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Galactic News
Friday October 5, 2001
Homing Beacon #45
The latest Homing Beacon has arrived! It's summer vacation -- you're getting a break from another grueling year of high school. You're ready to enjoy some time off, but your dad comes up to you and decides that you're going to work with him all summer, going to his job each day, and helping him out. Sounds like the summer's ruined, right? Not necessarily...
It came as a surprise to several crewmembers in Australia when a bright teenager carrying sound equipment would introduce himself as Ben Burtt. This is Benjamin A. Burtt, son of Episode II's editor and sound designer, Benjamin P. Burtt. ("We refer to my son as 'Benny' to distinguish him from me and my father. In fact we are in a line of nine Ben Burtts, all the way from 1602," says the elder Burtt). When Benjamin returned to high school last fall, he was able to boast about being involved in Episode II during his summer vacation. "At first, people didn't know," recalls the younger Burtt. "When I started to record, people would come up to me and ask what I was doing. I'd say, 'oh, I'm recording things for my dad.' They'll say, 'oh, who is your dad?' And I'll say, 'He's editing right now, but he does sound design.' I met a lot of people this way." In between his 10th and 11th year of high school, Benjamin accompanied the production crew to Fox Studios Australia, gathering sounds with his father's DAT recorder which will later be blended, mixed and tweaked in post-production. "I came across a lot of good things. I recorded all the motors in the R2-D2s and C-3POs. You know when you open doors, and the air pressure is different so it makes this weird little howling? My dad was working on a scene where there's this city that's always in a stormy area. That can be used there." The rich diversity of the far-away galaxy gave Burtt the freedom to record almost anything. "There's also an air drill that makes a bzzzt sound, so we can use that. My dad said that we can probably use it for Zam Wesell's speeder. It's a lot of fun. When you think about Star Wars, almost any sound can be used because there's so many different things: droids, aliens, rocketships, engines of all sorts." Benjamin also sat in with his father in the editing suite as the senior Ben Burtt began cutting takes and assembling the movie. While gathering sounds was definitely a fun venture, Benjamin isn't quite as sold on editing. "You have to watch the scenes over and over again -- I probably wouldn't be able to do that because I've seen the same thing over and over," he says. He credits his father for not only having a sound designer's ear, but an editor's eye. "I'd probably say, 'oh, that looks good,' but he notices things that you wouldn't notice. There's one scene where there's an explosion and these guys go flying. What's really funny is that one guy is anticipating it -- he's ready for the explosion. He's halfway through his flip before the actual explosion went off. He notices these things." Did the unique job-shadowing opportunity give him insights into his future career path? The young Burtt still has a lot of time to decide. "I might want to do sound design when I grow up; I don't know... I want to be a professional baseball player."