Exciting sounds of "Star Wars"

Photo Crosa CC BY

While still a student at the University of Southern California, Ben Burtt dreamed of space. In 1975, his dream came true. But not thanks to NASA.
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Once George Lucas, a screenwriter and director, asked producer Gary Kurtz (Gary Kurtz) to find some student who would not have to pay a lot to start searching for sounds for a new film. Harry called the University of Southern California and asked if they had “future Walters of the Murches?” They recommended him to Ben Burtt. “Most students wanted to be screenwriters or directors, but certainly not sound artists,” says Burtt.

At that time, Ben couldn’t even imagine that the movie Star Wars would be Lukas and Kurtz’s movie Hollywood celebrities. However, he already felt that his first acquaintance with the film industry will remember for a long time.

Often, at least three specialists are involved in the work on the film, on whom the quality of the sound track depends (in fact, there may be many more, or one person can combine work on various tasks). One of them is a microphone player who is responsible for recording sound during filming. Wielding a microphone, he records the dialogues and everything that happens on the court. The second profession is a sound engineer. This person works with a collection of sounds recorded using a recorder. The third person is the sound engineer of the dubbing, whose task is to bring all sounds, dialogue and effects into one final audio track.

“Usually, all duties are strictly delimited. If you are a microphoneman, you will not be engaged in editing and editing, and the sound producer will not be engaged in re-recording. I was the exception to the rule, ”recalls Burtt. - I needed to come up with a new term to describe my occupation, so I called myself a “sound effects director” (sound designer). Ben gave advice on where to find those or other sounds, searched for and recorded them himself, and also worked on editing and mixing. “At that time, such a frequent change of roles was something unusual for me,” he noted.

At the very beginning of the work, Ben asked George Lucas what film they were making? Realistic, like “Space Odyssey” by Stanley Kubrick, or a film in which you can spit on physics and do what you like? Lucas replied that the frame of the cosmos will be accompanied by music, because with the sound you can do anything. “We forgot about physics and decided that we would have sound in space — that made the film much more interesting,” said Ben.

Being a university graduate, Ben Burtt liked to use a systematic approach to solving problems. He asked himself: “If this object really existed, what kind of sound would it make?” His task was to make the public believe that this object, vehicle, weapon, or place actually exists. The best way to do this is to use the sounds of real objects.

So, armed with the mono-record Nagra and a microphone, which provided him with new bosses, Burtt set off to collect sounds for various creatures and mechanisms that appeared in the script. “While they were making the film, I went to different places and looked for sounds. In the zoo, I wrote the voices of animals, and at airports - the sounds of engines and airplanes. I even went to the military base where I recorded the sound of machine gun fire, ”Ben recalls. “Once I went to the Marineland water park in Long Beach, California, in the hope that the walrus’s voice would be suitable for the Wookiee.”

“The sound of lightsabers is one of my favorite sounds. I did it first, despite the fact that at first I had to come up with “voices” for Chewbacca and R2-D2, and only then work with blasters and everything else, ” says Burtt. “As soon as I read the script and saw the illustrations made by Ralph McQuarrie, the lightsabers captured my imagination.”

At that time, Ben Burtt was still a graduate student at the University of Southern California, where he worked as a projectionist. In the cinema hall, very old searchlights were installed, which made an interesting buzzing sound. However, it was not enough - the picture was incomplete. A new sound was found quite by accident. “I walked around the studio with a microphone when I went near the TV. The microphone was right above the kinescope, and because of this, there was a very strange noise — a strong buzz, ”says Burtt. - I recorded this buzz and combined it with the sound from the spotlight. Thus was born the sound of the lightsaber. ”



Photo STICK KIM CC BY-ND

The main villain Darth Vader in the script was described as an evil creature connected to a life support system. At first, Vader was very “noisy”: he breathed loud and raspy, like a windmill, and when he turned his head, you could hear the sound of mechanisms. This made him look too much like a robot, so I had to deviate from this concept. On the first trial recordings, Dart sounded like a walking resuscitation.

It is believed that in order to record the sound of a blaster, Ben climbed the Golden Gate Bridge and pounded on his tension cables. Ben's father, Benjamin Burtt, Sr., says this is not true. In the 70s, they traveled to the mountains of Pocono, and Ben as usual took the Nagra recorder with him. “At one of the elevations there was a radio tower, we climbed there, and I hit a stone on one of the cables a couple of times,” recalls Burtt Sr. - At this point, my son exclaimed: “Probably that is how the blaster should sound!” After this incident, Ben Jr. decided to record the same sound again, but in California, when he found a suitable tower in the Mojave Desert.

“Such discoveries made me believe that the search for sounds is a real adventure,” said Ben. And he was right. At 27, Burtt received his first Oscar for his achievements in creating voices for aliens, creatures and robots in Star Wars, a film that raised the bar for cinema to a completely different level.

In the 90s, Burtt had the opportunity to return to the past. To the release of the movie “Star Wars. Episode I: The Phantom Menace. ”The studio decided to restore the old trilogy. For example, in some places, special effects were added directly to the film after the work was completed, therefore several blasters and ships did not make any sounds. Ben Burtt says: “The Star Wars film was the first major project I was working on, so I was happy with any result — but these shortcomings irritated me a little.”

Lucas, Burtt and the team made a list of changes and, "relying on records of twenty years ago and their memory," they began to rule the sound tracks of the films. As usual, Lucas gave Burtt complete freedom of action. “Most of the sounds in modern films are just faded and inconspicuous noise,” says Ben. - We tried to “embrace” the audience with sound ”. The original sound effects were digitized and processed by Digidesign's Pro Tools, but to add sounds to the film, the team literally had to cut and glue the tapes on which the audio tracks were recorded. “As for the music, we wanted to use the original recordings to preserve the feeling that John Williams’s compositions gave to him,” says Ben.

Burtt is pleased that Star Wars has fundamentally changed the attitude to sound in movies. “I worked and learned new things in a team with experienced sound engineers from Hollywood,” he says, comparing himself with the young Luke Skywalker in the audio world. “The result of our collaboration has shaken the world.”

Since then, much has changed, but something has remained the same. “I still have my Nagra,” he jokes. - This is a very reliable recorder that refuses to break. I will use it for the rest of my life. ”

PS More materials on the topic of music and audio - in our " World Hi-Fi ".