How Macs helped create the Star Wars sound design – from single Macintosh SE to 280-Mac network

The Star Wars sound design has a history as well as the visuals. Darth Vader’s breathing, the bleeping dialogue of R2-D2, the buzzing of light sabers, Chewbacca’s roars, the Starfighter lasers – all of these sounds and more are instantly recognizable and immediately evoke the related visual imagery.

Apple has shared a 16-minute Behind the Mac documentary on how George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch facility creates the sound effects that help bring the Star Wars universe to life, and the role which Macs play in this …

Apple’s documentary short Skywalker Sound: Behind the Mac (below) offers a fascinating look into the rarely seen world of movie sound design.

It is often stated that sound at minimum are as important as the movie. Perhaps more than 50%:vPeople will watch a poor-quality video if they are caught up in the story and the dialogue is clear, but they won’t watch great videography with hard-to-hear dialogue.

But dialogue is only part of the story. Background sounds can play an important role in the scene’s life-enhancing qualities. This is what lead Star Wars creator George Lucas to build a huge facility dedicated to this.

This is the site of Skywalker Ranch, the vast facility owned and conceived by George Lucas, the creator of the epic Star Wars universe. Skywalker Sound is the centerpiece of this ranch, which offers world-class audio editing and mixing as well as post-production facilities. The 153,000-square-foot, red-bricked building [is] surrounded by vineyards and the man-made Lake Ewok […]

Soundminer is a sound-library system that allows you to search for keywords almost as poetically in your specificity. It keeps up with Skywalker Sound’s constantly expanding library of over a million sounds.

Macs are absolutely integral to the facility. Ben Burtt, the sound designer for the original Star Wars films, says that he started with a Macintosh SE, which he used for writing. He says that it was this experience that prepared him for digital sound editing.

“Sound editing in a way is really the same as word processing; cutting and pasting files,” Burtt continues. “All the experience I had on the Mac immediately gave me training for what came along in cutting digital sound. I started cutting using a Mac with Final Cut in the late ’90s, and now have four Mac computers. Each handles a different process: one for picture editing, sound editing, manuscript writing, I’m completely surrounded. They’re labeled Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta.”

(Yeah, I also want to know what the fourth one does. )

Today, Skywalker Sound uses 280 Macs.

Sound editor Ryan Frias takes you on a tour through Skywalker Sound’s central machine room. He describes it as the “brains” of the entire stage operation. “When you have a thought and you really want it out there on a blank canvas like that, you really need fast tools that can give you the results as fast as you think.” The studio’s force of 130 Mac Pro racks, 50 iMac, 50 MacBook Pro, and 50 Mac mini computers running Pro Tools all connect remotely to this central power source.

One sound designer even used an old PowerBook!

” I enjoy happy accidents, and I love getting unexpected results from technology,” Nelson says. I love playing with digital systems where the clock is wrong. This means that the bits don’t flow correctly. It’s broken, it sounds like bad radio. I have a really old PowerBook, and it has certain old software I like to use; I can feed recordings into it and digitally break them.”

The full piece is well worth reading, and you can watch the video below.

On a personal note as an amateur videographer, I was fortunate enough to have encountered the concept of sound design before I made my first-ever film, a one-minute film called The Decisive Moment. So much so that after I created the scene-by-scene storyboard for it, I actually sourced the sound effects before I shot the video. They all made it to the final cut, except one.

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