Sunday August 10, 2008
Burtt sounds
The ‘voice’ behind WALL-E has much to say about his role in developing the sound for the reticent robot. Meet Ben Burtt or ... R2-D2 of Star Wars.
WHEN Andrew Stanton first started out making WALL-E, he was having a hard time explaining to people that the movie was about a robot that would say things the way it was built. In the end, he found that the easiest way to explain to people was to refer to it as “R2-D2: The Movie”.
He used that analogy so often that one day, his producer just asked him: “Why don’t we just hire Ben Burtt then?”
While Burtt may not exactly be a household name to the average moviegoer, but to geeks all over the world, he is revered as the “voice” of the Star Wars universe’s most famous robot – R2-D2 (Artoo for short).
EVE and WALL-E aboard the human space liner The Axiom, in the story about one robot’s comic adventures as he chases his dream across the galaxy. He is also responsible for creating the Star Wars trilogy’s most memorable sounds, notably those of a lightsaber igniting and Darth Vader’s wheezy breathing.
Besides Star Wars, the four-time Academy Award-winning sound designer and editor has also worked on other iconic movies such as the Indiana Jones films and ET: The Extra Terrestrial, and is considered a pioneer in modern sound effects technology.
Disappointingly, in person, the 60-year-old does not talk in beeps, clicks and whistles. In fact, but for the fact that he punctuates his answers with examples of his sound effects, he is just like any ordinary guy, albeit one who has spent his entire life playing around with weird sound effects.
“Have I ever gone crazy after playing with all those sounds? Absolutely, all the time! I’m left alone too much of the time, and I’d put on explosions and go BOOM, BOOM, BOOM all day long!” he joked.
“As a child, I’ve always loved recording movies and TV shows and then listening to them. I got very involved and interested in how sounds and images worked together – how sound could dramatise a story,” he recalled. “I was never interested in radio, which was just sound alone. I was more interested in sound and pictures happening at the same time because there is obviously a relationship between them that fascinated me.”
Although he had undoubtedly had his fill of robots over the years, the opportunity to work on WALL-E was too good to resist. “It’s a great concept of a movie; it’s like a silent movie, because it relies on visual language – the tilt of the head, the angle of the binoculars ... all those little things tell you something about the character’s viewpoint,” Burtt noted. “And then the sound is there to really convince you that WALL-E is a machine, and is capable of doing what you’re seeing.”
Unlike most of the movies he’s been involved in, Burtt was roped in to do WALL-E early on, and was developing the sound for the character from the very beginning.
“I started three years ago, when there wasn’t even a script for the movie yet – it was just Andrew with a lot of uncompleted ideas in his head,” he recalled. “We had some sketches and artwork that showed maybe what the character would look like, and Andrew would describe the character to me, and what he thought his personality was like.
“For instance, ‘WALL-E is a cute, lovable character but curious, frightened, and capable of falling in love’; and that would be enough for me to get started.”
WALL-E has grown to be inquisitive about the junk that he finds. The visual language used in the movie helps to convey the robot’s thoughts. According to Burtt, WALL-E was always meant to be a character that has an extremely limited vocabulary. In fact, a very early version of the movie didn’t have a single word in it at all; except for the two names WALL-E and EVE, everything else was just sound effects.
It was a good thing then that Burtt had already had a lot of experience with a character like that previously – R2-D2.
“Andrew is a big fan of Star Wars, and we did talk about R2-D2 a lot, obviously because Artoo is basically the best example of a robot that can communicate his feelings without using any words.
“The difference between Artoo and WALL-E is that Artoo had the advantage of always having C-3PO with him. So if Artoo went ‘beep, beep, beep’, C-3PO would then go, ‘Artoo says the force field needs to be turned off at the Death Star,” said Burtt with a laugh.
“But WALL-E didn’t have a C-3PO, so I had to go deeper into his expressions to make sure the audience would understand what was going on. I knew that it could work – I just didn’t know what kind of sounds would work for him.”
In the case of WALL-E’s voice, it is actually Burtt’s own synthesised voice, produced by playing around with the sound on a computer.
“Andrew liked that because it sounded like synthetic speech, and that’s what we wanted – creating this idea that the characters were machines. We wanted to make the sound seem as if it were really coming out of the device.
“I suppose we could have recorded actors and just dubbed their voices in, but you would have lost the depth and sense of reality that these are talking devices. Imagine if that thing (points to a voice recorder on the table) could talk, it wouldn’t sound like Liam Neeson!”
While some of the sounds he produces usually come across as being very unique, they can come from rather strange sources. For instance, the sound of EVE’s lasers in one of the scenes is actually that of his young daughter crying.
“The laser is going across the room in slow motion and gives out a slow, low growling sound. That’s my daughter crying when she was a baby, slowed way down. I use that sound for monsters a lot!” – By MICHAEL CHEANG
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