BEN BURTT INTERVIEW
20 sound effects a day’. And then I try to stick with that and get through it.” Burtt’s interest in movie sound began after he saw Fantasia as a child, when he was spellbound by Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor , which Disney brought to life with animated shapes and abstract colours that moved with the music. “I was amazed as a child that the two things went together. The imagery and sound combined into something completely unique,” he recalls. The sonic maestro grew up making audio recordings of films which were broadcast on television, educating himself on how dialogue, music and sound effects were used to tell stories or enhance narratives. “Most people take it for granted that the sound is there. It’s invisible,” he muses. “But I realised that it could be constructed and controlled; that you could be selective about what the audience would hear and, by making the right selections, you could control their attention and what their focus was on. That you could influence how they were feeling in the same manner a composer writes music in order to produce an emotional reaction to it.” Sometimes, sound effects come from unlikely sources. For example, scenes of temples collapsing or giant stone doors sliding, which are frequent in the Indiana Jones films, were made via a technique Burtt refers to as balloon wrestling. “You blow up a balloon and then you start scraping your hands on the edge of it, making these scrunchy or squawking
MOST PEOPLE TAKE SOUND FOR GRANTED; it’s invisible. BUT I REALISED IT COULD BE constructed and controlled ”
sounds,” he explains. “You play it like a musical instrument and slow them down. You get great stuff for those rocks as they break away from the wall to the sliding door and Indy gets out just in time.” At times, recording outside is preferable to a clean studio environment. “One of our favourite spots for recording sounds for Raiders was a little grove of trees at Skywalker Ranch, which, at that time, was an empty property with grass and trees. There were some beautiful gullies and – if you went out there and threw yourself at the ground with a leather jacket onto some football equipment – you could get nice body falls that have a genuine sense of being outside in a real place.” Equally important is having moments of silence, which “can bring a certain amount of tension to a moment because they are unresolved,” notes Burtt. “This can give you rest from a busy scene that’s occurred beforehand, giving the
audience time to reset themselves. Or it can be quiet or near silent in order to allow something to come in loud, making the contrast more apparent. “You can have that loud moment and then you need to precede it with something quiet in order to get contrast. It’s called dynamic range.” Scene transitions are one of the most fun and challenging things to do. “If you go back and analyse Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back, you will see that some transitions are music-to- music or music-to-sound-effects. There will be a big swell of music with Vader’s fleet passing overhead and then it will wipe, and you will only hear the sounds of the Dagobah jungle with little insects, some frogs and tweeting birds. I love that kind of stuff and the audience responds to it emotionally because your statement is made musically about where the story is with those characters – now, you’re in a fresh, new place; that’s a lost art.”
WORDS Trevor Hogg
IT IS YOU! Ben Burtt is responsible for R2-D2’s voice – as well as using sound effects in a similar way as music to influence mood
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