The Ultimate Star Wars Sound Deep-Dive Is Here: May the 4th Be With You!

The Star Wars Outlaws sound team at Massive Entertainment took sonic inspiration from the original Star Wars Trilogy films, embuing the sound of Outlaws with a ‘tape flavor,’ choosing ‘warmth over precision’ and ‘analog over digital.’
Here, they talk about honoring that ’70s aesthetic while also creating a ‘scoundrel adventure’ inspired by Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Solo: A Star Wars Story. They talk about their creative and technical approach to creating an immersive and reactive world, capturing fresh sounds on field recording trips to Australia, Tasmania, and locations around Sweden, using slapback, bubblespace, and spatial seeds system in the Snowdrop engine, and much, much more!

 
In this exclusive AirCon interview, Jennifer Walden speaks with Emmy, MPSE, and CAS Award-winning supervising sound editor/sound designer/re-recording mixer Bonnie Wild:

 
Skywalker Sound supervising sound editors Matthew Wood and Bonnie Wild discuss the details of their sound work on the Disney+ series Ahsoka, S1:E4 ‘Fallen Jedi,’. Here, Wood and Wild talk about designing sound of the star map dome, how they handled the droid vocal processing, what went into the sound of Shin’s force choke ability, and more!

 


While in the original THX theater — where Return of the Jedi was mixed! — Adam Savage sits down with Academy Award-winning sound designer, film director, editor, screenwriter and voice actor Ben Burtt, the man behind the iconic sounds you know and love from the Star Wars franchise, from R2D2’s beeps and boops to Chewbacca’s rrrruuurrr to Darth Vader’s heavy breathing. What’s YOUR favorite Star Wars sound?

 


Each episode of Disney+ animated series Star Wars: Visions is unique – created by different teams with stories inspired by the Star Wars universe. Here, supervising sound editor/sound designer David W. Collins at Skywalker Sound and writer/director LeAndre Thomas at Lucasfilm talk about their MPSE Award-nominated sound on S2: E8 ‘The Pit,’ which tells the story of oppressed kyber crystal miners abandoned by the Empire. They discuss using sound to help fill in details in animation, creating creature vocals, using legacy sounds to tie this individual story to the larger Star Wars universe, and so much more!

 

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor – developed by Respawn Entertainment and published by Electronic Arts – is the highly anticipated sequel to Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (2019 – here’s the sound story behind that game), and picks up five years later with young Jedi Knight Cal Kestis continuing the fight against the Galactic Empire.

Here, the sound team (led by Audio Director Nick von Kaenel at Respawn Entertainment) talks about how they built upon the foundation of Fallen Order while still creating something fun and fresh for Star Wars games fans. They talk about designing bolder sound for the different colored lightsabers, creating franchise-fitting new sounds for foes, world-building for unique environments, building systems for breaths, foliage, ships, combat, debris, and Force abilities, using blueprints in UE4 to add audio to game logic, working with Wwise middleware for spatial audio, and so much more!

 
The Andor series will explore a new perspective from the Star Wars galaxy, focusing on Cassian Andor’s journey to discover the difference he can make. The series brings forward the tale of the burgeoning rebellion against the Empire and how people and planets became involved. It’s an era filled with danger, deception, and intrigue where Cassian will embark on the path that is destined to turn him into a rebel hero.

 
 
Here’s how ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ blended Hayden Christensen & James Earl Jones to make Darth Vader:

 
 
So thrilled to be welcoming Natalie Holt back to Soundtracking – a composer who’s doing great things, most recently in providing the score for Obi-Wan Kenobi on Disney +.

Here she tells Edith about adding to the legendary musical landscape of the franchise, and meeting the man who’s behind much of it, her idol John Williams.

 
In this great interview by the Dolby Institute and the Soundworks Collection, Bonnie Wild – sound effects editor and re-recording mixer of Disney+’s hit show The Mandalorian – takes us behind the scenes for a conversation about achieving cinematic scale and production value on a television budget, balancing the palette of new sound creation with classic Star Wars sounds we all know and love, why mixing in a home theater environment was important for the show, and how to do a Jawa loop group session:

 
In this Soundworks Collection interview, supervising sound editors Matthew Wood and David Acord delve into the conceptual and sonic intricacies of evolving “force lightning,” and about working in stages from temp mixes to the final mix in a film with a legacy. They share experiences working playfully and dynamically with director J.J. Abrams, recording lines in actor Adam Driver’s closet, and working on previous Star Wars films.

Matthew Wood and David Acord, co-sound supervisors on Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, have been working on the sound of the SW films for nearly two decades. Join us for a wide-ranging conversation on the audio restorations of the original films, the voice of Baby Yoda from The Mandalorian, the importance of sound to George Lucas… and even the controversy about whether Han or Greedo shot first and the notorious “Maclunkey.”
 

(via @Soundworks)

Watch the video here: