Ben Burtt has the most amazing job in Hollywood: he gets to creates sounds and even characters for some of the geekiest things in the movies. Lightsabers, the sound of the Ark of the Covenant being opened, WALL•E’s distinctive tread noises –– Burtt came up with different ways to create them all. What’s really impressive is that he doesn’t create most these on a computer or with a synthesizer, he actually goes out in the real world and gets them by hand.

When asked about the distinctive sound of Indiana Jones’ pistol, which sounds like a cannon blast whenever he fires it, Burtt responds, “Oh, that’s my 30-30 Winchester rifle. We found a little box canyon that gave us a perfect little echo, so if you listen to that closely you can hear a really quick echo every time he fires that pistol.” That’s the sort of stuff that I really geek out on. There’s more where that came from after the jump.

So what does a sound designer do?

A sound designer is really basically someone who is designated to invent sounds for a movie. Sometimes the sound designer just does a few special sounds. Like on a science fiction movie, they make a ray gun or a death star ray or something, and turn it over to the production. And other times a sound designer gets opportunities… like I have had over the years, to start on a production very early on. Maybe it is just a script and they haven’t even started to make the movie yet; to talk with the director and come up with ideas about how sound will play a role in the movie, and planting some creative seeds right at that point so that you can develop the sound throughout the whole process. Quite often sound people are only considered at the very end of the process in the movie; the last few months or weeks. The film has been shot and edited and suddenly someone says, “Oh, we need sound too. Is that all the sound?”

It can be a very difficult job for most sound people because you are cramming a lot of work into a short time and usually not given the time to experiment and develop new, customized sounds for a movie.

Did your work on Star Wars bring you directly to this point?

I have been spoiled ever since the first Star Wars movie when I was hired about a year before they made the movie to start making Wookies, laser guns, and R2D2’s so that they had some idea where we were going with sound. So that was great.

The same thing happened with WALL•E because Andrew Stanton had the foresight more than three years ago when he was developing the film to realize, “Well I want to do a film that has very little dialogue. It is very full of sound effects, very sparse with dialogue. The dialogue is not going to be ordinary. It is going to be talking robots. They might even speak a foreign language. I don’t know. We better start developing the voices right away so that we will know whether this movie will work or not.”

I was called in right after I finished work on Revenge of the Sith and concluded the tour of duty with Star Wars movies. I went over to Pixar and listened to a pitch from Andrew Stanton. At that time there were some story boards for the movie WALL•E. He actually had a little five minute reel of some story boards cut together of WALL•E at work and boxing trash. Then he pitched the rest of the story to me. I was charmed by the idea. Initially I thought, “Well, more robots. I don’t know if I have any more ideas.” I was kind of worn out with science fiction and I wanted to make arthouse movies the rest of my life; dark, meaningful movies. Destiny took me once again back into science fiction. So I signed on and started developing voices.

How long did you work on WALL•E? That’s a lot more sound work than you normally do.

For about nine months out of the year I spent time trying to create. I started creating the WALL•E voice, the EVE voice, the AutoPilot, MO and the others. What were the humans going to sound like in their gelatinous condition? Originally they were almost completely Jell-O. We made Jell-O voices that had shimmering, funny, shaking in the voices and stuff. That concept of the voices for the humans was eventually dropped as the sounds developed.

Out of these improvisations of taking sounds from both the real world and some synthesizations, I will fashion what you will hear in the movie. There are like 2600 sound files made for WALL•E, which is a lot; more than I made for any other movie. A Star Wars movie, which is huge, usually takes about 1,000 new sounds. Indiana Jones movies, maybe 700 or 800. So this was gigantic, partly because it just needed so much detail in the sound. Obviously nothing is recorded while you are making the movie. Everything has to be added after the fact.

How did you come up with the sounds for WALL•E? I mean, he doesn’t speak, so you have to sort of make him sound unique.

Sometimes, most often, good sounds are just discovered when you are looking for one sound and you suddenly discover another. The sound we used for his treads, that is an army tank. Obvious choice; just go out and record something with treads. But it has been sped up so that it sounds a little tinnier. He does lots of movements in the film; lots of little driving this way, driving that way. We try to put a sound with everything and convince the audience that this character really exists; this illusion.

I needed some soft motors, something we could tailor to shape WALL•E’s movements. I was watching on Turner Classic Movies an old John Wayne movie and there was this army private cranking a generator. I said, “That is a great sound for WALL•E. How can I get one of those WW2 generators?” Well I got this on eBay. That’s what we used.

I’ve heard that you always carry around a recorder with you in case you hear anything that sounds interesting. Is that true?

I do! I have one with me now. Once again, going back to methods of some of the things I have learned over the years. In Star Wars I created the basic laser blaster, and here’s a great example. I had been hiking over a mountain and went under a radio tower. My pack caught on a wire that was a guide wire that was holding a power stake. It made a twangy sound. I said, “Oh, a laser gun!” I recorded it and that became the basic blaster in the Star Wars movies.

For WALL•E I wanted to create something new but maybe a cousin of the same sound effect. So I got what looks like a slinky here. It is used in a physics class just to demonstrate the propagation of mechanical waves. You set it up horizontally in the classroom and shake it and the students can see the waves moving back and forth. I had learned from experiments as a kid and other things that when you pluck it you get an interesting sound. It sounds futuristic. It happens because sound traveling in the metal wire, the high frequencies travel faster than low frequencies. So if you tap it, it is just a click sound. If you listen to that sound at the other end of the spring…If I tap one end the sound travels up the spring. The high frequencies arrive first, followed by the low frequencies. So you get a pitch shift. You get a “Chooo” sound.

A lot of sound designers just use synthesizers all the time, or buy sound effects from different sources. You’re a bit old school, can you talk about that?

I am kind of the old school just by the fact that I am 60 years old and I started movie work at a time when everything was mechanical and electro-mechanical. I have always had a love for the history of sound and sound effects, so I am always looking for stories or information, or how did they do the sound in King Kong? How did they do the sound in Robin Hood or whatever old movie I love. But the reality is… they do what is called Foley in movies, which is usually in front of a projected movie. You have a room full of props and shoes and footsteps where it is still a very active art form where people manipulate props to get conventional sounds. Usually they do things like where somebody picks up a newspaper and puts it down. A lot of it is kind of straightforward.

Most of the sound designers I know still spend a certain amount of time finding a prop that they can record that is not all done on the computer. Sound is releasing the kind of illusions, especially in fantasy films, that I have always connected with. You are trying to fool the audience into thinking that these fantasy things really exist. They come up with a force field. Well what is that going to sound like?

Sound is one of the ways of convincing people that something might be real. I have always found that if you use sounds from the real world, sounds that you might even be familiar with but you can’t quite identify, you change it a little bit, it brings with it that credibility, that naturalness, so when you hear the Millennium Falcon goes by, you don’t tend to stop and think about that a whole lot. It seems like it is really powerful and it is real, but you don’t stop to think that it is really a Mustang, just slowed down, or a World War II aircraft. You do know the sound of a World War II aircraft. You know that is powerful. You know the motor. You know it is accelerating because it is a sound you have had experience with in some way. So I think it is always that use of real sounds.

A lot of people use computers or synthesizers today. Back when you worked on Star Wars, were you able to manipulate magnetic tape?

Everything I did on the first Star Wars was…Things would be recorded and you either put them on a quarter inch magnetic tape or on magnetic film, which is 35 mm in width. Then you would do things with cutting, and splicing, and gluing, and taping tapes. It is hard to describe it. But if I wanted to produce phasing, that kind of movement sound… you can take a sound and just sort of make it sort of sweep through itself. It is used a lot for lasers and spaceships and stuff I did in Star Wars.

I used to be able to do that by taking two identical copies of the sound, put them on two play back machines in sync with each other. They would lean against each other and play. You would just take your thumb and just drag it for a microsecond. That off-set sync would create that interaction between the two sounds. Now in the computer nowadays you can do that readily. Any kid in high school can do it with a delay program. Things I struggled with then are second nature. You can buy plug-ins to do it today pretty easy.

A lot of it was just thinking mechanically, like this spring apparatus. I would just reason it out. I would take a scientific approach and say, “Well if it really existed, what would it sound like,” and investigate that. If that is not dramatic enough, then throw away the science and go with something else.

What are some of the hardest sounds to create?

Directors are always saying, “I want a sound that they have never heard before, but I want to understand it completely.” So voices are always hard. When they say voices, my blood pressure always goes up a little becaue I know this is going to be tough, because it is going to be climbing that mountain again. Sometimes I have failed in creating sounds, I have to say. I have had rejections. I worked for a long time for Ridley Scott on Alien trying to create the sound this alien transmission that was supposed to run through the first 20 minutes of the movie over and over again as if it were a beacon bringing their spaceship to a location.

He said, “It has got to be eight seconds long. It has got to always be the same but seem to be different everytime we play it every eight seconds.” I was like, “OK. I will try that one.” Although I made a lot of sounds that ended up being used elsewhere in the movie, that one he never got one that he liked. In fact, he dropped that idea from the movie eventually. I used the sound that I made for that for the ghosts coming out of the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders and it got an Academy Award. [laughs]

Did you have a favorite robot or a favorite sound in WALL•E?

My favorite sound in WALL•E? Well I don’t know. I don’t know. I kind of fell in love with this character. [sound] Moe. I don’t know why. Someone I identify with Moe. Not that I am a good cleaner or anything, but I think that sort of feisty sort of sidekick character that he was appealing to me, and the fact that he has a big character change in the movie. He goes from a robot governed by his duties to a free thinker. That was part of the theme of the movie.

Photo by Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times