Lightsabers are fantastical, but they may be technologically possible. “Every stroke is choreographed,” he told the audience at a New York Times-hosted event in 2012. Villains wield them aggressively, hacking through the air with lightsabers that appear more like battle axes than artful swords in their hands.) Preparing for a lightsaber duel is like learning intricate dance steps, according to Ewan McGregor, who played a young Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Jedi master, in the more recent films. (Obviously, lightsabers aren’t exclusively used in self-defense. It requires skill, a sense of tradition, and that most elusive of power source: The Force. Unlike a blast gun-also featured in the Star Wars universe-the lightsaber is a defensive weapon, one that’s meant to be used as a last resort. For an object so influential in the realm of fictional technology, it is the lightsaber’s real-world elegance that makes it memorable. Epic battles are fought in the tradition of world-class swordsmen. Mesmerizing sound and a three-foot blade of colorful light make the lightsaber distinct and otherworldly but how the weapon is wielded is what makes it classic. In the first films, a technique called rotoscoping made the lightsabers glow today they’re digitized. The original lightsaber handles were made from pieces of old flashgun battery packs, from the kind of camera where you had to hold up the flash separately. The onscreen look of the lightsaber was, of course, at least as important as the noise it made. “What happens when you do that, by recording with a moving microphone, is you get a Doppler shift, you get a pitch shift in the sound, and therefore you can produce a very authentic facsimilie of a moving sound."
He achieved that by taking a microphone and waving it through the air next to the speaker as the foundational lightsaber sound was playing. So I took that buzz and recorded it and combined it with the projector motor sound and that 50-50 combination of those two sounds became the basic lightsaber tone.”įrom there, all Burtt needed was a sense of motion, the thrumming and slashing of battle. “It picked up a transmission from the television set and a signal was induced into its sound-reproducing mechanism. When he passed by a television set that was on but with its volume all the way down, the microphone let out a whine. On that day, Burtt was recording something, and crossed the room with his microphone still turned on. The Star Wars George Lucas Doesn't Want You To See Rose Eveleth And that I found it one day by accident.” “What was missing was kind of a buzzy, sparkling sound, the scintillating element which I was looking for. “It was just a humming sound,” Burtt said. That pleasant white noise became the foundation for what the lightsaber would sound like. “It would slowly change in pitch, and it would beat against another motor-there were two motors-and they would harmonize with each other.”
“And they had an interlock motor which connected them to the system, which, when they just sat there and idled, made a wonderful humming sound,” Burtt said.
#LIGHTSABER SOUND EFFECT PACK MOVIE#
He helped operate a projection booth at the school that used ancient Simplex projectors, the kind that used to whir and murmur in old movie houses.
“I think maybe somewhere in my subconscious.”Īt the time, Burtt, who had majored in physics during college, was a graduate student at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television. “I could kind of hear the sound in my head, of lightsabers,” said Ben Burtt, the sound designer who created the distinctive pitch, in an interview for a Star Wars video extra. That sound was invented in a mixture of serendipity, imagination, and mundanity. It is personal, precise, and deliberate-emitting no haphazard pew-pew-pewing, but instead a reassuring, almost meditative hummmmmm. Its neon glow may be visible from afar, but the lightsaber is designed for face-to-face combat.
0 kommentar(er)
