Star Wars Sound

[Goldberg]

Hey just curious after watching the Episode 2 Star Wars (I know it's old I've been watching the World Cup what can I say). They really have some cool sort of unique sounds in there-like the speeder chase scene in the beginning and then those seismic charges and those monsters in the arena near the end. What kind of person does that work, and what sort of materials do they use? Computers? Synthesisers?

[josh.d]

http://www.filmsound.org/starwars/

 

That link might be of interest to you. It's all about how Ben Burtt created all those sounds for Star Wars over the years.

[Postman]

Originally posted by Striker1080:

Hey just curious after watching the Episode 2 Star Wars (I know it's old I've been watching the World Cup what can I say). They really have some cool sort of unique sounds in there-like the speeder chase scene in the beginning and then those seismic charges and those monsters in the arena near the end. What kind of person does that work, and what sort of materials do they use? Computers? Synthesisers?

I used to do that kind of work. We used EII+HD sampler and Digidesigns Soundtools (yes, this was a while ago) to lay in all our effects. We had a CD library (forget which one, now) of all sorts of different sounds (door slams, car-bys, car starts, gunshots -- you name it). We synced to SMPTE and laid down to 24 track tape. When we couldn't find a particular sound -- once we had to get a basketball rolling around a rim before dropping through the net -- we took a DAT player and tried to recreate it. That's as close as we got to traditional Foley, which I would guess is not what you're interested in. At the same time, in a different part of the studio, we had a guy doing effects for the Tracy Ulman Show. He was using a Synclavier for the same thing.

 

The work was fun some of the time, but mostly I found it to be painstaking, boring work. There was a scene in a movie we were working on that was shot at a lunch counter with a highway in the background. During the dialog over 50 cars went by, all of which needed a car-by sound. That was the last movie I did. I quit when it was done. I've been out of the recording business ever since.