Ben Burtt to Receive the 'Charles S. Swartz Award'

[The winners of Academy Awards for Best Sound Effects Editing: Ben Burtt and Charles L. Campbell with Jamie Lee Curtis, Carl Weathers -1983]

The Hollywood Post Alliance has announced that Ben Burtt will receive the organization’s Charles S. Swartz Award for Outstanding Contribution in the Field of Post Production, recognizing his powerful artistic impact on the industry. The award will be bestowed on Mr. Burtt on November 12th during the Hollywood Post Alliance Awards gala at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles.

HPA Awards co-founder and committee chair Carolyn Giardina said, “We are thrilled to recognize Ben Burtt with the Charles S. Swartz Award, an honor that represents everything that the HPA stands for; creativity, technical excellence, and limitless thinking. From R2 D2 to WALL-E, Ben Burtt has helped create some of the most unforgettable characters of our generation. We are honored to present this award to him.”

The Charles S. Swartz Award was created to honor individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the field of post production; an industry in a state of an expanding creative palette and of dynamic transition as a result of digital technologies and societal changes. The award was named in honor of the late Charles Swartz, who led the Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California from 2002 until 2006 and helped to build it into the industry’s premiere test bed for new digital cinema technologies. In addition to a long and successful career as producer, educator and consultant, Mr. Swartz served on the Board of Directors of the HPA. Leon Silverman, President of the HPA noted that “Ben Burtt’s career and accomplishments speak to the true spirit of this award, which recognizes impactful contributions. Ben Burtt’s impact to the art and craft of post production and to our cultural legacy should be celebrated. ”

[via blog.digitalcontentproducer.com]

Layers of Sound

Ben Burtt reveals some of the Episode III's sound secrets.

"From the beginning of the first Star Wars film, George Lucas always encouraged the sound development to start in pre-production," says Ben Burtt, Sound Designer and Co-Editor of Revenge of the Sith. "That way, sound is being talked about when you first see the artwork, and sound effects and concepts for sound are there from the beginning as the films were shot. Once the film is being edited, sound is put in right away." Though that is the tradition with Star Wars movies, the standard Hollywood model had been to scramble to develop sound deep in the post production period. "In that case, there may be only a short amount of time left to work out all of the concepts; but for us, the sound has really been developed over a long period of time."

Like many elements in Episode III, the sound design is a mix of new and old as the Star Wars saga bridges together, and the prequel trilogy segues into the classics. Burtt was very much cognizant of that as he began putting together elements for the opening space battle. "I knew when those ships came in that they were going to be the new Jedi starfighters, which were related to the TIE fighters from A New Hope. I felt the sound should have some continuity, so I started working with the old TIE fighter sounds and adding NASCAR sounds to it to develop something that would hint at the direction of the technology."

Burtt describes there being about a thousand different sound projects for the film, not including foley effects like footsteps. In addition, the sound crew also provided performances both large (Matthew Wood as General Grievous) and small (Burtt as the Niemoidian captain). "We're a small operation, a sound crew of 9 people, so we tend to use ourselves as characters," says Burtt. "Matt and I played in the recent films probably about 30 or 40 incidental characters -- battle droids, Nemoidians, Gungans, Utapaun pit crews, R2-D2, all kinds of robots, and we've enjoyed that because it gives us the feeling that we can really put our performances into the film."

Since the first Star Wars, Ben has been the "voice" of R2-D2, combining synthesizer and organic sounds with his own voice to create the distinctive beeps and boops of the beloved astromech droid. "We revived some of our old equipment for this film," he says. "We pulled out an old ARP synthesizer from under my house, and it was all moldy. Howie Hammerman, our engineer, got it working again so we did lots of new Artoo for this."

The combination of many disparate and sometimes surprising sound sources has been a Ben Burtt trademark, and it continued with this final installment of the saga. "You look at General Grievous' wheel bike, and it's nasty, loud and dangerous. I thought a chainsaw would be perfect," says Burtt. Likewise, the low rumble of the very first Star Destroyer we see on screen is actually the filtered sound of Niagara Falls. And the sound of Vader's heartbeat while he is undergoing his final transformation into a Sith Lord who is more machine than man?

It was a sonic boom emitted by the space shuttle, as heard in northern California.

[source: 'Homing Beacon" #156, the official starwars.com newsletter]

Ben Burtt receives Silver Award from the Town of San Anselmo

[Photo Credit: berndt2]

Ben Burtt, who helped preserve San Anselmo history in films, has been named a Silver Award winner. Burtt documented the local floods of 1982 and 2005 in “The Great Flood of 1982” and “12/31.” He says, he “collected footage from 15 or 16 different people and added that to my own. The film shows people being rescued, basements being flooded and so on.” 

Burtt, who says he’s always had “a big interest in history,” first became interested in San Anselmo’s while working on the first “Star Wars” film with George Lucas. He became fascinated with pictures he found in the local library that showed some of the changes the town had gone through.

Burtt also made a lengthy audio recording of the town’s historical walking tour, complete with sounds of old San Anselmo. That recording, a celebration of the town’s 2007 centennial, is available for download from the museum’s website.

[via marinscope.com]
[see footage online of Burtt’s film @ filmnight.org]

Before Skywalker Sound there was Lucasfilm's Sprocket Systems, which opened in 1979 at 321 San Anselmo Avenue in San Anselmo. Film editors worked upstairs on "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "The Empire Strikes Back" while sound editors downstairs worked on "Alien" and "E.T." Kentfield resident Pat Walsh, discovered while shopping at Seawood Photo, provided the voice for the loveable alien, with the help of actress Debra Winger. Sprocket's parking lot was also notable: It's where Harrison Ford practiced snapping a bullwhip for his role in "Raiders." Sprocket's work on "The Return of the Jedi" came to a halt when the Flood of 1982 ruined equipment. The division moved to Lucafilm's Kerner complex in March of that year.

[sananselmohistory.org]

'The Prisoner of Zenda'
- Playing at the Rafael Film Center on June 13th, 2010 -

Craig Barron, Oscar®-winning visual effects supervisor and Academy governor, and Ben Burtt, Oscar-winning sound designer, will introduce a rare screening of the 1937 adventure-romance 'The Prisoner of Zenda'. Burtt will demonstrate how the sound effects from the film's famous swordfights were achieved.

[via California Film Institute]

Audio Puppeteering

Carefully selected 'sound for picture' articles on Wall-E to fit your taste:

To that end Mr. Stanton enlisted the man who created the grammar of the “Star Wars” robot R2D2, the veteran sound designer Ben Burtt. Mr. Stanton wrote a conventional script — “Hi, I’m Wall-E” — and Mr. Burtt essentially translated the dialogue into robot, something he calls “audio puppeteering.”

“If you take sounds from the real world, we have a subconscious association with them that gives credibility to an otherwise fantastic concept,” Mr. Burtt said in a telephone interview.

The result is a film where the sound is as significant as the visual. One hears echoes of E.T.’s throat-singing (“E.T” is another Burtt film), and when Wall-E moves, the sound comes from a hand-cranked, World War II Army generator that Mr. Burtt saw in a John Wayne movie, then found on eBay.

“We all thought about Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton,” Mr. Burtt said, “this energetic, sympathetic character who doesn’t say a whole lot. Most animation is very dialogue heavy. There’s dance, constant talking, punch lines. We used to wonder: How will we prepare the audience?”

[via nytimes.com]

Burtt created more than 2,500 sounds for the movie. By way of comparison, Burtt made between 800 to 1,000 sounds for "Star Wars" films and 700 for an "Indiana Jones" movie. "It had to go deeper than we did with R2 because Wall-E carries the weight of the whole movie," Burtt says. "We needed to give him a large range of reactions - he's curious, surprised, desperate - but none of the sounds he makes are words, at least, not as we understand them."

[via la.com]

ANDREW STANTON: Yes. The one thing Ben Burtt couldn’t simulate was a female voice himself. So if it needed to be neutral or male, it was easy for him to be the source of anything that had to have a human element to it or an inflection. But because we wanted a very obvious feminine source, fortunately Elissa Knight, was one of our in-house Pixar players for lack of a better term. Because we’re in San Francisco and we’re always rewriting our stuff every day, we don’t have access to actors that quickly, so we use people in-house to do stand-in vocal stuff and she had been a stand-in for many movies and was a pretty decent actress. So I called her in to just do all the female stuff and it worked so well and when Ben started effecting it, I said, “That is so good. I’m sorry, I’m not going to look for another actress and re-do all this. She’s great.” So, that’s why. And that’s frankly the methodology Pixar has had in all their movies. If you look back at our casting, it’s all over the map, whether we use A-list, B-list, or employees. What’s consistent if you look at it is, is that the best voice for the character? And that’s why we choose who we do.

[via moviesonline.ca]

Ben Burtt on J.J. Abrams' Super 8!

Ben Burtt's latest film as Sound Designer, "Super 8" - written and directed by J.J. Abrams - opens June 10th.

J.J. Abrams: “Ben Burtt did the sound design, and he brought with him one day a copy of this Super 8 film that he made when he was a teenager, that was about a train wreck, a WW2 film, and it so was much like what happened in this movie, it was uncanny. I was jealous, wishing I had a train wreck to go to when I was a kid.”

[courtesy of Empire]
[expect an update to Burtt's IMDb page soon]
[Ben Burtt Receives Charles S. Swartz Award from JJ Abrams]

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

[via 30 People Who Shaped Sound, Mixonline]

Encyclopedia of Sound: Ben Burtt

Ben Burtt on Star Wars



Ben Burtt on Sabers, Walkers, and Explosions



Ben Burtt on the Empire Strikes Back



[via PindarMoloch]

Ben Burtt about the genesis of the TIE fighter sounds

[an excerpt from The Sounds of Star Wars - © Chronicle Books]

The genesis of the TIE fighter sounds is another story, one that began with Ben Burtt's search for the laser gun effect.



Originally, George Lucas had seen a British documentary on PBS about the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II and had noted that the firing sound of some strange Nazi rockets was quite weird and interesting. Lucas mentioned that it might make a great sound for the laser gun and Burtt managed to find a copy of the documentary. He then set about finding sources that could emulate that sound. Luckily, at Twentieth Century Fox Studios, Don Hall let Burtt go through the Fox sound library, where he found recordings of some elephants that had been done for an Errol Flynn movie The Roots of Heaven [1958]. In that film, elephants stampeded and bellowed. with an almost shrieking sound (the same sounds were used for the dinosaurs in Journey to the Center of the Earth).

After making a copy of that recording, Burtt realized that when he slowed it down and stretched it out, he ended up with a sound similar to the rocket one in the PBS documentary.

[The Lost World - 1960]

But it wasn't quite right, so Burtt took the sound of the elephant and mixed it with pass-bys he'd recorded of cars during a rainstorm as they sped through puddles in front of a motel where he was staying (a pass-by is when a vehicle comes toward the viewer, passes by, and then speeds away).
"Swoosh, the car would come by, and you heard this car plowing through the water," he says. "I took that sound still thinking that I was making a laser of some kind." The key "a-ha" moment occurred during temp track auditions, as shots started coming in from ILM of the gunport sequence.
"When we did temp mixes and played it back for the crew at Park Way, I would take advantage of the fresh audience, because the editors hadn't heard anything with sound," Burtt explains.
"The gunport sequence came along with the first trial shots of actual TIEs in motion. There was pressure to just get some temporary sound in for a screening, so I grabbed a random set of sounds I liked and cut in a different one each time a TIE fighter zoomed by," continues Burtt. "One sound was the elephant shriek, the next one was a slowed-down World War II warbird, the next a processed jet or rocket."
After the screening was over, the only talk in the room was about that elephant swoosh sound. "That was the greatest sound for those ships you could have possibly picked!" Of course, I was saying, "Oh yeah, of course". I’d really put it in because I had no other altemative, but it got great reviews, so naturally it became the sound ofthe TIE fighters."
"ln World War II, the super dive bombers had an artificially created siren wail created by air ducts," explains Joe Johnston, visual effects art director. "They didn't serve any purpose except to create this noise, which would terrify people. It was intended that the TIE should achieve the same effect."

Ben Burtt to present "Emma's Time Machine: Adventures in Time and Space"

While reading this article by Paul Liberatore (via Marin History Museum), we discovered that our hero Ben Burtt just finished editing "Red Tails", the upcoming movie about the Tuskegee Airmen - the African-American pilots who fought in World War II (produced by Lucasfilm). And he's about to start sound work on the first live-action film by Andrew Stanton, "John Carter of Mars".

Ben will join his daughter Emma Burtt for the premiere of Adventures in Time and Space, the latest chapter of Emma's Time Machine, a 90-minute documentary on the history of Marin County. Narrated by Emma, the film also takes a look back at the early days of Lucasfilm in San Anselmo and includes clips of the Marin County locations used for motion pictures, from the days of silent movies until Indiana Jones.

"This film is really the result of a lot of little stories," Ben Burtt said. "I decided that we'd try to connect them all together in a kind of walking tour idea that juxtaposes the past and the present. It's nostalgia. I've always had a great interest in finding some way to connect with the past."

[Dad-daughter film team makes time to go back in time]
[Emma's Time Machine: Adventures in Time and Space - via California Film Institute]

More on WALL-E at Comic Con 2007

Andrew Stanton: "One thing I knew in the beginning is I didn’t want to have dialogue in the traditional sense. In order to stay true to the integrity of the inanimate object, I really wanted to view most of it’s personality through how it was constructed. And it’s a metal box, a piece of electronics. I’m basically making R2-D2 the movie."

[source: comingsoon.net]

Stanton introduced "Star Wars" veteran Ben Burtt, who is doing sound design on the film. He played samples of the various robots sound effects then showed animation samples of the robots.
He wasn't sure if he'd be working on Indiana Jones 4 since the WALL•E schedule was going to overlap with its schedule. WALL•E is his first priority.

[more @ slashfilm.com]

Ben Burtt: "I would love to be involved. Its kinda a tradition but Wall E and Indiana Jones have the same schedule so I don't know. My priority is Wall E." Stanton, however, gave Burtt an out, saying "I think we can find a way to work that out. Nobody is denying Indiana Jones."

[indie.cinematical.com]

It's not often Ben Burtt gives a live demo of his sound design, and I was enraptured as he used a small keyboard to show off some of his extensive work for the (mostly) dialogue-free Wall-E.

[chud.com]


[WALL-E: Official Site]
[Pixar’s WALL•E Promo Postcards]
[Audio interview with Andrew Stanton on WALL•E]

Related Story:
Pixar’s WALL E Revealed

Ben Burtt on Star Trek?

"According to a studio insiders, one of the last people to join the Star Trek movie team was Academy Award winning sound designer Ben Burtt, best known for his work on the Star Wars franchise. Burtt worked on all six Star Wars films and created most of the iconic sounds, including Chewbacca’s roar, light sabers and the droids. Burtt also worked as a sound designer on all of the Indiana Jones films, E.T., and last year’s Pixar hit Wall-E.

Burtt is working alongside Mark Stoeckinger who was the sound editor for J.J. Abrams Mission: Impossible: III. According to the source, they needed all the help they could get for the sheer number of new sounds that had to be created for this new Star Trek. Even though the film re-uses some iconic TOS sounds (like the Red Alert klaxon), all the sounds still need to be recreated, and then there are many more new sounds as well. Apparently Burtt is a huge Trek fan and was thrilled to get a chance to be involved."

[via trekmovie.com]

[The "twang" from Star Trek and Star Wars compared]

Mix Sound for Film Profile: Ben Burtt on Indiana Jones 4

"Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" Sound for Film Profile with Ben Burtt from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.

[via Mix Magazine]
[don't miss a Q&A with Ben Burtt @ filmsounddaily.com]

Interview: Ben Burtt and J.W. Rinzler - 'The Sounds of Star Wars'

Ben Burtt and J. W. Rinzler discussed The Sounds of Star Wars book on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday with Liane Hansen.

Though The Sounds of Star Wars is a gold mine for Star Wars buffs, it's designed to appeal to more casual audiences as well.

"This book is meant to appeal to anybody who's interested in cinema or sound," Rinzler says.

The idea came from an outfit, Becker and Mayer, that had just published a birdsong book.

"They came to us at LucasFilm and said, 'You know, we think the technology is good enough so we could do a Sounds of Star Wars book,'" Rinzler says. "I contacted Ben, who was, I think, justifiably skeptical."

Burtt was afraid the explosions wouldn't sound right, but he came around eventually. When they decided to go ahead and do it, he suggested the book include an earphone jack.

"So kids can take the book to bed and get under the covers with their headphones and their parents won't know," he says, laughing.

[read more: The Sounds Of Star Wars, 'Now At Fans' Fingertips - via NPR]

An interview with James A. Moorer, pt.2

by Matteo Milani, February 2009

(Continued from Page 1)

MM: Did Lucas himself choose the name SoundDroid?

JM: No. It came from the name of the group, which was "The Droid Works". Peter Langston came up with the name "Droid Works".


MM: Is it true that SoundDroid was the second generation digital audio workstation after the ASP? Or the ASP was called later SoundDroid?

JM: The ASP was later renamed SoundDroid. We were working on a second generation when the work was stopped.

The Droid Works closed before the production-ready version of the device was completed, before any products were delivered. Still, the audio research that went into it lived on. In the last months of 1986, Lucasfilm tried to find an industry leader to purchase the technologies had been created there, with no success.
[excerpt from Droidmaker]


MM: What kind of sound processing did you implement? Filtering, eq, dynamics?

JM: All the kinds that were known at that time - filtering, dynamics, spatialization, reverberation, pitch shifting, denoising, and many more.

MM: Did your pioneering work on the Phase Vocoder lead to NoNoise for removing hiss, noise, clicks and pops from recordings?

JM: The Phase Vocoder work did lead directly to the algorithms for removing clicks and pops. The broadband noise reduction came out of some work I did with John Strawn on the "Karen Silkwood Tapes" back at Stanford. These were the techniques used for the Amadeus restoration projects.

Milos Forman was [...] mixing “Amadeus” at Fantasy Films (Saul Zaentz). [...] There was a scene in the movie (the asylum scene) where the performances of Salieri and Mozart were excellent but the audio recording was not. Forman's sound engineers, Mark Berger and Tom Scott, knew that Lucas's teams were pioneering new technology for exactly this kind of problem. They brought the tapes over to Andy Moorer and asked if his ASP could help.[...] Andy immediately digitized the tapes into the ASP. Then he excised small samples of pure noise and had the computer analyze them - getting, in essence, a fingerprint of the background noise. Then the pure noise was subtracted from the dialog tracks, leaving the human voices intact.
"About half of the tapes they brought me we were able to clean up," said Moorer. Amadeus was the first feature film to utilize their new noise reduction technology.
[excerpt from Droidmaker]


MM: The visual waveform had been demonstrated originally in your program called "S" (for Sound) at Stanford in 1970. How was your contribution to the user interface design? Where did you find your inspiration of waveforms, from optical recordings?

JM: ALL modern digital audio workstations use the SAME waveform display that I created in the program "S". All modern digital audio workstations are descended directly from "S". I have no idea where the idea for the display on "S" came from. It just seemed good at the time.


MM: What was the audio recording format for the SoundDroid?

JM: We used 16 or 24-bit samples at 48 kHz.


MM: How big was the storage of the SoundDroid?

JM: We used 300 MByte "Storage Module Drives" on the original ASP. One drive would hold about 50 minutes of monaural sound at 48K and 16-bit samples. You could attach up to 4 drives to one ASP. With SoundDroid, we got some newer drives that could hold 850 MBytes, or about 2 hours of mono. Four of those drives adds up to about 1 hour of eight-track audio.


MM: How was your connection with Tomlinson Holman? Did you collaborate at that time?

JM: I enjoyed working with Tom Holman, although we had different responsibilities. He was all analog and didn't really work much with digital audio.


MM: How was your relationship with Ben Burtt? Was he the only figure who helped you sweetening the software?

JM: Ben helped me understand what sound designers did and how they do it.

"Ben Burtt said the biggest bottleneck was the spatializing of sounds; it was his biggest time sink," recalled Andy [Moorer]. Ben needed fine control over the room size around a sound, a magic knob that would adjust the spatial environment so he could immediately hear how a sound could be varied.
His traditional method was slow and tedious, with tape decks and amplifiers. And creating flybys! All those objects - space ships, motorcycles, airplanes - that had to be made to sound like they were moving fast by an imaginary microphone. He needed a Doppler shift that could be added to a sound.
Andy provided a solution. "We put a box in his little mixing room in the basement of C building, connected through the wall to the sound pit, where the ASP resided." He wrote Ben a basic set of programs that would allow the box to input a sound, fly it around at a desired speed, and output it.
[excerpt from Droidmaker]

MM: The Doppler machine you invented for Ben was stand-alone or was it a remote controller doing a specific task?

JM: It was a remote terminal on the ASP. We would load a specific program into the machine for him to use.


[Prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | Next]

An interview with Gary Rydstrom

by Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi - U.S.O. Project, 2011 

Gary Rydstrom was born in 1959 in Chicago, IL. He graduated from the University of Southern California - School of Cinematic Arts in 1981. He began his career at Sprocket Systems, formerly Skywalker Sound, in 1983. Offered the job by a college professor, Gary received the opportunity to work with his mentor, Star Wars sound designer Ben Burtt. He created sound for numerous successful films including Backdraft, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Jurassic Park, Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, Minority Report and Finding Nemo. Through this work he has won 7 Academy Awards.
Rydstrom did his first work for Pixar on the short film Luxo Jr.. John Lasseter has said it was Rydstrom's work on Luxo Jr., such as creating the lamp's voice from the squeak of a lightbulb being screwed in, that taught him how sound can be a partner in the storytelling of a film. In 2006 he has made his directorial debut with the Pixar animated short Lifted. He recently jumped again into the director's chair to create his second animated short Hawaiian Vacation, set to play in front of Cars 2. 

[Rydstrom talks about the first of Pixar's new brand of Toy Story shorts @ AWN] 

For every director and for all of us the goal is at any one moment in a movie to have the audience on the edge of their feet and can't wait to see what happens next. You are moved by these characters, you believe in these characters. All the meticulous and hard work should be completely invisible. We wanted to be involved in the scene and we don’t you to think that Nemo is a bunch of computer layout. We do not want you to think the many hours that took to create that scene. You are just carried away by the scene and every focus in every step of the production that we do at Pixar is about the story. It is about entertaining the audience. - John Lasseter, 66th Venice Film Festival 


USO: Gary, you’re the third person – of our personal “respect-list” – who came from a sound career and crossed over to a director’s chair: Walter Murch did it first, Ben Burtt came after him. They still design their own sound for their works, just as you did for your first short movie Lifted (with a tribute like the Wilhelm Scream at the very end). How did you manage the transition from sound designer/re-recording mixer to director? How about your feelings?

Gary Rydstrom: Working in film sound is a great way to immerse yourself in the rhythms of a movie. Having done sound for so many movies, and so many different kinds of movies, I’m hoping I’ve developed some mysterious “film instinct.” I think the best directors – and best sound designers – work more from their gut than their brain. In other words, to make movies, your gut has to be bigger than your brain… or maybe I should rephrase that?


GR: "It was a little scary but I always wanted to make films and wanted to have opportunities to write and tell stories. So Pixar being old friends, they gave me this opportunity to come over there and do that. So it was a little scary because there were a lot of things I had to learn. But doing sound for so many years, what I found was that the big similarity is that sound is all about rhythm. It’s about using sound, rhythm helps delineate sound effects, sound tracks, and telling a story with these kind of rhythms is really key. Animation is really about rhythms and timing so I think working in sound gave me a great sense of timing. In fact, on Lifted I used, before animation had been started, used a temp soundtrack to express the timing that I wanted to the animators so they had some reference of what I was after. It was a way for me to even communicate to the animators." - CanMag

[Lifted producer Katherine Sarafian and director Gary Rydstrom © AWN Inc]

USO: Did you develop and learn your new craft in sound room working movie by movie?

GR: Central to sound design is finding what feels right for a movie, what matches its look and heart. So every movie I worked on taught me different lessons. I kept thinking I was close to end of my lessons, but they never ended. Turns out that’s what makes working in film fun. It’s never the same twice. 


USO: Being close to first-class directors during all your sound career has thought you well?

GR: I felt like a spy, watching a lot of directors. I’ve been very lucky to have worked with many of the best – Spielberg, Cameron, Lasseter, Redford – and you probably don’t need me to tell you (their movies do) how different in approach they were. One thing the best have in common: they inspire their crews.


GR: "... I've had this long, great relationship with John Lasseter and Pixar. I've felt involved throughout the whole filmmaking process on their films. They offered me an opportunity to develop and direct films, maybe because I bring an outsider's perspective while still being a Pixar guy through and through.
My friends there know that I've had a long-standing love of comedy. When I first told Steven Spielberg and George Lucas that I was doing this, they were touchingly supportive and generous with advice. I'm grateful for my sound career. It gave me the equivalent of 50-yard-line seats, second row, during a fascinating era in film history." - Mix Magazine 


USO: Can you describe what you were feeling when you left the Technical Building (where you spent almost 20 years), and all your friends at Lucas Skywalker Sound, to your new life/experience in Emeryville?

GR: Luckily I get back to Skywalker Sound quite often, otherwise I’d REALLY miss my old friends and career. Pixar’s no slouch, but there isn’t a more beautiful place to work than Skywalker Ranch. 


I've known Gary for over 20 years and he's really been a mentor and a role model for me, as to how to do this work. His standard for quality, inventiveness and humor is really always in the back of my mind when I work. No one is a quicker study when you break down a scene or a film in terms of what, soundwise, is the best direction to go to serve the story. - Tom Myers, Skywalker Sound 


USO: What does it mean for you to associate a particular sound to a visual event (identifying it in a vast catalogue as big as the sound library of SkySound)? What are the mental or purely instinctive paths competing in making the choice?

GR: Something magical happens when a sound effect is added to picture – and it’s not predictable. After all my years of doing it, I still depend on experimenting, putting sounds against image and seeing what happens. First time I did this, as a film student, it amazed me how sound could “open up” a movie, how the combination of sound and visual could create something greater than the sum parts. Having a great sound library is essential, but the real secret is how one uses it. 


GR: "I wanted to give the lamps in Luxo Jr. character through sound. I told John (Lasseter) that I'd come up with these voices. He'd never imagined they'd have voices and was wary of the idea. But I experimented with taking real sounds — a lot of it as simple as unscrewing a light bulb or scraping metal. Every once in a while, a sound would be produced that would remind you of sadness or glee. I always think of sound design being like prospecting for gold. Start by, say, goofing around, making lots of sounds, then find the one percent that has something interesting about it. Put this against the film, and there's a magical moment when the sound, if it's right, merges into the image, brings it to life. They were not cartoon-y. They were fun, reality-based sounds. It felt like the birth of something new, even then." - Mix Magazine

USO: Many sound artists working in other domains like electroacoustic music, musique concrete, environmental sounds has been strongly influenced by the contemporary cinema, and by its ability to create stories with the help of sound effects, soundscapes and even to define the personality of some "objects" with unmistakable sounds. How it is possible to interrelate these multiplicity of experience? 

GR: What all sound artists share is a desire to convey emotions, so I certainly was inspired by non-movie sound work. Sound is emotion. Not just music, but all sound. Humans (who can hear) seem to take sound in general for granted, which is frustrating, but liberating. How manipulative can we be when no one’s paying attention! 


USO: While Europe was experiencing electronics and sound design like natural language consequence of the avant-garde of 50's, in the U.S. this journey took place independently in the field of the film industry with other purposes and objectives. You were aware of what was happening in the old continent and its experiments?

GR: I’m certainly aware of the European traditional of producing “soundscapes” (for lack of a better word) for radio. In some ways, I was jealous of sound work that didn’t depend on the visual – how free it seemed! Best I could do was build an “off-screen” world in film. But I always had a movie to be influenced by – how scary to have sound work stand on its own. 


USO: You've been one of the most assiduous "regulars" of the Synclavier, an instrument widely used in various musical fields. Can you describe the creative approach with this tool? What were your procedures? What made it such as a instrument so unique? To create the sound of the engines of the Titanic you and Chris Boyes worked long on the Synclavier to reproduce the effect in question. Do you remember how you did it?

GR: I fell in love with the Synclavier early in my career because it was such a powerful instrument for shaping natural sounds. I never used the FM synthesis – even making electronic sound effects I would try to use natural sounds, just because I find real sounds are more interesting. Sampling sounds and putting them on a keyboard allowed me to quickly experiment with pitch and layering, which are my primary tools for bending real sounds to my will. The Titanic engine sounds took advantage of how the Synclavier could speed up and slow down a sound pattern. For me, nothing beats using a “musical” instrument for creating sound effects.


GR: "The idea of using a sampler for sound effects work had astonishing potential. With sampled sounds in RAM, you can instantly pitch-bend it and layer it and play it and shape it, without using any processing time. You can layer on the same key and very finely manipulate the pitch and delay and merge them together in ways that were harder to do in the tape-to-tape days. It allowed me to create the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, in which I took several layers and blended different animal sounds into what sounds like one animal.
With the Synclavier, I have a library of sound “parts,” little snippets that are like phonemes in language. Interesting bits of sound that can be rearranged in multitudes of ways. It's a library of raw material, and it's valuable still." - Mix Magazine


USO: How about your relationship with Ben Burtt along your sound career and especially now in Pixar? I mean crosstalk and dialogue, to share ideas. Could you describe him as a mentor, a friend, a colleague, a druid?

GR: All of my approaches and philosophies about sound come from Ben Burtt. At the time he was revolutionizing sound design, I was lucky enough to get a job at Sprocket Systems and see how he did it, how much he knew about film sound history, and most importantly how much he cared about using sound to tell a story. When I started working on Jurassic Park, I remember Ben was away on vacation. I stumbled along until he came back – for all sorts of reasons, psychological and practical, I couldn’t get started until he was in the building.



[Gary Rydstrom Talks About Cinema Sound - via DolbyInsider]


USO: Nowadays many sound designers are working in nonlinear environments like Pro Tools, Nuendo with tons of plug-ins to make everything. One thing we always admired in your work is the exquisite and unfailing "organic" sound and his innate musicality. It seems that sounds "exist" in nature and are not a product of a skilled craftsman. Would you like to talk about that?

GR: There’s a danger in processing sound too much. I believe the best sound effects come from the best raw recordings, and are tweaked as little as possible. The world is so full of amazing sounds – sounds no synthesizer can match – so why not find them and use them?


GR: [...] I remember a scene in the first Mission Impossible in which Tom Cruise breaks into a computer room at the CIA, for which we’d added all these sound details for equipment he was using to lower himself in. Yet the idea was that if he made any sound over a certain level, he would trip the alarm. Brian De Palma ultimately said, “No, take it all out.” And for the most part, that scene plays with nothing on the track. I went to see it with an audience and it had the desired effect: It made everyone lean in, pay closer attention, get nervous. Tension comes from the silence of that scene.
[...] Silence can be thought of as a type of sound. It’s like when somebody years ago figured out that zero was a number. And silence is just as valid as an amazing sound. Every sound editor can’t help but think of how to fill up a track; it’s what we’re paid for. - excerpts from “From here on in, absolute silence.” [via Benjamin Wright]

Thanks Gary... keep up the good work! M&F

Ben Burtt interview - Upcoming Pixar

[photo via sfgate.com]

Sound Designer Ben Burtt moved from LucasFilm to Pixar a few years ago and headed up Sound Design on WALL•E. Have a read of this Q&A below with Burtt, thanks to Upcoming Pixar.

Some excerpts worth mentioning:

BB: I have always felt that the best way to get a robot voice is to have a human element and an electronic element and blend the two. So I worked out a circuit where I started with my voice and broke that down in the computer and then re-synthesized it. And the voice of EVE was done in a similar way. We used a woman at Pixar, who was named Elissa Knight. We started using her as a scratch track and once again, just like with me, once I ran it through the laborious computer process, we got results that we liked, and we felt we should keep it.

BB: I’ve always found, when you’re trying to create illusions with sound, especially in a science fiction or fantasy movie, that pulling sounds from the world around us is a great way to cement that illusion because you can go out and record an elevator in George Lucas’s house or something, and it will have that motor sound. It will be an elevator and you might associate it with that, but if you use it in a movie people will believe it’s a force field, or maybe it’s the sound of a spaceship door opening.
[...] It’s forging those connections between familiar sound and illusionary sound that I think is the basis of the success for a lot of the sounds that sound designers have put in these movies.

BB: I’ve been on this film for three years, so the work was being embedded right from the beginning, sometimes we would do some sounds and then do an animation test to try those sounds out. Those kinds of opportunities are great. So of course I’m very proud of that, what film gives you a chance to do sound effects as well as key voices in the film. Maybe the only other big assignment would be to do a movie with no music and see where you could go...

[some fun facts about WALL•E’s sound design - promotional PDF]

[read more via pixarplanet.com]

More Sound Trekking

Ben Burtt’s Further Explorations of Audio Frontiers

[photo by Gregory Schwartz]

In the MAY-JUN 09 Editors Guild Magazine’s cover story, "Sound Trek: The Audio Explorations of Ben Burtt," the four-time Oscar-winning filmmaker goes deep into the evolution of a personal 35-year journey that has seen a revolution in the organic art of sound effects creation and editing.
In this interview by Michael Kunkes, Burtt amplifies his print comments about his work on J.J. Abrams' feature Star Trek, revealing how he seamlessly re-created and updated some of the best-loved signature sounds from the original TV series. He also discusses his feelings about picture editing, music and his own still-evolving creative aspirations.

[read the full interview- via Editors Guild Magazine]

Ben Burtt on Lightsaber Sound Design

Ben Burtt talks about creating the original sound for the lightsabers in Star Wars.
This is the U.S.O. version for the 30th anniversary of Star Wars!

About Ben:
[Layers of Sound]
[Skywalker Sound]
[The Wilhelm Scream]
[Star Wars and Sound Design]

An interview with James A. Moorer, pt.1

by Matteo Milani, February 2009

I had the pleasure of interviewing James A. Moorer, an internationally-known figure in digital audio and computer music, with over 40 technical publications and four patents to his credit. He personally designed and wrote much of the advanced DSP algorithms for the Sonic Solutions "NoNOISE" process which is used to restore vintage recordings for CD remastering.
Between 1980 and 1987, while Vice-President of Research and Development at Lucasfilm's The Droid Works, he designed the Audio Signal Processor (ASP) which was used in the production of sound tracks for Return of the Jedi, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and others.
Between 1977 and 1979, he was a researcher and the Scientific Advisor to IRCAM in Paris.
In the mid-seventies he was Co-Director and Co-Founder of the Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1975.
In 1991, he won the Audio Engineering Society Silver award for lifetime achievement. In 1996, he won an Emmy Award for Technical Achievement with his partners, Robert J. Doris and Mary C. Sauer for Sonic Solutions "NoNOISE" for Noise Reduction on Television Broadcast Sound Tracks. In 1999, he won an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Scientific and Engineering Award for his pioneering work in the design of digital signal processing and its application to audio editing for film. He is currently working at Adobe Systems as Senior Computer Scientist in the DVD team.

[James Moorer (second from left), who gave the 2000 Richard C. Heyser Memorial Lecture at the 108th AES Convention in Paris, Audio in the New Millennium, receives Technical Council recognition - via aes.org]

The SoundDroid is an early digital audio workstation designed by a team of engineers led by Moorer at Lucasfilm. It was a hard-disk–based, nonlinear audio editor developed on the Audio Signal Processor. Only one prototype was ever built and it was never commercialized. Lucasfilm  started putting together a computer division right after Star Wars as an in-house project to build a range of digital tools for filmmaking. The audio project that became SoundDroid was done in close collaboration with the post-production division, Sprocket Systems, and later spun out as part of a joint venture called The Droid Works. Complete with a trackball, touch-sensitive displays, moving faders, and a jog-shuttle wheel, the SoundDroid included programs for sound synthesis, digital reverberation, recording, editing and mixing. EditDroid and SoundDroid were the beginnings of the desktop tools digital revolution.


MM: Mr. Moorer, who developed the concept of a "digital audio workstation", during those early days? How did you collect the ideas for the ASP?

JM: It was my idea from back in my days at Stanford University. My 1977 paper describes a "digital recording studio". The digital audio processing station and digital audio workstation came out of that work. I first coined the term "digital audio workstation" in a talk I gave at the AES. A paper from that talk came out in 1982, but I don't think the term "digital audio workstation" made it into the paper.

Andy Moorer, the director of Audio Research, was moving ahead with the design of the digital audio processor, the ASP. [...] The sound work centered on the invention of a brand new set of chips that could perform the special kinds of calculations required for digital audio. [...] Designing new hardware chips was a long and complex process. Once the engineer determined precisely what needed to be done, and perhaps executed the various algorithms in sofware, he needed to translate the software into fundamental logical steps that could be built with wire and chips. [...] This process of chip design, finding the best position of the chips on a board and the most efficient way to wire them together, was expedited by using specialized CAD software.
By summer of 1982, after most two years of work, Andy Moorer and his cohorts finally completed the first working prototype of the audio computer, the ASP. The massive ASP consisted of eight oversized boards assembled entirely by hand, requiring more than 3.000 IC chips. It represented a number of significant engineering breakthroughs.
[excerpt from Droidmaker]


MM: Who's missing from this list of your crew at that time: John Max Snell, Curtis Abbott, Jim Lawson, Bernard Mont-Reynaud, John M. Strawn?

JM: That about it. John Snell worked on user interfaces (touch-sensitive screens, assignable knobs, moving faders and shuttle wheel). The other folks worked on software.

John Snell had met repeatedly with Ben Burtt and the rest of the Sprockets sound team. They all felt that the audio computer had to look and work pretty much like the traditional tools they knew. [...] Though Ben wanted the flexibility that digital processing and random access might provide, it couldn't be at the cost of changing the interface.
"We felt that you could use one knob or slider and have the sofware change its function," said Snell, "and a console could be built with perhaps eight sliders, or twelve, but not a hundred. [ The old console design ] simply wasn't practical."
Before Peter Nye arrived to the audio project, the ASP was controlled by a command-line interface, much like MS-DOS, and a small box of knobs that John Snell had built for Ben Burtt. Peter Nye, a computer-music student of Moorer's, implemented the paradigm on the SoundDroid for a film-oriented system, which traditionally viewed tracks running vertically, from top to bottom. The new SoundDroid interface featured Snell's touchscreen and a novel by-product of the digital audio: a waveform of the sound. [...] The Droid Works trademarked the feature as "See the Sound."
[excerpt from Droidmaker]


MM: Are you the co-founder of CCRMA at Stanford University? Later, how was your experience in Paris @ IRCAM?

JM: Yes, with John Chowning, John Grey and Loren Rush. It was an interesting experience at IRCAM. I enjoyed my time there. I did not enjoy the internal politics.


MM: Did you help John Chowning during his research of FM synthesis? What kind of sound synthesis run in the ASP?

JM: Yes, of course. I designed the original hardware FM synthesizer that was the basis of the FM patent. Yamaha later built that particular device. We could run all kinds of sound synthesis on the ASP - FM, additive (Fourier), subtractive, whatever.

MM: Thanks to George Lucas who subsidized pure research, for the first time in the movie history scientists and filmmakers were together under the same roof (The Droid Works). What were the big hurdles from the machine-side and from the human-side during the development years?

JM: Technically, the problem was just that we didn't have a lot of the modern technology, like computers with 1 GHz processors and 1 GByte of memory. We had to build all the technology we used. From the human side, people were having trouble understanding the workflow in the digital audio world. I had a very, very difficult time selling people on the idea that you could do "scrub" or "reel-rock" on a computer, rather than by sliding a tape over a head. Someone even suggested that I use the top of a tape recorder as a computer interface, even with no tape on it, so it would "feel" the same. Today, nobody even knows that audio was edited using razor blades and scotch tape.

ASP does for sound tracks - the band of squiggly lines at the edge of a film that encode the film's sounds - what EditDroid does for images: it uses its silicon circuitry to mix, edit, and even synthesize the music, speech, and sound effects so important to film makers, especially somebody like Lucas for whom sound is as important as sight in stirring the emotions of an audience. ASP has already been used to heighten the drama - by changing the pitch of a scream, for example, to make it more chilling - in the current hit Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, co-produced by Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Lucasfilm's sound mixer is even more ambitious technologically. Today's films have as many as six sound tracks to drive the multiple speakers in many theaters. But even these are usually the distillation of many more tracks. Project chief Andy Moorer points out that in a film like Return of the Jedi the sounds in a typical scene may represent a mix of 70 separate tracks of dialogue, music, and audio effects. A single change in one of the original tracks - say, the boom of a rocket or the pitch of a siren - would require remixing all of them. Jedi needed only five film editors but 17 sound editors. "What we set out to do," says Moorer, "Was to put a computer in the middle of all of this." That was not easy: just as the visual images must first be converted to electronic signals for EditDroid, so the sounds must be turned into digital form for ASP. This means every flutter of noise has to be translated into the "on-off" binary language of the computer. In other words, the sounds become numbers.
[excerpt from Discover Magazine, August 1984]

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Pic: Ben Burtt at Skywalker Ranch

[click to enlarge]

 

Sound designer Ben Burtt hears the buzzing from a parking lot lamp post at Skywalker Ranch. He used the sound for the skull characters in the new Indiana Jones movie. [via sfgate.com]