Matt Wood and David Acord in studio talking about 'The Clone Wars'.
Test your knowledge and identify those sound effects from Star Wars movies (too easy)!

[watch it via cbs13.com]

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Unidentified Sound Object

Matthew Wood talks about creating the world of sound for Star Wars, his friend Ben Burtt , WALL-E and the upcoming Clone Wars feature film and series.

Supervising sound editor Matthew Wood, aka General Grievous (voice) and Dave Filoni (The Clone Wars), director.

[listen here - via theforce.net]

Walter looks back on how it used to be in the days when celluloid was cut and spliced [part 1].



[part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5]

[via macvideo.tv]

I got to chat with Paul Doucette (Matchbox Twenty) in the bluhammock music office this afternoon about his new project The Break and Repair Method.

Music:
You Won’t Be Able To Be Sad
This City (Is Bound To Do Us In)
Life Gets Beautful

Many thanks to Ralph Cutler and Christina Duren from Ariel Publicity for setting everything up for me!

In other news, I have decided to make MikeyPod a weekly music only podcast. In the next month or so I will be setting up another podcast feed for everything else. This last year or so in NYC has been such a learning time for me, and a struggle in so many ways, but at last I am feeling like I am where I want to be– loving the city and ready to get my activist self moving again. It always felt so awkward to try to cover both passions in one place: music and social justice. Many times the two intersect, of course, but it makes more sense to me to branch out in this way. Stay Tuned!

p.s. Don’t forget about Meat Free Radio for all of your vegan and vegeterian needs.

Technorati Tags: Paul Doucette, Matchbox Twenty, The Break and Repair Method, Podcast, Mikeypod, MB20

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This work (excluding the music) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Ben Burtt is talking to Newsbeat entertainment reporter Natalie Jamieson.

I created the voice for E.T. out of many different things, about 18 different people and animals and sound effects. There are racoons in there, there are sea otters, there are some horses, there's a burp from my old cinema professor from USC (University of Southern California). There's my wife's laboured breathing asleep at night with a cold. I'll take sound from anywhere and use it if it'll get me the effect I want.

Is there any one sound of yours that's like a trademark that goes through most of the things you've done?

There are probably many little trademarks of sound. I don't think I consciously put things in. I used to put a scream in called the Wilhelm Scream which was in every movie I did but that was just a joke to impress another friend of mine named Richard Anderson. We were both students together and we both put that scream in all our movies to out do each other.

But then the public began to recognise that and there are cults now around the Wilhelm Scream. There's not a Wilhelm in WALL·E but there are other sounds. In every movie I think I've got bit of my grandfather's hand radio set. I recorded some electronic sounds, tuning stations, back 40 or 50 years ago. And I have used a bit of that Morse code, that side banding, short wave sound in some form in every film I've ever done.

[read the interview - via BBC]

Kurt Andersen talks to Burtt about the movie and the legendary sounds of his career.

[via studio360.org]

[Los Angeles Times article on Ben Burtt]

MoviesOnline sat down with Academy Award-winning sound designer Ben Burtt at the Los Angeles press day for his new film, “WALL-E.”

I could reassemble the Wall-E vocals and perform it with a light pen on a tablet. You could change pitch by moving the pen or the pressure of the pen would sustain or stretch syllables or consonants and you could get an additional level of performance that way, kind of like playing a musical instrument. But that process had artifacts in it, things that made it unlike human speech, glitches you might say, things you might throw away if you were trying to convince someone it was a human voice. That’s what we liked, that electronic alias thing that went along with it, because that helped make the illusion that the sound was coming from a voice box or some kind of circuit depending on the character.  

When Wall-E is going fast, he needed something higher pitched and more energetic. Once again, I went back through my memory of things. I had recorded bi-planes a long time ago for Raiders of the Lost Ark. The old 1930s bi-planes have an inertia starter. It’s a mechanical crank that cranks the engine up. You do it by hand and then clutch – you connect it and it makes a wonderful whirring sound. So I thought I want to get that and do more with it. I couldn’t bring a bi-plane into the studio but on eBay I found an inertia starter, bought that again, and brought it in. So we built these props for many things. You know, it’s a tradition in animation to have sound effects machines. This goes back to the earliest days of Disney cartoons -- like wind machines and blowing machines and things like that. We actually built several things so we could perform Wall-E sounds that way. 

I also love the history of sound effects and there is a great opportunity working for Pixar and Disney because you’re in touch there with a legacy of sound effects creativity that goes back into the 1930s. They used to build all kinds of machines. There is a machine that does flying insects, there is a machine that does a talking clock spring. They’ve got an archive of these machines out there in Burbank and I love that and I look at what a sound effects man does and I love the table top props and things like that. It’s the style.

[read the full interview: moviesonline.ca]

[photo from Getty Images]

Oscar-winning Sound Designer Ben Burtt, who came to Pixar to do both sound and character voice work on WALL-E three years ago, discussed the challenges of animation with AWN.

His favorite WALL-E sequence is actually one of the quieter ones: "Of course, I love it when we do everything that's supported by sound effects ulike when the probe ship lands and EVE comes out and WALL-E first sees her. But my favorite section is when he continues to follow her searching for life forms because there is virtually no dialogue except for a few sounds from WALL-E. It not only has a lot of suspense but also a little romance, and very much the ambience is there with the music and sound effects for support. It's just a wonderful array of tones."

Burtt will continue working at Pixar but has no idea what his next project will be. "Obviously they won't be doing a robot film right away, but I guess JOHN CARTER OF MARS might [be discussed]. There are a lot of great ones to talk about."

[read more - via news.awn.com]