At Skywalker Ranch, the world-class team of sound artists from Skywalker Sound create the world’s most recognisable sounds for films like the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises. In this article, we get a rare insight as they share their creative process, including the origins of R2-D2’s voice, and their journey to building a vast sound effects library.

Sound Is At Least 50% Of The Moviegoing Experience

In the rugged terrain of Nicasio, California, population shy of one thousand, visitors to this isolated corner of Marin County are surrounded by a spirit of limitless possibility.

This is the site of Skywalker Ranch, the vast facility owned and conceived by George Lucas, the creator of the epic Star Wars universe. The cornerstone of the ranch is Skywalker Sound, an iconic sound design, editing, mixing, and audio post-production facility. The 153,000-square-foot, red-bricked building, surrounded by vineyards and the man-made Lake Ewok, stands as a monument to the maxim, often repeated by Lucas, that sound is at least 50% of the moviegoing experience.

The sound library system Soundminer, which allows for descriptive keyword searches almost poetic in their specificity, keeps pace with Skywalker Sound’s ever-expanding library of nearly a million sounds.

Skywalker Sound Powered By Over 275 Computers Running Pro Tools

Sound editor Ryan Frias gives a tour of Skywalker Sound’s central machine room, which he describes as… “basically the brains of all the stage operations”. Ryan continues…

“As creative people, you don’t want technology to slow you down,” he says. “When you have a thought and you really want it out there on a blank canvas like that, you really need fast tools that can give you the results as fast as you think.”

The studio’s force of 130 Mac Pro racks, 50 iMac, 50 MacBook Pro, and 50 Mac mini computers running Pro Tools all connect remotely to this central power source.

Ben Burtt, the sound designer of the original Star Wars films, the prequels, and the Indiana Jones franchise shares some of his journey…

“I started out with a Macintosh SE, way back, word processing was a huge leap forward for me as a writer.

Sound editing in a way is really the same as word processing; cutting and pasting files, all the experience I had on the Mac immediately gave me training for what came along in cutting digital sound. I started cutting using a Mac with Final Cut in the late ‘90s and now have four Mac computers. Each handles a different process: one for picture editing, sound editing, and manuscript writing, I’m completely surrounded. They’re labelled Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta.”

Create Your Own Sound Effects Library

Talk to any artist at Skywalker Sound and it quickly becomes evident they all harbour a personal library of treasured recordings and for sound designers, even outdated equipment creates opportunity. For example, here’s what supervising sound editor and sound designer Al Nelson has to say…

“Sounds that evoke emotion are what we’re always on a quest for. I love happy accidents and I love breaking technology and getting unexpected results. I love to play with digital systems that are clocking wrong, meaning the way the bits are flowing. It’s broken, it sounds like bad radio. I have a really old PowerBook, and it has certain old software I like to use; I can feed recordings into it and digitally break them.”

One never knows when inspiration will strike. A contractor, who knew Ben Burtt, was always on the lookout for unique sounds and once called to say he’d heard a strange, broken ceiling fan in an apartment he was servicing. Burtt’s recording of the wobbly blades later transformed into the ominous sound of the laser gates that momentarily divide Qui-Gon Jinn and Darth Maul during the climactic lightsaber duel in ’Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace’.

Sources sometimes materialise from thin air. Ben Burtt continues…

“I’ve had people write me on the internet and say, ‘My aunt has a really weird cough, do you want to record it for a creature?’”

When gathering field recordings in nature, supervising sound editor Baihui Yang stresses the handiness of having a MacBook Pro on-site…

“We can bring the Pro Tools session with us in the field and watch and record and quickly put it together, to test whether it works or not. If you bring all the recordings back to the studio, you don’t know if you’ve missed the moment.”

Applications like Keyboard Maestro are also integral to her process, as is Matchbox from The Cargo Cult.

With a background in classical guitar, among other instruments, Al Nelson often seeks musicality in the outside world, as well as inside the mixing room…

“We’re all musicians — either literally musicians or musicians of sound. Everything is very much a tonal approach or an orchestration approach. You can’t just throw noise at the screen; you have to articulate and pick your flavours in the same way that you would orchestrate something symphonic.”

The sounds we associate with Apple — the iconic F-sharp startup chime of a Mac, the swoosh of an outgoing email all share an essential, underlying characteristic with many of the most recognisable sounds from films like Star Wars, and that is one of activation. Think how often an idle droid bursts to life with warnings and bleeps. Or how the elegant, dormant handle of a lightsaber suddenly pierces into a glow. Or a ship, sputtering and lumbering through space, thrust into lightspeed.

Gary Rydstrom, a seven-time Oscar-winning sound designer who started working at Lucasfilm in 1983 explains…

“What I learned from Star Wars was that Ben used all-natural sounds to do science fiction. He kept sounds in the Star Wars universe gritty and realistic, based on real sounds you would manipulate into something you’d never heard before, which was inspiring.”

A key distinction in Ben Burtt’s work is the element of performance.

“When it comes to fantasy sounds, especially — alien voices, creatures, weapons, strange things of the sort — a performance helps.”

In the earliest stages of finding the voice of R2-D2, which set the standard for how sound design can influence character development, Ben felt increased pressure, knowing the droid would be sharing scenes with Alec Guinness.

“When I sat down and started experimenting with R2 on the first film, suddenly I realised that I’m in dialogue. The timing is very important. Once we realised we had something that was working, the picture editors went back through the movie and started re-cutting many of the scenes, changing the timing ever so slightly. It began to figure into the actual pacing, as any dialogue would.”

Ben continued to refine the performance in the prequels, for which he served as both sound designer and picture editor.

Supervising sound editor André Fenley, whose extensive credits at Skywalker Sound include the iconic dinosaur sounds from the original continues…

“Sound designers actually create sounds from nothing. They’re going out and recording the weirdest things that you can think of, and they take those raw sounds and manipulate them and bend them and break them and turn them upside-down and see what they get.”

As the artists at Skywalker Sound have settled into the digital age of filmmaking, their advice for both aspiring and professional filmmakers is boundless. Ben Burtt…

“I tell young people who want to work with sound in movies, ‘You should listen to the world around you and build a sound effects collection.’ Get a recording and classify it, because any time you build a library of sound, you are making creative choices. The other thing is that because there are plenty of inexpensive applications that you can have access to now on your iPad or your MacBook, that you can actually do all kinds of cutting and sound-mixing at home. I could never do that. If I was a teenage filmmaker again, I’d be amazed. I’d have drones, I could do all kinds of sound recording. I could do none of those things in my formative years.”

Al Nelson even owns up that iPhone recordings are “perfectly useable” in a professional context.

Gary Rydstrom again…

“However you do it, think about sound early on, because it’s one of your storytelling tools. I will argue it’s one of the more efficient storytelling tools, once you get into the shooting and cutting.

You can tell a lot of the story with sound in a way that is less expensive than visuals, usually, and sometimes more emotionally powerful. If you’re interested in sound or filmmaking, you can record 4K+ video on your iPhone. There’s no excuse. The stuff that’s part of our day-to-day lives is the same stuff you need to record sound and make movies. That’s the real revolution. Ultimately, it will democratise the whole process.”

Want More? Watch This…

The scream of a TIE fighter. The Pew-Pew! of a blaster. Behind the Mac: Skywalker Sound spotlights the team of creators who collaborate to make the magic we hear onscreen. From field recording and Foley to sound design and mixing, these artists reveal their process, showing us how they use Mac to bring to life sounds from the Star Wars universe and beyond…

Virtual Studio: Create Creature Vocals with Skywalker Sound

On Monday, May 9th 2022 you can join sound designer Leff Lefferts as he shares his favourite projects and how Skywalker Sound brings iconic movie characters to life with Apple Music’s Eddie Francis. You’ll watch footage from Skywalker Ranch in their Behind the Mac film. Then, guided by an Apple Creative Pro, you’ll learn how to make vocal effects for a character using your voice, everyday objects, and GarageBand on Mac.