being in one term or another.
The term sound designer has gotten usage in the last decade really since the Star Wars films began a new interest in creative soundtracks in motion pictures. I called myself a sound designer because I wasn't really functioning as a production recordist, or a sound editor, or just a sound mixer. I did some of the job that all three of those people might do. But I was able to follow through from the point of production of a film. That is I can go out and advise and make suggestions about things that could be recorded once I'd seen the script of the film. I was on hand during some of the filming of the motion picture to gather sounds or at least see what was going on so i could run off myself and begin to manufacture and make sounds that I'd know we'd need later on. I was also on hand during the editing of the film to function as a sound editor, that job would be to pick out sounds out of a library of our own making and edit them and synchronize them with the action on the screen. And also I'd be involved with the sound mixing and it's not often that one person gets to move through all those different jobs on a film.
Usually there pretty strictly categorized. One person doesn't, you know, one sound recordist may not do the any sound editing. The sound editor may not do any sound mixing. That's the tradition of the division of labor in feature films. But since I was an exception to that traditional division if labor I needed to describe myself in some new terms. So I began to use the term sound designer, which essentially meant that although I emphasize my creative work in sound effects, my job was to coordinate all you heard in the final soundtrack of the film."
| 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." | 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."
Original URL: http://home.online.no/~rohaagen/sw/txt/benburtt.txt
Ben Burtt demonstrates how he made Wall-E
-Steve Weintraub
http://benburttinterviews.blogspot.com/2009/02/ben-burtt-demonstrates-how-he-made-wall.html
Ben Burtt Interview, Wall-E
MoviesOnline sat down with Academy Award-winning sound designer Ben Burtt at the Los Angeles press day for his new film, “WALL-E.”
“WALL-E’s” expressive range of robotic voices was created by Burtt, whose memorable work includes creating the “voices” of other legendary robots, such as R2-D2 from the “Star Wars” films. Drawing on 30 years of experience as one of the industry’s top sound experts, Burtt was involved from the film’s earliest stages in creating an entire world of sound for all of the robotic characters and the spacecraft, as well as all environments.
Burtt is an accomplished filmmaker who has served as film editor on a vast array of projects. He began his work with director George Lucas in 1977 as sound designer of the original “Star Wars,” earning his first Academy Award – a Special Achievement Award. He rejoined Lucas 20 years later to supervise the sound work on “Star Wars Trilogy” (Special Edition).
In addition to his work on the “Star Wars” films, Burtt has worked on many film and television projects. He has won Academy Awards for Best Sound Editing in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and for Best Sound Effects Editing in “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial” and “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.” Burtt has also been recognized for his work with a number of Academy Award nominations, including Best Sound in “Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi,” Best Sound and Sound Effects Editing in “Willow,” Best Sound Effects Editing in “Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace,” and, as director of “Special Effects, Anything Can Happen,” Best Short Subject Documentary.
Burtt has also been awarded a British Academy Award for Best Sound in “Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back,” a Golden Reel Award for Best Sound Effects Editing in “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and a British Academy Award nomination for Best Sound in “Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.”
Ben Burtt is a fabulous guy and we really appreciated his time. Here’s what he had to tell us about his latest movie:
Q: Clearly one of the challenges in voicing a character like Wall-E is not to do R2-D2, but there was a little R2-D2 in there, wasn’t there?
BEN BURTT: Well, the challenge of doing robot voices – Andrew (Stanton), if he’d wanted to, I suppose could have hired actors and had them stand in front of a mike and recorded their voices and dubbed that in over character action, but that would have of course not taken the whole idea of the illusion very far. What he wanted was the illusion that these robot characters, the speech and sounds they made were really coming from their functions as machines, that there was either a chip on board that synthesized the voice or the squeak of their motor would sound cute, and that would give an indication how they feel. The problem does go back, for me, to the sort of primal R2-D2 idea, which is how do you have a character not speak words or, in the case of Wall-E, just a very few words, but you understand what is going on in their head and they also seem to have a depth of character.
The trick has always been to somehow balance the human input to the electronic input so you have the human side of it. In this case, for Wall-E, it ended up being my voice because I was always experimenting on myself sort of like the mad scientist in his lab, you inject yourself with the serum. After weeks and months of experimenting it was easier to try it on myself as we worked it out. You start with the human voice input and record words or sounds and then it is taken into a computer and I worked out a unique program which allowed me to deconstruct the sound into its component parts. We all know how pictures are pixels now and you can rearrange pixels to change the picture. You kind of do the same thing with sound.
I could reassemble the Wall-E vocals and perform it with a light pen on a tablet. You could change pitch by moving the pen or the pressure of the pen would sustain or stretch syllables or consonants and you could get an additional level of performance that way, kind of like playing a musical instrument. But that process had artifacts in it, things that made it unlike human speech, glitches you might say, things you might throw away if you were trying to convince someone it was a human voice. That’s what we liked, that electronic alias thing that went along with it, because that helped make the illusion that the sound was coming from a voice box or some kind of circuit depending on the character.
So it is a matter of that relationship, how much electronic, how much human, and you sway back and forth to create the different sounds. A great deal of the sounds, for him as well as the other characters, are also sound effects which are chosen to go with the robot’s character. Wall-E has lots of little motors and squeaks and little clicks of his hands and those are all mechanical sounds that come from many, many different sources. The idea is to orchestrate all those little bits of sound to also be a part of his character so he can cock his head and look at something and you can hear a little funny squeak and in a way it’s an expressive sound effect. So that is important too. It was really that array of sounds that were used to define each character.
Q: Do you find that sound design is still just as exciting for you now as it was when you first began your career?
BEN BURTT: Sure. I love recording sounds and exploring for sounds and yes, because every film seems to soak up and use everything I’ve got because there is always a need for something more and so I’m always on the alert for new things. They are harder to find because I’ve recorded so many airplanes and explosions and electronic noises that for Wall-E I think I and the team as well recorded every motor we ever came in touch with from appliances to jet planes, whatever. We just went wild. The world is full of sound and we found for a science fiction film like this – and others I’ve done – the idea of taking real natural sounds and imposing them into the fantasy film gives the illusion that these things are real because we kind of recognize them even though we can’t identify them specifically, but you say “Oh, it sounds like it is really a motor so I kind of believe it.” That has been the trick in these films.
Q: What are some of the sources of these sounds?
BEN BURTT: 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.
Q: Were Eve’s sounds more modern then?
BEN BURTT: 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.
Q: 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?
BEN BURTT: 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.
Q: The quality of the artistic presentation of the sound design of Wall-E was absolutely incomparable.
BEN BURTT: Thank you.
Q: Does the social commentary of the movie concern you at all as a sound designer? What do you make of the irony of Pixar and Disney making a film about the commercialization of entertainment?
BEN BURTT: [laughs] Did you ask Andrew that question? I can’t represent the thinking of the film on that level. I know that for my contact going back three years with the film when Andrew pitched it to me that in the forefront was always this romantic story. It was kind of a Buster Keaton movie. A lonely character left alone on an exotic island and an exotic female character enters the scene and he falls in love with her and he chases her back to the big city. That was always the driving story line.
The world that was set up, with the demise of civilization coming about through commercialization and no exercise and so on, that was the setting to set up the science fiction part of the story and we are seeing in the screenings a lot of reactions to that aspect of it. My point of view was that there wasn’t a big emphasis on that, but you know Pixar and the Disney overseers, if that’s the word, they give Pixar a lot of freedom and flexibility to let the directors write and pursue their story and what messages may come out of it. It allows a message to come out that could be very personal and very different and maybe not a corporate message either.
Q: Andrew said earlier that there was no political message, that he didn’t have an agenda in this film? You couldn’t see that at all?
BEN BURTT: I couldn’t see that at all. No. I was never part of a meeting or discussion where that was ever talked about as a goal. I always saw it as part of the science fiction set up. We want to create a world. What are the problems with the world? What is the world about? How did Wall-E get stranded here and why are the humans missing? Well, in order to set that up, there’s an appropriate series of events, which is an extension perhaps, of course, like most science fiction, of the present and where it might take us. So that was all I saw.
Q: 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.
BEN BURTT: 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.
Q: 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?
BEN BURTT: 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.
Of course we are in this special effects driven era and certainly the most money is spent on films that involve huge fantastic concepts, and the sound becomes that kind of aspect of those films that holds them together and tries to convince the audience that it is dramatic and real even when in fact in some cases it doesn’t look all that good. You’re still doing it.
Q: I loved Sigourney Weaver as the voice of the ship’s computer in “Wall-E” and the parallels to Mother, the ship’s computer in “Alien.” What did you do with her voice and how different did it have to be?
BEN BURTT: Well, Andrew, of course, and myself included, we’re all fans of science fiction movies including Alien and its sequels. I worked on the first Alien movie and in fact made sounds for the mother computer and that sort of thing, so I had a little connection there. Her voice was recorded straight forward in a studio, but during the mix of the film, it was put in a big echo chamber so it comes from everywhere so it is this omnipotent voice. You actually never see the source of it like a speaker. It’s the broadest range high fidelity voice in the movie. The idea is to have it be omnipotent and all powerful I suppose.
Q: Was she aware of the inside joke?
BEN BURTT: I was not present when Andrew briefed her, so I’m not sure what he may have said or not to her.
Q: There is a famous scream sound effect that’s been used in every movie since 1933 or something. Was it in this film?
BEN BURTT: No, it’s actually not in WALL-E.
Q: What sound was the most difficult?
BEN BURTT: Voices are the hardest because the audience listens to them with much more critical ears than sound effects. We are all experts at interpreting the nuances of speech, so anything that might be interpreted as a vocal or expression the audience really listens carefully. So creating all these different characters, a dozen different kinds of voices in the film, from Eve and Wall-E you get down a vacuum bot which is just (bleebleeblah) while you run a vacuum cleaner (bleebleeblah) and things you did in third grade and got in trouble.
Q: How did he sneeze?
BEN BURTT: That was me sneezing. It is all done with a vacuum cleaner in concert so usually I do these things alone in the studio. There’s no footage so I’m glad.
Q: With these different computer voices, was it difficult to find that point where you sounded like a computer but were also understandable, especially for little kids?
BEN BURTT: I think with my experience with Star Wars I kind of knew the dangers of going too far with things so I sort of worked with Wall-E and, with Andrew’s attention to it all the time, the development was kind of slow. It came from the human side into the electronic side. There wasn’t a time in the film where things were completely extreme another way or anything. We thought originally that Wall-E might just beep and whistle and chirp like R2 but that changed.
Q: Wall-E reacts when something fascinates or surprises him. Where did those sounds come from?
BEN BURTT: There are a multitude of sounds like those little eyebrow type things are a Nikon camera shutter and his arms are the sound of a tank cannon, the asmyth motor on a tank. Name something and I will try to tell you what it is. There are a lot of things.
Q: There is one obvious sound joke which is the Mac boot-up sound. Are there others?
BEN BURTT: Once again, Andrew, that was his idea. I attribute that to him.
Q: Did you program MacInTalk to do Auto things?
BEN BURTT: With Auto we started with typing, inputting the sound. I got the software for MacInTalk, then I could use a microphone and use my own voice to say a performance and that could be injected and twist and warp the MacInTalk voice to follow that performance. So it was a combination. Some of these things I refer to as audio puppeteering. You know, you’re kind of behind the scenes with whatever means you can to interact, whether it is your own voice, whether it is your hands, whether it’s running a piece of equipment. Somehow the output is sound and hopefully expressive sound and when it comes to character what are meant to be vocals.
http://www.moviesonline.ca/movienews_14930.html
Burtt was born in Jamesville, New York, and graduated with a major in physics from Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania.
In 1970, he won the National Student Film Festival with a war film Yankee Squadron, reputedly after following exposure to classic aviation drama through making an amateur film at the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome, a living aviation museum in Red Hook, New York, under guidance from its founder, Cole Palen.[1]
For his work on the special-effects film Genesis, Burtt won a scholarship to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California, where he earned a master's degree in film production.
Sound designer
Burtt pioneered modern sound design,[citation needed] especially in the science-fiction- and fantasy-film genres. Before his work in the first Star Wars (now known as Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope) in 1977, science-fiction films 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 guy-wire on a radio tower with a wrench.
He is personally responsible for some of the sounds heard in films. In the Star Wars series, part of R2-D2's beeps and whistles are Burtt's vocalizations, also made using an ARP 2600 synthesizer, as are some of the squawks made by the tiny holographic monsters on the Millennium Falcon spacecraft. In Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005) he provides the voice for Lushros Dofine, captain of the Invisible Hand cruiser. The heavy-breathing of Darth Vader was created by recording his own breathing in an old Dacor scuba regulator.
Burtt also used a recording of his wife, who at the time was suffering from a minor cold and was sleeping in bed, for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. He created the "voice" of the title character and many other robots in Pixar's film WALL-E (2008), about a lonely garbage-compacting robot. Additionally, he is responsible for the sound effects in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008).[2]
Burtt is a voice for Day (voice was inspired by WALL-E from WALL-E) and Night (voice was inspired by M-O from WALL-E) in Day & Night' (2010, released before Toy Story 3).
Burtt is Sound enngeer and voice of part of Minions in MegaMind (2010) from DreamWorks Animation.
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."
Burtt was among the golden ears that critically reviewed the various audio compression systems that were proposed for the ATSC digital television system.
A tongue-in-cheek homage to Ben Burtt appears in the 1997 Activision PC game Zork: Grand Inquisitor - the spell 'Beburtt', which 'creates the illusion of inclement weather', plays dramatic thunderclap and rainfall sounds when cast.
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