Go behind the scenes with the sound team at Skywalker Sound and learn how they designed and developed all of the sound effects for the movie "Star Wars: Rogue One." 

Career

Find out how the sounds of Rogue One were made.

Remake part of a show or movie you like or come up with something new of your own. You can film on your phone or digital camera. Get practical experience in what it takes to produce and direct a film. 

Start a film project with your friends.

Get a jump start on what you want do in college or test your interest before you get there by taking a class in person or online in audio effects! 

Education

Take a class in audio effects. 

Sound Engineers

Operate machines and equipment to record, synchronize, mix, or reproduce music, voices, or sound effects in sporting arenas, theater productions, recording studios, or movie and video productions.

Realistic occupations frequently involve work activities that include practical, hands-on problems and solutions. They often deal with plants, animals, and real-world materials like wood, tools, and machinery. Many of the occupations require working outside, and do not involve a lot of paperwork or working closely with others.

Realistic

Artistic occupations frequently involve working with forms, designs and patterns. They often require self-expression and the work can be done without following a clear set of rules.

Artistic

Conventional occupations frequently involve following set procedures and routines. These occupations can include working with data and details more than with ideas. Usually there is a clear line of authority to follow.

Conventional

Enterprising occupations frequently involve starting up and carrying out projects. These occupations can involve leading people and making many decisions. Sometimes they require risk taking and often deal with business.

Enterprising

Second Interest High-Point

Investigative occupations frequently involve working with ideas, and require an extensive amount of thinking. These occupations can involve searching for facts and figuring out problems mentally.

Investigative

Social occupations frequently involve working with, communicating with, and teaching people. These occupations often involve helping or providing service to others.

Social

First Interest High-Point

Third Interest High-Point

Job Zone Three: Medium Preparation Needed

Sound Engineering Technicians

Broadcast and Sound Engineering Technicians and Radio Operators

Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations

Media and Communication Equipment Workers

Confer with producers, performers, and others to determine and achieve the desired sound for a production, such as a musical recording or a film.

Regulate volume level and sound quality during recording sessions, using control consoles.

Prepare for recording sessions by performing such activities as selecting and setting up microphones.

Report equipment problems and ensure that required repairs are made.

Mix and edit voices, music, and taped sound effects for live performances and for prerecorded events, using sound mixing boards.

Synchronize and equalize prerecorded dialogue, music, and sound effects with visual action of motion pictures or television productions, using control consoles.

Record speech, music, and other sounds on recording media, using recording equipment.

Reproduce and duplicate sound recordings from original recording media, using sound editing and duplication equipment.

Separate instruments, vocals, and other sounds, and combine sounds during the mixing or postproduction stage.

Create musical instrument digital interface programs for music projects, commercials, or film postproduction.

Tear down equipment after event completion.

Convert video and audio recordings into digital formats for editing or archiving.

Set up, test, and adjust recording equipment for recording sessions and live performances.

1/3 octave equalizers

Amplifiers

Audio compressors

Audio filters

Audio mixer consoles

Cable testers

Channel equalizers

Condenser microphones

Desktop computers

Digital audio recorders

Digital delay pedals

Digital oscilloscopes

Digital samplers

Dynamic microphones

Dynamics processors

Electret microphones

Laptop computers

Microphone pre-amps

Multitrack tape recording machines

Musical instrument digital interface MIDI sequencers

Noise reduction systems

Parametric equalizers

Peak equalizers

Personal computers

Polarity checkers

Pressure zone microphones

Reverb devices

Ribbon microphones

Shelving equalizers

Soldering irons

Studio intercom systems

Volt-ohm meters VOM

Wireless microphones

Wireless receivers

Wireless transmitters

Apple Final Cut Pro

Autodesk AutoCAD

Avid Technology

Avid Technology Pro Tools

Cisco IOS

Computer aided design CAD software

Data entry software

Linux

Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Office

Microsoft Visio

Musical instrument digital interface MIDI software

You have to get used to rejection and be willing to keep going. I have a library of sounds that didn't work out for the project I was developing them for, but some have worked for others and succeed. 

I experiment with various materials and technologies to develop sound effects for movies. I spend a lot of time recording, editing, and manipulating different sounds to create something new. 

Sound Designer

I can't do this. I'm just going to fail. 

[Male narrator #2] Everywhere you turn, people try to tell you who to be and what to do, but what about deciding for yourself? Roadtrip Nation is a movement that empowers people to define their own roads in life. Every summer we bring together three people from different backgrounds. Together they explore the country interviewing inspiring individuals from all walks of life. They hit the road in search of wisdom and guidance to find what it actually takes to build a life around doing what you love. This is what they found, this is Roadtrip Nation. [Darth Vader breathing] [Ben Burtt]  You probably recognize that right? the old Vader breathing. It's making me nervous. [Ben Burtt]  Yeah you like that? [Vader breathing] The script talked about Vader having a breathing mask of some kind. Yeah the apparatus it's me breathing through a scuba regulator. [Ben] Oh ok. It's back here, you have to have a scuba tank charged up you know,  with pressure. It was this apparatus here. I found if I took this little tiny microphone and I put it right inside and held it inside the regulator and then breathe. (breathing sound) Since the mic was at such  an unusually close perspective, it just got this icy cold kind of vrrr sensation. [Sofaya] So how did you get to sitting at skywalker ranch like doing what you love everyday? [Ben Burtt]  I grew up in Syracuse New York. Didn't want to grow up and I found that going into movies was one way of not growing up. That I can still have fun putting on costumes and acting out stories and this sort of thing. I never looked at my interest in movies as a career. I never considered it growing up, it was a hobby and I majored in physics. But along side to that I was still making movies for fun. So I decided I would stop science for the moment and I would pursue this movie career. So I went to the west coast and I went to  USC cinema and I thought well I'll go out there and maybe two years of it I can get this out of my system and I can come back and be a science teacher and pursue what I thought I was going to do, and I was there for about ten days and I chickened out and I got on a plane and I came home. I was just fearful of doing this and I can remember my automatic garage door closing and I'm standing on this inside and I thought you know my whole world was ended because there was this door closing. Clunk. I was back in my house in my bedroom where I grew up and I thought I had failed completely. [Ben] That definently resonates with me, maybe all of us but particularly like in Rhode Island is so small and tight knit, it's hard to step out and I feel that uncertainty and fear and then you just freeze up. Was there any one thing that motivated you to finally get in the car and go, and not turn around? I used up all my opportunities locally and I needed a place to plant my imagination, that it can grow. The folks at USC said I could still come back and start another semester and hold it open for me and I thought about it for some months and got the courage for it and I went back. It took me a second attempt to do that. It wasn't easy, it was a time of trauma to some extent. I still was so uncertain about what I wanted to do but when I was at USC somebody called the campus and said we're looking for some young student interested in sound who can come work on this film called "The Star Wars." We just need some one, well they didn't say so, cheap. And behind me, that artwork on that screen is, that was what was on the wall in their office. It was one of the early paintings that depicted what the movie might look like, and I looked at that and I said, "Wow, I made this film when I was 14, a version of it so I'm cut out for this job," and I got the job. Of course I didn't know where that was going to lead. I didn't know I'd be still talking about it fourty years later. [Blaster sound effects] [Ben Burtt]  Ok who wants to shoot? [Blaster shooting] [Martha]  There was the whole kind of fandom, because it was just this absurd opportunity that no fan should be allowed to have. [Ben] It was like taking a time warp back to the original days of making sound because he had the original stuff, like that he created Star Wars that he sparked my imagination as a child. You know for hours I would play in the backyard imitating the sounds he came up with and it was the way he came up with them, that was the coolest thing of all. [Ben Burtt]  The sound of the lightsabers was the first sound I ever made for star wars oddly enough but... [Sofaya]  How? [Ben]  Yeah I was going to say how did you record that? I was a projectionist at a movie theater and in the projection booth at USC was a projector's interlock motors. They're just motors. They go "mmmmmmm." Like that. It sounded musical and charming but not maybe dangerous enough. A short time later I was in my apartment and I had a microphone plugged into my recorder and the microphone had a bad connecting cable on it so it was getting hum, it was "zzzzz" getting into the mic. and I thought, "Wow that sounds dangerous there I like that sound." I recorded that buzz and I took the hum of the projector motor and just blended the two together. And then I took another tape recorder and another microphone and waved it around in front of the speaker. So you have the hum "mmmmm" like this. I could produce the movement of the swords that way. So it wasn't any kind of digital effect or, in those days we had no computers. Everything was done cutting and splicing sound with scissors and tape. Physical stuff. How is your experience  with presenting your creative work to audiences? I personally struggle with really putting it out there because you really are really vulnerable. Even someone like me, makes things every day that get thrown away. It just happens. There's a library of sound on my computer and there's lots and lots of things that I loved and someone did not and it's part of it. I mean I was hired once a long time ago to make a sound for the movie Alien, you know. And they wanted a very particular sound of a transmission. I tried lots of different things and I could not sell one to the director. And I felt terrible, I had failed. I took one of those sounds later and used it in Raiders of The Lost Ark for ghosts coming up out of the ark of the covenant, and I got an Academy Award. So, it was the same sound. So you know these things happen. You have to get used to rejection. R2 was the most difficult project on the first one because there wasn't much precedent for a character that would communicate without using any words and we were really worried who would  understand what the heck was going on. We found that we were talking about it all the time and that we were verbalizing sounds. You know like maybe R2 should do this and R2 comes in here and he goes "beep boop beep hoop beep" and George would make a sound like that and I would answer him that way and so I realized one day wait a second wait a second aren't we doing kind of what we want? And so I came up with a process of combining my own voice making performances with the synthesizer. That synthesizer right there. The human input to it you know the human part of it. I turned it on today to see if it still works because often it doesn't anymore, but the basis for R2 was this synthesizer and you could do different pitches on the keyboard [R2D2 sounds] You can make him mad you know. But the trick to it was the human input, my microphone from my tape recorder in high school and so I could combine my voice at the same time that we were doing (makes sounds) [Group laughing] and the idea being that you kind of get the human input which is sort of a performance right? And you get the electronic part of it which is the machine so you get a 50/50 blend so some of the best things we've ever done in my opinion were actually done pretty quickly and instinctively. You don't want to over think it sometimes. [Martha] So then, what advice would you give to people kind of in our age and you know? Let me think about that for a second, well I do think it's important to have  clear goals in mind you can always change a goal, you don't have to suffer if something isn't working out. And have faith that you will be able to express yourself successfully within those goals. Even during those times where you just feel like you're getting nowhere. I had those times. Sure, still makes me nervous to think about. That was a long time ago. I didn't like that, I didn't like being stuck somewhere. I think it's part of a passage that's likely to happen to everybody at some point. [Ben]  Ben, that was incredible. I can only hope to be as plugged in as he is. Like he has really mastered it. He was just a really fascinating character. [Sofaya]  And now I can say I've been to Skywalker ranch and I've touched the original script of The Star Wars, like... ♪ [Ben] We are in Emoryville, California. Outside of San Francisco. We are about to go in to Pixar and meet with Ralph Eggleston. There's not really a reference for something that's completely imaginary so how do you make that up to make it like, authentic. [Ben] It's pretty cool to see  that community of artists and creative thinkers working together in synergy to create something unthinkable like Monsters, Inc. Like what? [Ralph] I always wanted to do animation and film and gravitated to some of the Disney animations especially when I was young. Especially Cinderella when I was ten years old, like what is this thing that made me laugh that made me cry? Every emotion but in 85 minutes, this is amazing. I ended up getting a camera and making a lot of animation when I was a kid about sixth or seventh grade I heard of a school called CalArts. Basically that was it, I got accepted and I was able to go and John Lassiter hired me at the very end of '92. So I've been here pretty much ever since. So you were the for Toy Story... That's what I was hired to do, art direct Toy Story. [Martha] I'm curious to learn more about your creative process, and what goes into a project generally? [Ralph]  Every project is so different. One thing I'm trying to work really hard on encouraging a lot of our younger artists here to realize is. Every four years is a four year graduate course in the subject matter of that film and to just take advantage of that because that's the fun part. The fun part is doing all the research and really getting into it. Getting to it's bare essence. Visually, and then how you present it and all of that. Can you clarify what kind of research you do? Because everything here is, you know you can't figure out how Nemo talks you know that's something that you're creating. Well we trained clownfish to talk actually. Oh ok. I thought I saw a video of that. Well I'll tell ya they were working on Ratatouille when we were working on Wall-E and they got to go to Paris and I got to go to a trash dump. For our films we go to the places, we crawl in the ground, we climb under things, we go where we're not supposed to go. With Wall-E we went to JPL and went to a bunch of cruise ships that, very thorough tours of the interior bowels of a cruise ship and also trash dumps, a lot of them. I don't know, it's fun, it's really fun. Right that you're kind of drawing on just every type of information. [Ralph]  Absolutely. Thinking about all of us being interested in creative fields in some way, we're really curious if you have any advice for people our age, not quite knowing what path to take. Yeah I think the only advice I would give anybody would really be to have fun with some research. Once you become interested in something go out and find out as much as you can about it. I mean its not that hard to do especially with the internet. You know you can always get a dozen books on a subject and read through them and just keep doing that you know, that's just really it but a lot of people get stuck in their little world of what they do and so take yourself out of that and go experience the rest of the world. Go to different places and try different foods and go see a rock concert then go see a ballet then go see an opera then go see a movie just see everything. ♪ [Martha] So cool, so cool! Nature is so cool. [Water splashing] ♪ [Ben] We got the funk situation going on dude. The fridge isn't working. Driving to San Francisco  to Portland was like, that felt like open road, like that might have been the first time we felt it. We talked to Ben Burtt and  seeing just how he just perceives everything was just like mind-blowing and walking onto Pixars campus and seeing illustrations everywhere. He relishes in that research like thats the part where he just absolutely loves. But like for me, I don't know. I just feel like I have that passion for like anything. I got to the point where I said Ok I'm going to put my art to the forefront, that's what I'm going to pursue. So I went to art school. Now I'm finding out I don't even know where or even how I want to apply it, so now I'm at a place where I don't really know what I want to do. So that's where I'm at. [Janice] I also actually wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do because I didn't fit in in engineering, you know feminine and science or feminine and engineering just in our minds are never seen together. So what *Chick Tech* does is we bring in high school girls that have the aptitude but have either subconsciously opted out of technology or who haven't had the opportunities. We're looking for the girls that were like me. I did some interviews with some bigger companies, it was while I was pregnant with my daughter and I actually had two offers pulled after they found out I was pregnant. I was considered you know not as smart because I was feminine and girly, I was considered not necessarily someone you would hire for a technical job. Yeah, so I had imposter syndrome, I don't know if you guys have heard of impostor syndrome. So basically it's the feeling that no matter how good you are no matter how many accolades you get, you're actually an imposter, and you're waiting for people to find out. A lot of people experience this at some point of time in their lives, but it really hits women and men in non traditional careers. So women in technology. I was so sure that I didn't belong and that everybody else was better at it than me, that I just I was terrified of these managers finding out that I was a fraud. I would have panic attacks, I would cry, it was awful. So really I'm like, I'm looking at my past and I'm like how can I fix this for other people, how can I help other people not feel like I did. For anybody coming out of college, what life advice would you give? Always challenge the status quo. People are like "oh well you need to be this way to be in engineering." I'm like why? Challenge these structures that have been put in place, why are we doing it this way and how can we do it better? Every generation should challenge that. That's the healthiest way to move our society forward. ...So it says The most dangerous phrase in the language is: This is how we've always done it. and I wrote, challenge the status quo. [Ben]  Alright! [Martha]  Cool. [Ben] Yeah, her story was really inspiring and there's some huge societal pressures that she overcame and some molds and boxes that society tries to put you in that she absolutely shattered and is continuing to do and is doing it for other people and is inspiring other people to do that, and so on and so forth. That's inspiring, definitely. There were a couple of moments, um, every time we go through the deal where we explain where we are and why we're having trouble deciding what we want to do, I've specifically not said the words, I'm not a good designer, but like I'm not a good designer, I'm not the best I'm not even in the middle, I've always been at the bottom. [Martha]  What makes you feel like you're not a good designer? It's, it's, it's like hard not to compare yourself to others when, I'm not going to say the curriculum is built around comparing yourself to others but it's like you're constantly being scrutinized and to feel like you don't stack up is like a terrible place to be. Like how do you even, I'm surprised I made it four years to be completely honest. But you earned your spot there. and even if it is cut throat, you survived it. It made you stronger. Give yourself credit for that. Because it's easy, like Janice was just saying to have that imposter syndrome and feel like. [Sofaya] That's true, but I'm such a confident person in general so it's easy for me to fake it. I can convince people that I think that I'm awesome even when I don't and it's like, I just, there's only so many jobs and if you don't work for someone else that means you better have a damn good idea to make a job for yourself, which I don't have. [Ben] But, that's why we're all here because we all feel that way. We're reconfirming the uncertainty in each other. ♪ People keep telling me,  nothing else matters, just do what you love, do the thing that excites you or whatever, but that's a lot to kind of marinate on and kind of hard to put the pieces together into something cohesive. I know, we'll see what happens to me in the end, but as of now that's what it is. [Martha] We're in Seattle [Ben]  At experience music project [Leader #4] I think sometimes when you don't know what you want to do, it's because you don't know yourself. [Ben] Now that we have these big drives we're kind of really getting into our groove [Leader #5] Growing up in a small village, everybody knows you. I just wanted to be somebody else. [Leader #6] I got into music not because I wanted to get rich and famous, or even make money and retire. I got into it because I felt like I had something burning in my heart to say. Roadtrip Nation extends beyond the program you just watched. It's a movement that empowers people to define their own roads in life Here's a quick snapshot from the Naviance Summer Institute. My name is David Woldenberg, I am going to be a senior. I'm Josiah Smith,  I'm eighteen years old and I just graduated from  high school. My name is Jezelle Minos I'm seventeen and I graduated from Corona Del Mar high school. We're heading over to the Naviance summer institute conference and we'll be interviewing educators I want to ask the leaders like how do you define success, where were you at my age? Figure out like how did they get their start. I want them to be questions that will actually benefit me. [Educator #1]  Hey how are you guys doing? Nice to meet you. [Jezelle]  I'm Jezelle. [Educator #1]  Nice to meet you. So I guess I'm wondering how exactly you think you're successful or what your definition of success is. What did you have to go through to make it possible. What gives you your drive for your passion? I get out of bed in the morning and I hit the ground running and I really do because I have something that's driving me. It's driving me to become a better person and you get up and you find something that really drives you or really makes you happy. Then I think that's really what's most important to helping you reach the goals that you really want to reach. Each person had a unique perspective to offer. Let your passion drive you. Let it drive you. Your passion with the right plan and place will not steer you wrong. No matter what you do or where you come from You've got wisdom to pass down. [Male Narrator #1] Help young people find their way by sharing the lessons you've learned. Take fifteen minutes to tell us what you love to do. The doors open We're all ears Become a leader at ShareYourRoad.com 

The road-trippers head to Skywalker Ranch, where Star Wars sound designer Ben Burtt recounts driving cross-country to California twice before his dreams of being a sound designer beat back his fear of change; plus Pixar animator Ralph Eggleston on getting beyond the world you inhabit and going deeper into what interests you, and Janice Levenhagen-Seeley of ChickTech on challenging the status quo.
<br/>
<a href="http://academy.autodesk.com/"><img width="96%" height="96% style="position:left" src="http://archive.roadtripnation.com.s3.amazonaws.com/roadtrip/logo/Fueled_By_Autodesk.png"></a>

Challenge the Status Quo

When I was at USC, somebody called the campus and said, we're looking for some young student interested in sound who could come and work on this film called the Star Wars. We just need someone who's, well, they didn't say so, cheap. And behind me, that artwork on that screen, that was on the wall in their office and it was one of the early paintings that depicted what the movie might look like. And I looked at that and I said, wow, I made this film when I was 14, a version of it, so I'm cut out for this job. And I got the job. Of course, I didn't know where it was gonna lead, I didn't know I'd be still be talking about it 40 years later. 

Desire

Determination

Opportunity

Passion

I Made This

[SOUND] >> You probably recognize that, right? >> Oh, yeah. >> [CROSSTALK] Vader breathing. >> [SOUND] >> It's making me nervous. >> Yeah, you like that? >> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] Yeah. [SOUND] The script talked about Vader having a breathing mask of some kind. Yeah the apparatus it's me breathing through a scuba regulator. >> Oh, okay. >> It's back here. You have to have a scuba tank charged up with the pressure. It was this apparatus here. I found that if I took this little tiny microphone and I put it right inside, held it inside the regulator, and then breathe. [SOUND] Since the mic is in this unusually close perspective it just got this icy cold kind of sensation. >> So how did you get to- >> Here. >> Sitting at Skywalker Ranch, like doing what you love everyday? >> I grew up in Syracuse, New York. Didn't wanna grow up and I found that going into movies was one way of not growing up. That I could still have fun putting on costumes and acting out stories and this sort of thing. I never looked at my interest in movies as a career. I never considered it growing up. It was a hobby. And I majored in physics. But along side of that I was still making movies for fun. So I decided I would stop science for the moment and I would pursue this movie career. So I went to the west coast and I went to USC Cinema. And I thought, well, I'll go out there, and maybe two years of it I can get this out of my system. And I can come back and be a science teacher and pursue what I thought I was going to do. And I was there for about 10 days, and I chickened out. And I got on a plane and I came home. I just was fearful of doing this and I can remember my automatic garage door went down closing and I'm standing on the inside. I thought my whole world had ended, cuz there was this door closing, clunk. I was back in my house, in my bedroom where I grew up and I thought I had failed completely. >> That definitely resonates with me, maybe all of us, but in particular, like Rhode Island is so small and tight knit, it's hard to step out. >> Yeah. >> And like I feel that uncertainty and that fear and then you just freeze up. >> Yeah, that was me. >> Was there any one thing that motivated you to finally get in the car and go and not turn around? >> I'd used up all my opportunities locally and I needed a place to plant my imagination that it could grow. The folks at USC said I could still come back and start another semester. So they'd hold it open for me and thought about it for some months and got the courage up and went back. It took me a second attempt to do that. It wasn't easy. It was a time of trauma to some extent. I still was so uncertain about what I wanted to do. But when I was at USC, somebody called the campus and said, we're looking for some young student that's interested in sound that can come and work on this film called The Star Wars. We just need someone who's, well they didn't say so, cheap. And behind me that's, that artwork on that screen, that was what was on their wall in their office. It was one of the early paintings that depicted what the movie might look like. I looked at that and I said, wow, I made this film when I was 14, a version of it, so I'm cut out for this job. And I got the job. Of course I didn't know where it was going to lead, I didn't know I was still going to be talking about it 40 years later. [SOUND] Okay, who wants to shoot it? >> [LAUGH] >> Yeah! >> There's a trigger back here. >> I just like. >> There ya go. >> [SOUND] [SOUND] [SOUND] >> There was the whole fandom because it was just this absurd opportunity that no fan should be allowed [LAUGH] to have. Oh! Oh yeah. >> But it was like taking a time warp back to the original days of making sound because he had the original stuff, like, that he created Star Wars that he sparked my imagination as a child. For hours I would play in the back yard, imitating the sounds that he came up with. And it was the way he came up with them, that was the coolest thing of all. >> The sound of the lightsabers was the first sound I ever made for Star Wars, oddly enough. But- >> How? >> Yeah, I was gonna say, how did you record that? >> [LAUGH] How? I was a projectionist at a movie theater. And in the projection booth at USC, was a projectors, called interlock motors. They're just motors, they go [SOUND] like that. It sounded musical and charming, but not maybe dangerous enough. A short time later, I was in my apartment and I had a microphone plugged into my recorder. And the microphone had a bad connecting cable in it, so it was getting hum. It was getting into the mic and I thought, wow, that sounds dangerous there. I like that sound, so I recorded that buzz. And I took the hum of the protector motor, and I just blended the two together. And then I took another tape recorder and another microphone, and waved it around in front of the speaker. >> Oh, cool. >> Wow, yeah. >> So you have the hum, [SOUND] like this. I could produce the movement of the swords that way. So it wasn't any kind of digital effect or anything. Those days there were, we had no computers, everything was done cutting and splicing sound with scissors and tape and physical stuff. >> How was your experience with presenting your creative work to audiences? I personally struggle with really putting it out there, cuz you really are really vulnerable. >> Even someone like me makes things everyday that get thrown away, it just happens. There's a library of sound in my computer and there's lots and lots of things in there that I loved and someone did not. [LAUGH] And it's part of it. I remember I was hired once to make a sound for the movie Alien. And they wanted a very particular sound of a transmission. I tried lots of different things and I could not sell one to the director. And I felt terrible, I had failed. But I took one of those sounds later and used it in Raiders of the Lost Ark for ghosts coming up out of the Ark of the Covenant and I got an Academy Award so. >> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] It was the same sound. So these things happen. You have to get used to rejection. R2 was the most difficult project in the first one because it wasn't precedent for a character that would communicate without using any words. Okay? And we really worried who would understand what the heck was going on. We found that we were talking about it all the time and that we were verbalizing sounds. Maybe R2 should do this and no, R2 comes in here and he goes [SOUND] like that. And George would make a sound like that and I'd answer him that way. And so we realized one day, well wait a second, wait a second. Aren't we doing kinda what we want? And so I came up with a process of combining my own voice making performances with the synthesizer and it's that synthesizer right there. The human input to it. The human part of it. I turned it on today to see if it still works cuz often it doesn't anymore. But the basis for R2 [SOUND] was this synthesizer [SOUND] and you can do him in different pitches on the keyboard. [SOUND] You can make him mad. [SOUND] But the trick to it was the human input, my microphone from my tape recorder in high school. [SOUND] And so I could combine my voice at the same time that we're doing [SOUND]. >> Cool. >> [LAUGH] >> What? >> Wow. >> And the idea being that you kind of got the human input, which is sort of a performance right? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> And you get the electronic part of it, which is the machine, so you get a 50 50 blend. Some of the best things we've ever done in my opinion were actually done pretty quickly and instinctively. You don't wanna overthink it sometimes. >> So then, just what advice would you give to people kind of in our age and- >> Let me think about that for a second. Well, I do think it's important to have clear goals in mind. You can always change a goal. You don't have to suffer if something isn't working out. And have faith that you will be able to express yourself successfully within those goals. You know even during those times where you just feel like you're getting nowhere, you know. I had those times, you know, for sure. Still makes me nervous to think about it. >> [LAUGH] >> It was a long time ago. I didn't like that. I didn't like being stuck somewhere, but I think it's part of a passage that is likely to happen to everybody at some point. 

Acceptance

Goals

Interview

Had these two worlds where I was in science and then I was also interested in just science fiction you might say, too. I couldn't quite reconcile the two, I still almost get a little strange feeling in my stomach like knots. When I think of those couple years after college where I felt stalled. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, I just didn't know. And I don't want to go back and relive those two years. >> [LAUGH] Well that's where we need your help. Cuz that's what we're living right now. [LAUGH] >> I know, but what I but what about that is, is that I got through it. I do think it's important to have clear goals in mind. You can always change your goal. You don't have to suffer if something isn't working out and quitting something once in a while is okay. Because there maybe something around the corner that's waiting for you and you'll miss it otherwise. And have faith that you will be able to express yourself successfully within those goals. 

Courage

Struggle

Ben Burtt Highlight

How is your experience with presenting your creative work to audiences? I personally struggle with really putting it out there cuz you really are really vulnerable. >> Even someone like me makes things every day that get thrown away. It just happens. There's a library of sound in my computer and there's lots and lots of things in there that I loved and someone did not. And it's part of it. I remember I was hired a long time ago to make a sound for the movie Alien, and they wanted a very particular sound of a transmission. I tried lots of different things and could not sell one to the director. And I felt terrible, I'd just failed. But I took one of those sounds later and used it in Raiders of the Lost Ark for ghosts coming up out of the ark of the covenant, and I got an Academy Award. So- >> [LAUGH] >> So It was the same sound. So these things happen. You have to get used to rejection. 

Failure

Get Used To Rejection

[SOUND] >> You probably recognize that, right? >> Yeah. >> Darth Vader breathing. >> It's making me nervous. >> Yeah, you like that? >> [LAUGH] >> The script talked about Vader having a breathing mask of some kind. The apparatus, it's me breathing through a scuba regulator. >> Oh, okay. >> It's back here. You have to have a scuba tank charged up with the pressure. It was this apparatus here. I found that if I took this little tiny microphone and I put it right inside, held it inside the regulator, and then breathed. Since the mic was in such of this unusually close perspective, it just got this icy cold kind of sensation. 

Experience

Talent

Vader

I have, and I go home, I have notebooks like this, cuz I grew up in the era of three ring notebooks filled. I call them idea books, and they're tabbed like this, and they're just things I jot down all the time, and I've been doing that since high school. I get a little glimmer of something. Wow wouldn't it be fun to do a film about World War II bombers that end up in space? [LAUGH] Or I don't know what it is. And I quickly write down some characters and some names and some things and I save it. And often when I'm starting a new project I'll go back and have a good laugh. I'm sometimes amazed the things that pass through your mind. And I keep a little recorder around here. And I keep this in the car and in my pocket, and I talk into it when something. This is also a bad thing, too, because it interferes with your family life. You know what I mean, you're always thinking about something. But I always have found that sometimes something's percolating there under the surface, and I need to capture that moment and save it. And like I said, it might be very useful later. And they have been, they have been useful. 

Inspiration

Instincts

Idea Books

I grew up in Syracuse, New York. I didn't want to grow up and I found that going into movies was one way of not growing up. That I could still have fun putting on costumes and acting out stories and this sorta thing. I never looked at my interest in movies as a career. I never considered it growing up. It was a hobby. And I majored in physics. But alongside of that, I was still making movies for fun. So I decided I would stop science for the moment, and I would pursue this movie career. So I went to the West Coast, and I went to USC Cinema. And I thought well, I'll go out there and maybe two years of it, I can get this out of my system, and I can come back and be a science teacher, and pursue what I thought I was gonna do. And I was there for about ten days, and I chickened out and I got on a plane and I came home. I just was fearful of doing this and I can remember my automatic garage door went down, closing and I'm standing on the inside. I thought my whole world had ended because there was this door closing, clank. I was back in my house in my bedroom where I grew up, and I thought I had failed completely. That definitely resonates with me, maybe all of us, but in particular Rhode Island is so small and tight knit >> Yeah. >> It's hard to step out. >> Yeah. >> And I feel that uncertainty, and that fear, and then you just freeze up and. >> Yeah, that was me. >> Was there any one thing that motivated you to finally get in the car and go, and not turn around? I'd used up all my opportunities locally, and I needed a place to plant my imagination that it could grow. The folks at USC said I could still come back and start another semester. They still would hold it open for me, and thought about it for some months and got the courage up and went back. It took me a second attempt to do that. Wasn't easy, it was a time of trauma to some extend. I still was so uncertain about what I wanted to do. 

Doubt

I Chickened Out

R2 was the most difficult project on the first one because there wasn't much precedent for a character that would communicate without using any words. Okay? We were really worried who would understand what the heck was going on, you know? We found that we were talking about it all the time and that we were verbalizing sound. You know, like, maybe R2 should do this and R2 comes in here and he goes beep beep beep boop boop boop beep like that, and George would make a sound like that and I'd answer him that way. And so we realized one day wait a second, wait a second, aren't we doing kind of what we want? And so I came up with a process of combining my own voice, making performances with a synthesizer. Evidently it's that synthesizer right there. The human input to it, the human part of it. I turned it on today, just to see if it still works, cuz often it doesn't anymore, but the basis for R2 [SOUND] was this synthesizer. [SOUND] And you could do him in different pitches on a keyboard. [SOUND] You can make him mad. [SOUND] But the trick to it was the human input, my microphone from tape recorder in high school. Who hoo hoo ho and so I could combine my voice at the same time that we're doing [SOUND]. >> Cool. [LAUGH] [SOUND] >> And the idea being that you kinda get the human input, which is sort of a performance, right? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> And you get the electronic part of it, which is the machine. So you get a 50-50 blend in some of the best things we've ever done in my entire opinion were actually done pretty quickly and instinctively. You don't wanna over think it sometimes. 

The Human Input

I, you know, I didn't realize it but God had prepared me with all these little things that I had done, you know, my interest in writing and my interest in history and my interest in science and sound and photography and trick photography. All these little things suddenly were gathered together and focused into a structure which you know film making is a wonderful blend of all these liberal arts together. And any kind of training you get, electrical engineering, English, scientific training, history. You will find an application of it in filmmaking. I have used every course that I ever took in some way in the work that I've done over the years because filmmaking is involved writing. It's involved [LAUGH] psychology, sociology. It's involved things I learned in science and history. I'm just amazed, looking back, how all these things came together and they've all been useful to me. 

Everything Applies to Film

I want to know what that was, the official Star Wars sound effects map. >> [LAUGH] That when I was working on the first film, the first Star Wars film and I was given a tape recorder by you know, Lucas Films, and they said go out and record things. I kept a map of where I went to record things just for fun. See I'm a scientist guy. I was used to taking notes and I still would use those notebooks with graph paper in them that you use in a lab. I took lab notes. I may even have one here somewhere, I'll look over there. What have I got? Sorry I'm jumping out of your frame. What do I have here? I might even have some kind of records of things I did. I mean I used to, of course remember this digitally. Didn't have a laptop in those days. >> Right. >> But I would just write down all the sounds I would make. I would give them numbers. I was very much into, and I would give a description how I did it. There's something here with R2, if I can just find R2, electric tones, lasers. I would write down what I made something from, where it came from, just notes. And this has been really useful to me, because I've had to go back to remake a lot of things over the years. Especially now we're starting on these new set of movies, and they pick up in time after Return of the Jedi. So, it builds on. Where's my R2 book? Let me find my R2 book. Somewhere here. >> I saw light sabers in the next one. >> Re-recording by moving microphone distributor. >> Is that what it says? >> Yeah, lightsaber. >> Okay, well there's some history for you right there. >> Yeah. >> Storm trooper laser mixed with reverb phased mutual. >> Oh secrets. >> Just reading something here that says dry ice combined with a rocket launcher. >> [LAUGH] >> Combined with what? >> A rocket launcher. >> [LAUGH] >> Yeah, that's true. >> [LAUGH] >> Why not? [CROSSTALK] >> Extended sizzle. >> You like that? See you have to make up a language when you do this. >> Yeah, it's so, I mean I feel like this happens in any art. You create an alphabet of your own. >> So these are important diagrams to keep. That's how to make the blaster sound in the movie. >> How old are these? >> That's so I don't forget. >> Huh. >> Huh. >> I wrote this down in 1976. >> [LAUGH] 

Planning

Sound Map

I find I do the same with songwriting. >> It must be the same. >> Yeah, I have my voice memos on my iPhone are all filled with just like- >> Yeah. >> You're driving and you're like, oh I've got some lyrics coming through. >> Lyrics. >> If you go back and listen to it though? >> Yeah. >> You're like what was I thinking [LAUGH]. >> [LAUGH] >> Well, occasionally yeah, occasionally, not all the time, let's say one out of 25. >> Yeah. >> There's something what the heck was I talking about? I don't even know what I said. But it does happen and I think that so much what we do is like writing. Because writing is kind of to me the exercise of pulling something up from inside, translating it to the page so that you can hold it up and somebody else can read it. It's like that with your musical lyrics, it's like that with song writing, it's like that with dance, it's like that with the sound design that I do. You're gathering all these things inside you, and then you're rearranging them in an original way for you, and then presenting it and saying, do you understand this? And I think if you have a mind for that, sometimes you can't turn off the trickle of ideas that's always flowing. And also, I find with sounds, that if I hear something out there, if I go to the convenience store to make purchase and I hear a funny fan in a refrigerator there, that I have to go out to the car, get my recorder, bring it back, turn it on, put it in the refrigerator, close the door and then pretend to shop for a few minutes. And I've got this great refrigerator motor recording becomes a force field in Star Trek later. I mean- >> Wow. >> It's that kind of thing. >> Is that a real story, did that actually happen? >> Yeah, it's a real story, yeah. So it might be a bad thing, but there's some part of it in me that's always trying to, inner wheels turning, I'm trying to link it up with something in my experience. And suddenly something in my imagination connects with something I'm experiencing, and I've learned to collect that. 

Refrigerator Noise

I mean not everything I do is science fiction though. I mean there's lots of, when I did Lincoln, of course there's nothing in the movie science fiction. So I approach it very differently. But read the script, and the script for instance called for Lincoln to take out his watch, his pocket watch, and look at it and hang it up and a scene, or a couple of scenes, where his watch was in it. So I thought, hm, maybe we can get Lincoln's actual watch. Why not? So I went on a quest to find does this watch still exist and if so has anybody ever recorded it. And it turned out to be a really interesting pursuit, because nobody had recorded his watch even though one's in the Smithsonian. But it turned out there was another watch that belonged to Lincoln, passed down through his family, that was in the Kentucky Historical Society. And when I call the curator there he was a Star Wars fan, so he was real interested, he understood who I was. And he allowed us to record his watch. They brought in a watchsmith and they carefully, they have a key in the watch and wind. The thing was ticking after all this time, and there we go. So we- >> So when you watch Lincoln. >> Recorded the actual watch. What's that? >> And you hear his watch ticking, you're hearing Lincoln's actual watch ticking. >> Yeah. Well see that, unfortunately the scene in the movie was cut out. >> Oh, no. >> The main scene where there was a watch. It's in there in a few places where the watch is sort of incidental, unfortunately. For me, I mean I had this dream. But you know, movies get cut and scenes get removed, it was a long movie. 

Lincoln's Watch

In my senior year in college, I had a guest come to the school, to the physics department. And it was a man named Arthur C Clarke. And he was two things. He was a famous science fiction writer, and he was a scientist. He was credited with coming up with the concept of the communications satellite in geostationary orbit. Something that we depend on today. But along side of his scientific endeavours he was a writer of famous science fiction and he at the time that I was in school he was popular because he was the co-author of the script 2001 Space Odyssey, the movie. And I was fascinated with that film, and there was really nothing published about how they did the tricks in that film, how they created the illusions. So when Arthur Clark came to our physics department to give a talk and I started asking him questions about his career and how he got to where he was and more specifically, how did you do that movie in 2001 [LAUGH]. And he took the time at the blackboard to go up and explain to me how they did the effects in the film. And I was just totally inspired by this because here I saw a man who could combine his interest in science and science fiction. He had a foot planted in both worlds, and so I felt well maybe I can do that. It is possible I can sort of be in science but I can still have fun of the realm of movie making and science fiction as well. 

Ben Burtt

Sound Designer

Videos

Ben Burtt

Milestones

Education

Career

Career Roadmap

My work combines:

My work combines:

Film

Technology

Being Creative

Day to Day

Skills & Qualities Beyond School

Advice for Getting Started

Hurdles

The Noise I Shed

From Myself: