"They didn't serve any purpose except to create this noise, which would terrify people.
"In World War II the super dive-bombers had an artificially created siren wail created by air ducts," he once said. Joe Johnston, who won an Academy Award for the effects work on Raiders of the Lost Ark and later directed such films as Captain America: The First Avenger, drew storyboards for A New Hope, later recalling the inspiration behind the TIE Fighters. It's a sound that triggers memories of the wailing dragons or pterodactyls we've seen in other movies-and like those ancient beasts, the TIE Fighter is a ceaseless killing machine. With their flat-panel wings, the Empire's TIE Fighters seem to be ferociously cutting through space, the noise they emanate resembling a high-tech buzzsaw. It was unreal."īy the way, Vader's breathing is so iconic that Lucasfilm trademarked it in 2014. And the flow of air through the narrow rubber hoses had a really cold, very hissy quality to it. "It had a little bit of a click and clank to it. "When you breathe through it you could hear the valve opening and closing," Burtt told NPR in 2008. You could hear his heart beating, he'd move his head you'd hear motors turning." But the sound designer quickly abandoned that approach-"He sounded like an operating room, an emergency room"-and instead turned his attention to putting a microphone inside a scuba tank regulator. "He came out into a scene, he was breathing like some … windmill. "The original concept I had of Darth Vader was a very noise-producing individual," Burtt has said.
#Endless sky ships leaving fighters behind when recalled. movie#
According to Burtt, Lucas had only told him that the character wouldn't be speaking English or any other recognizable human language-and that maybe the sound of a bear would work.ĭoes any movie villain have a simpler, more iconic sound associated with him than Darth Vader's strained breathing through his metal mask? It's a chilling juxtaposition-the recognizably human intake of air mixed with the robotic emptiness and echo of Vader's suit-and it came to Burtt when he was screwing around with scuba gear. It's remarkable now to think that Burtt had little to work from when he first designed Chewbacca's voice. As he would later recall about visiting Long Beach's Marineland of the Pacific, which closed down in 1987, "Its pool had been drained for cleaning-the walrus was stranded at the bottom, moaning-and that was the sound!"
But it took some doing: Burtt would travel to oceanariums on the off chance that their walruses would give him just the right sound. "Mostly bears, with a dash of walrus, dog, and lion thrown in," Burtt once said simply when asked how he found the sounds to create the character of Chewbacca's voice. But Mayhew didn't produce the grunts, whimpers and wails that emanate from Chewie-those were provided by Burtt or, rather, from some friends in the animal kingdom.
Once asked what makes a good sound designer, Burtt responded, "It boils down to the ability to select or create the right sound for the right moment, to pick the thing that dramatically tells what needs to be said in that moment." As these six examples demonstrate below, Burtt's sonic instincts are pitch-perfect.Īs played by Peter Mayhew and designed by makeup supervisor Stuart Freeborn, Chewbacca is both alien and familiar, an oversized, lovable dog who just so happens to tower over everyone else and walk upright. For that, you can thank Burtt, who has won two competitive Oscars and two special-achievement Oscars, and has gone on to work on such projects as E.T., the Indiana Jones films and Wall-E. Putting in sounds from the real world creates the illusion that these fantasies are credible."Īlmost 40 years after its premiere, Star Wars is such a cultural colossus that even its sound effects are ingrained in our subconscious. That man was Ben Burtt, who spent about a year coming up with different ideas for, say, how a Wookie talks or the exact combination of human and electronic sounds needed to bring a droid to life.Īs Burtt later told an interviewer, "Since we were going to design a visual world that had rust and dents and dirt, we wanted a sound world that had squeaks and motors that may not be smooth-sounding or quiet. When George Lucas began work on Star Wars in the mid-1970s, he tapped a USC classmate to craft all the strange sounds for this risky sci-fi movie about a sheltered kid on a distant planet who ends up saving the galaxy.
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