The inspired sound of ‘Star Wars: Visions’ – with David Collins and Mac Smith:

Star Wars: Visions Volume 2 Official Trailer

Doug Siebum (DS): Can you both introduce yourself and tell me how you got into doing sound for animation and how you ended up working on an animated Star Wars show?

Mac Smith (MS): I was thinking back to what was the first animated thing I ever worked on and it’s got to be Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within which was in 2001, as Randy Tom’s sound design intern.

So that was my very first taste of animation. And while I was just an intern mostly sitting on the back of the couch watching Randy do all this amazing sound design. There were a few times where he said, “you see what I’m doing here, where I’m sort of combining these layers, why don’t you take a stab at that and try to make other variations.” And so that was my first taste of that. And then right after that project, I worked on Osmosis Jones, which is an animated movie. Half live action, half animated, and the animated portion which Randy was working on had to do with inside the human body. We recorded all kinds of crazy things for that. Over the years I worked on probably 3 or 4 movies from Illumination, 3 or 4 Pixar movies, 3 or 4 DreamWorks movies, so I love animation. It’s definitely been one of my favorite things to work on, but this is the first time working on a Star Wars animation!
 
David Collins (DC): Like Mac. I started as an intern at Skywalker, but I was on the scoring stage side of things. When things slowed down, I was able to shadow some of the sound effects on Toy Story 2. That was my first real introduction to animation on the post production side. I just followed them around and learned. I remember at one point they went to a toy store locally, and bought every noise making squeaky toy they could find and all kinds of different stuff. They put it all over the booth. One of the scoring stage isolation booths. I helped them record a bunch of stuff. They took some HVAC ventilation, and I remember using my fingers and doing footsteps for that scene, where they’re running through the HVAC ventilation and recording that as sweeteners for footsteps, and seeing moving storyboards and rough versions of picture turnover at that time. It left a huge impression on me.

I ended up moving into video games about a year later and I stayed there. In many ways, I still have one foot in the video games business, but I stayed there for over a decade. I went over to LucasArts in 2000 and that’s all animation essentially, except it’s interactive. The portions that Mac and I did together were like little animated movies. I was there for a while. I went freelance after the Disney sale happened, and then when Lucasfilm and Star Wars were sold to Disney. I got a call to come back to Skywalker in 2018 and it was specifically to do a show called Star Wars Resistance. That led to a few other Star Wars animated projects, including the Bad Batch, and Tales of the Jedi. Right around that time, to get around to Star Wars: Visions, the franchise group at Lucasfilm was starting to do more and more animated projects. Lego Star Wars Holiday special, things like that.

In the first season of Star Wars: Visions, I had never done anything like it before. I mean, it’s an anthology series, and every single episode is a different studio. So you’re having kickoff meetings with different creatives each time. In season one, all the studios were from Japan. So we were having conversations with each different studio. I think at one point, we did do two episodes with Trigger Studios, but there were two different teams within Trigger, so it was still like two different studios. That’s kind of how I started in animation. I’m getting ahead of our conversation here, but it’s been a long road along with Mac, of learning and loving animation, and being a big fan. There’s a certain freedom to it and a certain way that you can express yourself with sound in animation that lends itself even more to hyper reality, which is really intriguing if you work in sound.

MS: I guess I should correct myself because I said Star Wars: Visions was my first Star Wars animated thing but as David brought up, working on the Star Wars Episode 3 video game, that was essentially animation.

DC: Part of it was live action though. There were live action sequences. I know what you mean. Visions was different than The Revenge of the Sith video game.

DS: With each episode being done by a different animation studio, did you take a different approach to the different episodes?

MS: Absolutely and all of the episodes came to us in different ways. There were some episodes, like The Bandits of Golak one from 88 Pictures in India, which had no sound effects. It only had the voices. So traditionally in animation, working with a studio like Pixar or DreamWorks, we get a pretty flushed out Avid track with temp sound effects, and we have a guide of what to do. In that case, with that one from India, there was no sound. So they were really leaning on us heavily. Where other ones, like the one from Chile, from Punk Robot Studios, in the start did have a full track that had been done by a different sound studio in Chile, which we just augmented slightly and did some additional details. And then everything in between, like Screecher’s Reach had an Avid track with some sounds in it, but they really leaned on us to, to go in and do our thing, and make it sound like we thought it should. And I’m sure David had the same experience with the episodes he did.

DC: We learned in season one that every episode was very unique. A lot of times with Star Wars, it has been traditionally a very small crew, and there’s been a lot of effort put into making things somewhat consistent. I mean, you still want to push new ground. But you know, “THIS is what this sounds like in this universe and this is what THAT sounds like in this universe.” You want to at least have a rough framework for how the galaxy consistently works. That’s how it traditionally has been. Particularly in the movies, and when it was just the first 6 films. Especially with Ben Burtt and Matthew Wood.

When it came to Visions, what we realized pretty quickly was that this lives up to the name of the series. It is a unique vision per studio of what Star Wars is to them, and what it means to them, and that includes sound.

When it came to Visions, what we realized pretty quickly was that this lives up to the name of the series. It is a unique vision per studio of what Star Wars is to them, and what it means to them, and that includes sound. So we would do a kick off call and say, look, we’re a service. We want to provide a service to you. If you want this to sound like a Star Wars movie, or even a particular Star Wars movie, we can do that. We have all those sounds. We have this wonderful Star Wars sound library that’s been built up over over 40 plus years, but if you want to do something unique, you can do that as well.

I remember very well, in the first season, a lot of the studios were doing their own sound work. We did four at Skywalker. Four that I did, and then there was a fifth one that I started working on called T0-B1, although I always called it Tobi-Wan. The producers weren’t sure what was going to happen with the sound, because we had gotten a few cuts, and the sound effects weren’t in or final, and they asked me to start doing a pass. I actually realized, as I was putting in certain Star Wars sounds, that I was actively working against the vision of the studio. And if I make these lightsaber sounds like legitimate lightsabers, it’s not going to be as charming as it is, if they make this sort of Astro Boy-esque sound pass on it. Which they ultimately did. There’s a few of my little sound edits in that episode, but for the most part the trick was to get out of the way.

So every single time like you mentioned with 88 Pictures, where there was no sound, that’s how The Duel was for us. In this season, Studio La Cachette was that way for us, for The Spy Dancer. The Pit was that way, but in the case of El Guiri and their Sith episode, their sound designer Gabriel Gutierrez did the majority of the work. Like Mac said, we just sweetened it. And that’s the whole point of this series, is to get ideas from around the world of what Star Wars is or could be, and that’s exciting. We’re here to make it sound as much or as little like Star Wars as they want as a service, as basically a sound arm of Lucasfilm for these studios. Particularly because, exactly like you said Mac, some have very robust sound departments, and others don’t have them at all.

MS: The Triggerfish episode, the studio from South Africa that did the short Aau’s Song. They had very ambitious expectations. They wanted us to incorporate vocals into the majority of the sound design. And that’s not something that it’s like “Oh, yeah, here’s the vocal spaceship in our library.” It’s like, “Oh, that’s a bigger thing.” So they luckily did send us a bunch of vocal sounds after our spotting session, performing certain sounds, that then we augmented and made them sound a little more Star Warsy. It was definitely a lot of heavy lifting on that episode, because that was very ambitious and a different kind of thing that we don’t typically get asked for.
 

DS: Can you talk about the variety of worlds and ambiences with the different episodes?

DC: Well, I was about to compare The Spy Dancer versus The Pit. The Pit was very very dusky, and dry, and dirty, and gritty. You wanted to feel all of that. You just wanted to feel the sweat of the labor in those ambiences. You wanted to feel the unpleasantness of The Pit versus say, The Spy Dancer, which was like this cabaret essentially, and that needed to have a completely different feeling to it. Compare that to Sith, which is a world, she’s like painting this world as she’s going, and that was that one from El Guiri studio. They did a lot of the work on those ambiences there. There was this kind of free reign to create something new. I’d be curious to know, Mac, what you have to say about Screecher’s Reach, because that cave was just terrifying.

MS: Yeah, that was interesting, because they really wanted to establish the oppressive factory at the beginning, that we were escaping from, so that was really important to establish and there wasn’t a lot of time to establish that. Then going out into the forest, which a lot of that landscape was inspired by Ireland, where Cartoon Saloon is from. So the campfire and then walking up to the cave, and my initial hunch for that cave was let’s make it sound really deep, and hollow, and rumbly. The director was like “no, no, no, I want it to be almost silent”. We tried that. I was like “ohhhh”, it just makes this big pit in your stomach at that moment where you’re like “Oh, there’s this dark cave, and I hear almost nothing, like what could be in there?” So it made it even more scary with the lack of sound.

Certainly the vocals in there give room for them to reverberate and be absolutely terrifying.

DC: And that’s a choice, I mean, no sound is still a creative choice, and it’s all about juxtaposing where you’ve been and where you’re going. Certainly the vocals in there give room for them to reverberate and be absolutely terrifying. Sometimes the choice to pull back is also a valid choice, and not an easily arrived at choice.

MS: It’s true. The deeper we got into the cave the more sort of cave-like and tones we were able to put in there. Then to have those ghostly vocals, and wisps and things, and the rocks cracking, and the scream from the banshee woman. It’s funny, in the spotting session, we asked “How scary can we get with that scream?” And the director said “oh, go all the way.” And I asked Lucasfilm “what is this rated?” They were like “well, you don’t think a scream could make the rating go up?” And I said “well, you never know.” So they said “don’t go quite Hereditary, maybe back off a little bit from there.” So that was fun to figure out where those boundaries were.

Yeah, that episode was so satisfying, because it was really built to have this journey sonically. Then at the very end, going back into the meadow and then having the spaceship land and all that stuff. It was just really wonderful to experiment with those ambiences and those sounds and bring that world to life.

DS: Yeah, that episode really was like a ghost story. It actually kind of reminded me of which one was it, Return of the Jedi maybe? Where Luke was on Dagobah and went and fought Darth Vader in like a cave.

DC: Empire Strikes Back.

DS: Oh yeah, It was Empire Strikes Back. It had that ghostly kind of feel and the tension, you know?

MS: Yeah, it was fun. That episode leaves a lot up to interpretation too. Like trying to connect the dots of “who is that in the cave? And who is this character that comes out of this spaceship and takes her away?”

DC: That’s my favorite part. You’re like “Is that a Sith apprentice that just got made? Or is that a…?” You know, that’s the best part of the episode. It’s totally oh, so good. It’s very haunting.
 

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DS: Working in the Star Wars universe, there are iconic sounds such as the lightsaber, the blasters, the tie fighters. Is there pressure to stay within this sonic universe?

DC: Normally, I would say yes, although it’s a double-edged sword, because you want to be very careful about how you use really unique sounds. I’ve always felt like, because I’ve been working on Star Wars for so long and I felt this way about those movies growing up, is that those sounds have emotional memory for me as a viewer. Every time you use them, you need to do that intentionally or else you’re going to knock somebody out of a scene. It’s kind of like the Wilhelm scream, at this point, you know that people are going to pick up on it. And so if you’re going to use it, you’re going to use it for a comedic effect.

MS: Very intentional.

DC: Yes, with great intention. And so when you use those sounds, you know that there’s going to be a huge portion of the audience that goes “I recognize that sound. That’s a pod racer sound and you’re reusing it.” So it just depends, you don’t want to be too rigid with it. And you also want to constantly be expanding the universe and making new things. I think this is not just unique to sound. I think that visually, every studio goes through this as well, on every project. How much do we lean on existing design? How many pill lights do we put up in this imperial base? Versus trying to make something that looks new or sounds new. It’s a balancing act. Sometimes we have the advantage of the artists having to figure that out first and then we’re reacting to the picture. So that usually helps us dictate how unique something is going to be.

The other nice thing about this Skywalker Sound library is that there’s so many versions of things.

The other nice thing about this Skywalker Sound library is that there’s so many versions of things. I don’t know if you found this to be true, Mac, but I found this to be true over the years, is that I’ve gone in and used versions of sounds that were unused. A sound designer makes 10 versions of something, and one of them ships in the show. Well, those other 9 versions are like our GOLD down the road somewhere. It could be years, it could be decades later, but we end up using every little bit of it. So there is some pressure to use it. But I think the whole point of Visions is to go beyond having to use those and to make something new. I think that everyone who’s working on something, Andor is a great example. I think that David Acord did a tremendous job of expanding the universe with something a little more gritty or hard hitting, you know? It still felt like Star Wars, but it had its own vibe, and it broadens the overall universe every time that happens.
 

DS: Did you get to create any new sounds that could become iconic Star Wars sounds?

DC: You mentioned that old ship at the end of Screecher’s reach that sounded pretty cool.

MS: Yeah, and the trick with that one was really, I knew how important the score was in that moment, and really trying to make something that doesn’t get in the way of the score, and it almost complements the score and works along with it. So, putting enough in there in the mix that you’re not like “why don’t I hear that ship?” It’s definitely a balancing act trying to figure out what’s the appropriate thing and what’s going to work best for the story, but also to not ruffle the composers feathers, or the director, and all that stuff. So it’s always a balancing act with a lot of give and take.

DC: Yeah, for me, I would say. There’s a cool creature in the pit that I really loved, this kind of little pangolin looking thing. I know it has a name, I’m sure LeAndre is sitting there going “Oh, man, you forgot the name during the interview.” But that was really fun to make.

MS: Is that the one that was making the holes in the cliff?

DC: Yeah, making the holes. I will say that The Pit, in particular, is a real celebration for me. One of our Foley artists who just retired, that is an absolute legend, named John Roesch, he was basically doing an updated version of what he did on Raiders of the Lost Ark. With all those pick axes, and all that earth, and all of that grit that he added. He and Shelly Roden were the Foley artists on that episode and they walked so much unique material for us. We gave them, I think, an extra day just to do more of that sort of stuff on the sound design. So we got all this wonderful gritty detail for trying to mine those Kyber crystals.

I found a sound in the Star Wars library a couple of years ago that Ben Burtt made, that to me, sounds like he was rubbing crystal. It has this wonderful crystal type of resonance. I ended up using it every time we see a Kyber crystal. I did it in season one and I did it in season two as well, because I wanted this kind of signature sound for this magical object that ends up being featured in a lot of different plots, by various different studios, all kind of coincidentally deciding to do something similar.

I know we made some unique weapons for Spy Dancer and some unique stuff for The Dual last season, which was that great samurai episode.

I know we made some unique weapons for Spy Dancer and some unique stuff for The Dual last season, which was that great samurai episode. That was really, really fun. We’ve made unique droids before. Yeah, a lot of different stuff here and there. But you know, another thing about animation, and television in general, is that it’s about how much detail you can put in with a TV type of schedule, you know, TV production. And that’s something that requires a lot of clever prioritization in terms of what you’re going to make that’s new versus what you’re going to rely on that is from the library. And so we do. We pull out every trick in the book basically, to bring these in on time.
 

DS: What did you do sonically to differentiate between the Jedi and the Sith?

MS: With the lightsabers, you tend to make the bad guy’s lightsabers more growly, sort of deeper, more threatening, maybe a little more distortion on some of those sounds. I was thinking about the bad guy in the Bandits of Golak episode. We were definitely trying to make him menacing. Make his footsteps bigger. All those things, which I think has been a tradition for all the Star Wars films and shows. Give them a little more weight, and bass, and darkness.

DC: The force powers too. I noticed this in Screecher’s Reach was that the force powers can be a lot more menacing. A lot of low end, a lot of rumble, a lot of thunder. Then the sort of light side seems to be a little bit more tonal and can be a little bit more, I hate to say whooshy, but it can have more air. It can have more, just sort of lighter energy as opposed to this sort of dark vibration that seems to come from dark Sith type of enemies. I remember one of the first sounds that I heard that was in the Star Wars library were just Vader’s footsteps that Ben Burtt had recorded. I don’t know this because I haven’t asked him, but it seemed to me, listening to it, that there was a subharmonic synth on those footsteps that when he walked there was like a real weight, like Mac is talking about. And I think that goes all the way back to Westerns, you know, here comes the heavy and that’s definitely a part of the formula, in terms of differentiating light side and dark.

MS: Yeah and ultimately, it’s about contrast and dynamics. It’s not just dynamics, loud and soft, but having different kinds of sounds next to each other that perk up your ears and make you pay attention. Ultimately, that’s what’s best. I know all the things that I think of that sound the best, over the years have contrast, and dynamics, and those interesting things that not only steer your ear, but then focuses your eye on what to look at in the story.
 

DS: In Screecher’s Reach, it took kind of a darker turn, can you talk about creating the tension for the Sith and the child? There was definitely a tension of going into the cave and finding this ghost, or Sith.

MS: Yeah and the things that I loved pulling and cutting for the ghost, for showing up, or just those weird, skittery sort of sounds that were scary and nerve wracking like something that you can’t see, that’s in the shadow or in the corner. There are all those, and also you see little bits of debris and gravel rise up with the force, and just be able to have that stuff and have the rumbles, and all those things build up to that scream was just so satisfying. There’s a sound that I think is in there, which is a dolphin recording which has been manipulated in weird ways to give it this odd, stuttery, rhythmic, like I said, uneasy sound which just kind of gets under your skin. So those are all fun. And then when she lights up the lightsaber too, it’s like having that moment of silence before that comes on. When it comes on, it’s big. So again, creating that contrast. Yeah, it was just really satisfying. Having all those moments. And then Daal reaches up and uses the force to pull that rock which ultimately crushes the Sith master. Yeah. Fun stuff. I wish we could play more in that world.

DC: I have a unique advantage on that episode, because I didn’t do any of the sound editing on it, and got to watch it and listen to it only when Mac was done. And one of the things that really struck me about the episode is how familiar and fun it seems like it’s going to be at the top. You know you’ve got these probe droids, and you’ve got speeders, and you’ve got walkers, and you’ve got kids playing and laughing, and we’re going to steal the speeders, and telling stories by the campfire.

MS: It’s almost like, Stand By Me or something.

DC: Yeah, but then it takes this incredibly frightening turn, and I think it’s that you’re lulled into a false sense of confidence. I think it’s why I was so struck by the silence comment. You’re lulled into this kind of comfort place. I know what this is going to be, and you absolutely do not know at all what it’s going to be, because by the time you get to the cave it just, you know, and it comes at you slowly. And those screeches are just incredible. So it definitely lives up to the episode’s name sake, for sure.

MS: And when it takes that turn. It’s like it’s almost making you lean in more like, “Oh, what’s happening? What’s happening?” And then, by the time that old woman scream happens, it’s like, “Whoa,” it makes you lean back in your chair.

DC: Yeah, it’s thrilling.

DS: There were some speeders in there that the kids were riding, can you talk about creating the sound of the speeders?

MS: Sure, I have to give credit to Andre Zweers, who was our sound effects editor on that episode. He did a great job. He took the notes that I wrote down from the Cartoon Saloon folks about what they wanted it to sound like, and the director referenced a Harmonium. He wanted a Harmonium element in the speeders to work with the score. So Andre took that note and ran with it. So he sort of combined sounds that Ben had made for The Phantom Menace, the Harmonium, and then also some two-stroke tractors to make them sound older, because they do look kind of old and junky. When they first start up, there’s the detail. You see, the engine sort of fire up. So it’s really sort of the marriage of those 3 sounds working together and working with the score. I’m very happy with how it turned out.
 

DS: So in the episode, The Pit, there were some little creatures that you mentioned earlier, they were digging holes and helping our hero out. Can you talk about creating the sounds and vocalizations for those creatures?

DC: Yeah, creatures are always difficult. But for some reason, when they’re that small, they’re really fun, because you can do a lot of different things. I mean, there’s a lot of animal recordings in there. I think my own voice is in there as well, because you pitch it up. The trick with creatures is you’re always trying to get them to emote somehow. And when you’re using existing animal recordings and getting them to inflect for the particular drama of the particular moment that you’re in, is always a real trick. So sometimes the human voice is the best way to do that, and there was a fair amount of that in there as well. And then you end up kind of layering other animal elements to make it seem not inhuman. Add some skittering Foley in there, and you have this wonderful little trick. The idea being that, in the natural order of things, these people would not be in this pit, they would be free. And so that’s kind of like nature, or the force, or whatever helping him escape out of the pit. But it’s the only real moment of any sort of light-hearted anything in those sequences or in the pit is that creature. So we wanted it to sound fun and kind of curious, and he was very much animated that way. I remember I was doing adds all the way up to the mix on that. I was feeding Jeff King, our mixer, adds on the day of the mix even, to address notes to push it even more. I know Bill Rudolph and Kevin Bolen were sound effects editors. So shout out to them. They also edited in a lot of material, and I was able to weave those together at the very end. So that was fun. But yeah, that’s every trick in the book, including the human voice. I feel like you have to do that if you can. And anytime they’re high pitched and skittery. That’s really fun to do.

DS: Yeah, I find vocalizations for creatures an exceptionally challenging thing. I’m always amazed when people pull it off so well.

DC: Yeah, it’s tough and very time consuming.

MS: It’s easy to stare at the blank Pro Tools session and go like, “Oh, where do I start?” You just have to start throwing things at the wall to see what sticks.
 

DS: Can you tell me about the sound for the space ships in The Pit? Did you use any pre-existing Star Wars sounds for creating those?

DC: They’re a combination? So our first pass was Bill Rudolph, and the idea was to get kind of very Blade Runnery with them, you know, because especially when they come down. You see those lit up pads as they’re slowly coming down there. Not the Imperial ships, but the transport ships at the end. So there’s some wonderful synthy elements in there Bill did. I think at the end, I just needed a little bit of engine in there, so I added some transport sounds that had been made by David Acord, for me when I was the editor and mixer on Star Wars Resistance. I thought, well these are transports. So again, back to our opening comments about trying to tie certain things together. I wanted a little bit of that Star Wars transport sound in there along with those synth elements, because the synth elements were cool, but it felt like an element as opposed to the whole vehicle and engine. Another big difference is that the synth elements are great, but if you push them up in the mix too high during a very emotional moment like that, then you start fighting the music. Traditionally, at least in Star Wars animation, we do very music forward mixing in a lot of moments. Particularly, when you’re telling a story this quickly in under 20 minutes, and so the synth elements needed to complement the music. And at times I needed to have something else in there that felt a little bit more like an engine whine that your mind was going to disassociate from harmony, and you go “Oh, that’s an effect.” So I added a little bit of that.

The stuff at the top was sort of classic Imperial transport stuff. I shouldn’t say classic, I should say previous Imperial transport stuff, because classic makes you think of the original trilogy, but you know certainly, since Rogue One. All Tim Nielsen’s stuff on Solo, all of Ren Klyce’s stuff on the Last Jedi for The First Order. You know, there’s such a wealth of Imperial slash First Order material that sounds great, that you can use and manipulate and create a variation on a theme. Which is usually what we end up doing. A lot of it is like, “Hey, this is very similar. Visually, it’s the same thing. It’s very similar to an Imperial ship I’ve seen before. It’s a little different. I’m going to make something that feels similar, but is a little different.” And that’s what we ended up doing for those transport ships at the top of the episode.

The city has a lot of unique elements, because it’s high tech with the Kyber crystal. It has this sort of stained glass that they have, and it needs to be sleek, but it also has kind of a Coruscant-esque street feel to it. Although there’s more aliens like Authorians and things around. So we cut in a lot of alien vocals and things like that. And then we got to do a lot of loop group which we generally don’t get to do a lot of loop group for animation, but we actually brought in a loop group on the pit. Not just for the city, but also for the light section at the end. We just needed as many voices as we could get. So we actually recorded, loop group for the pit, which is a first for me on Star Wars animation.
 

DS: Fantastic. I think that’s about it. Is there anything else that either of you wants to add?

MS: I feel like sometimes people think that, Oh, you’re working on sound for Star Wars, that must be easy, because you already have all the sounds. That’s such a misnomer. Yes, we have a lot of elements that were created for other things and it gives us a little bit of a jump start, but there’s still a tremendous amount of heavy lifting that we have to do editorially. There’s a lot of things that, like David said, aren’t in the library. The clients have a very specific vision, which is not a “paint by numbers” thing that we can just pull from the library. So it does end up being a lot of work and a lot of thinking on our feet very quickly to be creative and as David said, get it through it on a TV episodic schedule. So it’s a big challenge. Also, David’s episodes sound incredible.

I feel like sometimes people think that, Oh, you’re working on sound for Star Wars, that must be easy, because you already have all the sounds. That’s such a misnomer. Yes, we have a lot of elements that were created for other things and it gives us a little bit of a jump start, but there’s still a tremendous amount of heavy lifting that we have to do editorially

DC: Yeah same, in particular on this show, Mac. More than say, working on The Bad Batch where you build something in one episode and then it shows up down the road half a dozen times. Every single episode in Visions is starting from scratch. There’s no “well, let’s build a show library.” It’s like every episode is a new show. That is particularly challenging, because you don’t know what you’re walking into at first. Sometimes the lift can be light, because you’re just augmenting and you’re doing the mix and Foley or whatever. And then sometimes the lift is like, “here is a 20 page document of how we think this thing should sound,” which Mac was alluding to earlier. So you just don’t know. And every time it’s starting over. That is a lot of work. Just because it says Star Wars on it, the whole point of Visions is “well, what if? What if this is new for Star Wars?” And that includes sound.

MS: And I don’t think any of these worlds, and correct me if I’m wrong, are established worlds. I think they are all brand new locations and brand new characters.

DS: And of course with Star Wars, the bar is set pretty high to start out with. So you have to deal with that also.

DC: Yes, I used to say this in video games all the time, where you see a planet for 15 seconds in a movie, and then you get to wander around on it for hours in a video game. The same is true for TV. If a TV series is going to a planet that you’ve visited in the movie, the movie might only have this much material. Now you have to expand it into an entire series. That’s a very different challenge than just. “well, let’s just grab it out of the library.” Well, no, you can use that as a reference, but you actually have to extrapolate and create something that you can live in for a while. That could be challenging as well. So you know, every medium has its own challenges. And just because it appeared in a film, and it’s famous because there have been toys made of the location or the character, doesn’t necessarily mean that we have it ready at a click of a mouse button, ready to go into whatever this director, on this new anthology series, wants to do with their version of the character.

MS: And these are almost like episodes of The Twilight Zone. In some ways it’s like one offs. Like David said, it’s not creating one palette of sound design that’s going to work across the whole series.
One other factoid. I don’t know if you know, Doug, is that the Visions title card with that short, musical, melodic thing. David wrote that.

DC: Oh, I did. I wrote that. And that was really just a funny thing that happened in season one where they had this whole title treatment, and they felt like it was too bombastic. And they wanted something very simple and very open for exactly this reason. Hey, here is Tabula Rasa. Here is what this studio is going to do with it. So I ended up writing this very light-side dark-side theme. You know it actually starts minor and goes Major. And there’s this little Lydian harp over it. I think I did 12 variations for them. I finally realized they wanted it more simple and even more simple. But it’s amazing how 12 seconds, or even, I don’t know if it’s even 12 seconds, can be a lot of different variations to get right, because it is sitting on the front of every episode.

Thank you to Mac Smith and David Collins for sharing some behind the scenes knowledge of Star Wars: Visions with us. You can find Mac Smith at Skywalker Sound here and on IMDb here. You can find David Collins at Skywalker Sound here and on IMDb here.

 

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