Rick McCallum:

Sound is 50 percent of the experience for us and that's been George's credo for a long, long time.

Twenty-seven years ago when he first started A New Hope, he hired a young kid who had just graduated from USC. His name was Ben Burtt. He has worked on all six of the Star Wars movies plus some of the most important films of the last 25 years. He's earned multiple Oscars and he's worked with another young boy who's been with us a long time. We snatched him from the cradle: Matt Wood is our supervising sound editor. They make a fantastic team. Matt and Ben.

Bruce Carse, Below the Line:

The thing that fascinates me about your sound design is that it's so rich and colorful. When you started to tackle the sound design of the film, back in the very beginning, Ben, where do you guys start?

Ben Burtt:

Fortunately, from the beginning of the first Star Wars film, George always encouraged the sound development to start in pre-production. Sound was being talked about when you saw the first artwork, and sound effects and concepts for sound were there from the beginning as the films were shot.

Once the film was being edited, sound was put in right away. Unlike some traditions, where you don't get sound work done until the film has actually been edited, and there may be only a short amount of time left to work out all of the concepts, the sound has really been developed over a long period of time.

When I started working on Episode III as a film editor, cutting together pre-visualization sequences, I was putting sound in.

Bruce Carse, Below the Line:

You'd have to put sound temp-tracks in the pre-visualizations?

Ben Burtt:

Well, it was more than temp. You start out with the space battle, and I knew when those ships came in that they were going to be the new Jedi fighters, which were related to the TIE fighters from A New Hope. I felt the sound should have some continuity, so I started working with the old TIE fighter sounds and adding NASCARs to it and things like that to develop something that would hint at the direction of the technology and the sounds would be going in when all the films connected.

Bruce Carse, Below the Line:

Speaking of technology: Matthew, was there a lot of innovation on this film in terms of advancements in technology from the sound end?

Matt Wood:

Yeah, Episode III was a culmination of a lot of stuff we put together since Young Indy. Young Indiana Jones was the first show that we used digital sound editing on at Skywalker, and we just wanted to build each film and hold on to what we had learned and bring it to the next level.

I think Episode III was the first time that we used the single workstation environment for the entire process, everything from sound design to the final mix. We had our sound designers doing editorial and mix and the mixers doing editorial, so the flexibility of having one platform made it really easy for the workers to do that. The result is we have a much smaller crew for very long periods of time.

So, Episode III is that pinnacle of achievement technology-wise and what we had been working towards since Young Indy.

Bruce Carse, Below the Line:

Ben, many of the shots and sequences have so many different elements in them. The music, the dialogue, the sound effects are multilayered. Can you give us one example and kind of break it down and tell us how many elements and what they were for just one particular sequence?

Ben Burtt:

Well, there were about 1,000 different sound projects for the film. That doesn't mean just footsteps and foley. So many, many sounds went into any sequence.

The space battle you just saw starts out with a big rumble; that rumble is really Niagara Falls, filtered a little bit. We have NASCARs in there, we have guy wire twangs, which form the basis for almost all of the laser shots in the film. Of course you have R2-D2, which is a performance that combines microwaves with a synthesizer. And we revived some of our old equipment for this film. We pulled out a synthesizer from under my house - it was all moldy. Howie Hammerman, our engineer, got it working again.

There were a lot of things that were done in layers like that. General Grievous's Dread Speeder: You look at it, it's nasty, it's loud it's dangerous. I looked at it and said, "Well, a chainsaw would be perfect." Also, the heartbeats at the end with Vader on the operating table - they were a space shuttle sonic boom that was recorded over at my house in San Anselmo.

So, the sound design becomes a matter of finding real-world sounds and turning them into other things by combining them, layering them.

Bruce Carse, Below the Line:

What is the one thing that's different for you guys when you work on a Star Wars film than any of the other films you've worked on?

Ben Burtt:

Well, I think that we see ourselves as entertainers, and, of course, the sound effects can be entertaining not only to make, but to put in the film. Also, we've got the chance with these films to be performers.

We're a small operation, a sound crew of nine people, so we tend to use ourselves as characters. In the recent films, Matt and I amassed about 30 or 40 incidental characters: Battle Droids, Nemoidians, Gungans, Utapauian pit crew, R2 D2, all kinds of robots and we've enjoyed that because it gives us the feeling that we can really put our performances into the film.

I want to tell a little story about this guy (Matt). When we were putting together General Grievous in the early cuts in the editing room, I was putting in General Grievous's voice with a microphone and I would put in a voice so we would have something to reference. That was in the cut for a long time.

At one point I thought, "Maybe I could be General Grievous?" But that wasn't to be, they needed a better actor. So casting calls were put out and people sent in voice tapes from lots pf performers and people. Matt was handling the tapes as they were going to George and Rick.

Well, we can tell the story now. He put his own voice in the auditions and he identified himself as "Alan." So, "Alan," welcome to Below the Line!

Matt Wood:

Thank you, guys!