Guest Lecturer Ben Burtt: The Sound of Star Wars

2024-04-26

[School of Movies 2024] This week, I have put together a presentation utilising footage drawn painstakingly from many, many hours worth of commentaries and archival interviews on the Star Wars movies, all focusing on one man. I worked until the thumb and index finger and on my mouse hand no longer obeyed commands, in order to do justice to the astonishing amount of our experience of those movies is informed upon by the sounds he composed with. His decades of craftsmanship are as crucial to...

[School of Movies 2024]

This week, I have put together a presentation utilising footage drawn painstakingly from many, many hours worth of commentaries and archival interviews on the Star Wars movies, all focusing on one man.

I worked until the thumb and index finger and on my mouse hand no longer obeyed commands, in order to do justice to the astonishing amount of our experience of those movies is informed upon by the sounds he composed with. His decades of craftsmanship are as crucial to Star Wars as the sensational scores of John Williams. That's not even mentioning Indiana Jones, Willow, WALL-E or E.T.

You'll hear how the most memorable FX (as well as the ones used so subtly we don't even notice) are recorded in the real world to create that lived-in environmental ambience and audible character forever linked with that Galaxy far, far away. Here for your further movie education is one of the greatest and most ground-breaking sound designers in the history of cinema, Mr Ben Burtt.

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