Honoured this past Wednesday at the Locarno Film Festival with the prestigeous Vision Award Ticinomoda, 12-time Oscar nominated sound designer (and living legend) Ben Burtt sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to delve into his peerless career, a soundboard of achievements that served up an landscape of audio that perfectly complimented the mindblowing visuals delivered onscreen. From the easter egg usage of the Wilhelm scream to the creation of the menacing breathing of Darth Vader, he delves into every element of his journey, and here Burtt discusses the creation of R2-D2 and the decisions made in giving the fiesty astromech a voice. THR: What was the turning point with R2-D2? BB: Well, I was trying out a lot of synthesizers and noise-making devices, squeaky hinges, say, moving them around, to make it sound like a language. It wasn’t working. George and I would be vocalizing the sounds to each other that we wanted to hear, like “bleep-bleep, bloop” — like little kids making funny noises, and it occurred simultaneously to us both: “Why don’t we build on that idea, actually include a human performance in the sound?” First, we thought babies would work and I recorded all kinds of vocals from children, cooing, babbling, etc. But it’s very hard getting a performance out of a baby. I ended up just doing it myself, in combination with a synthesizer, a keyboard. I combined that with my own voice, so about 50 percent was me trying to sound electronic and the other half was the synthesizer trying to sound human-like, and it was blending the two together. I ended up with a series of expressive sounds, to indicate what R2-D2 was thinking at any moment. Because there was a human performance in it, you had a sense of R2 being alive, being sentient, having some sort of soul. That was the key, injecting the human element, but disguising it so it didn’t just sound like someone impersonating a robot. It wasn’t until a test screening of the film that we knew it worked. The movie starts with two robots talking to each other. It’s just C-3PO and R2-D2 making beeps and boops. It’s a lot to expect for the audience to get that but, fortunately, they did. And we realized that we were on the right track with the robot language. THR: It’s really incredible to see, watching Star Wars again, how little of those invented languages, R2-D2’s language, Chewbacca’s language, the Ewoks, is ever translated. BB: George’s intention from the beginning was to not have any subtitling. A lot of times, C-3PO translates what R2-D2 is saying, but for the rest of it, you can infer the meaning because of our universal understanding of non-word expressive sounds. We worked really hard to get those expressive sounds in there. So when R2-D2 makes a rude sound, you know he’s cursing, that he’s frustrated. He can be cute, he can be innocent. And that was important to us — that he was like this little five-year-old in the midst of all this warfare and traveling through the desert, whatever. It’s hard to go back and describe how we were imagining it because we didn’t know, or think we’d be talking about it 50 years later. [amazon box="B0CXYS2ZPZ"]

He's the master of sound, an Oscar winning audio genius who gave us the familiar whistles and beeps of R2-D2, the roars of Chewbacca and a fleet of starships and the thrum of lightsabers, but on The Phantom Menace Ben Burtt was also editing the visuals of the film, and to celebrate the 25th anniversary he talks about the challenges of both, and here he looks at the iconic podrace. “So when you get to the podrace, you’re dealing with all of these tonalities,” Burtt continues. “You create a distinctive sound for each podracer so you have a sense of differentiation between them, some that are high, others low. Sebulba had his pulsing engines like a big heartbeat. Another was just an electric toothbrush motor. Anakin’s was a blend of a lot of high-speed racecars. It’s a hodge-podge of high-energy vehicle sounds that the audience knows from their own experience that these things represent power and danger. If you place them in, and disguise them just a little bit so you don’t hear a dragster or a P-51 Mustang, then you capitalize on the emotions those sounds carry with them, because people have heard them in real life. That process goes back to the first Star Wars movie where we built a lot of things with World War II airplanes and jets.” What began as a nearly 30-minute, 25-lap epic in the videomatic phase, was carefully refined down to a three-lap nail-biter that rivals A New Hope’s trench run in energy and suspense. Lucas and his crew withheld any musical score until the final lap of the race as Anakin Skywalker closes in on his opponent and the ultimate chance of freedom. “Filmmakers often miss opportunities to use sound in this way,” says Burtt. “I understand the power of music, but there can be a lot of insecurity in terms of what filmmakers think is needed to have the biggest impact. It’s easier to have music run all the way through something and feel like you’ve done your job. But my feeling is that the power of music is so strong that you want to use it carefully. On the other hand, I’ve run some of the sequences in the films without their music and you’re missing something. It’s all about balance, with the right choices made for the right moment in the context of the whole movie.” [amazon box="B0D18PNXNL"]

https://youtu.be/QAZKWMei8gg Adam Savage is back at 32TEN Studios for the final time with Oscar-winning Lucasfillm legend Ben Burtt, who gives Adam a tour of the now-closed studio Adam Savage gets a tour of the iconic 32Ten Studios before its permanent closure, courtesy of Academy Award-winning sound designer, film director, editor, screenwriter and voice actor Ben Burtt. The majority of the ‘80s and ‘90s blockbusters -- from Indiana Jones to Back to the Future to Star Wars -- passed through 32Ten Studios during their production, and it was even housing the original Lucasfilm EditDroid, a revolutionary computerized analog non-linear editing system, which changed movie making forever. This studio is full of secrets and legacy ready to be discovered! [amazon box="0345381521"]

Heard that JW Rinzler has died, which is very sad news. He wrote a number of fantastic “Making Of” Star Wars books over the years that told the full stories of producing the original trilogy with great candor. Deep dives into not only flashy things like special effects, but also the business side — the money, the contracts, deals good and bad; it’s all there and meticulously researched. He also wrote this book, The Sounds of Star Wars, with the legendary sound designer Ben Burtt. I interviewed Rinzler about the book for my magazine at NY Comic Con in 2010 and then met Burtt a year or two later when he did the Hyser Lecture at the annual Audio Engineering Society convention in SF. Both were craftsmen at the top of their game. R.I.P.


The really cool thing about the new #waroftheworlds release by #criterion is that it has a documentary of movie archaeologists led by #benburtt of @lucasfilm fame. So good to see Ben Burtt again (at Canonsburg, Pennsylvania) https://www.instagram.com/p/CCr0YMagH30/?igshid=afen25lnqu8k

#starwars #book #benburtt #sergioaragones #nowreading https://www.instagram.com/p/B6hFDwrn8GE/?igshid=12eflve1rssnb