Taking a break from all the rumour and speculation surrounding the reshoots on Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, IGN caught up with Skywalker Sound’s Matthew Wood, who spoke about his work on December’s first Anthology movie and how he plans to blend new elements with the familiar sounds from Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope.
Star Wars just has such a great legacy of sound that we’ve kept really special over the years,” states Wood. “Ben Burtt, who’s the original sound designer from the first Star Wars in ’77, was my mentor, and we’ve worked together on many, many projects. He’s still active at Skywalker Sound, almost 40 years after the first Star Wars. We’ve kept those sounds very special, so they’re only used in Star Wars films. I mean, Skywalker Sound, we do a ton of other movies, but we keep those sounds special, because we want that. You hear a TIE fighter, you’re gonna know that’s a TIE fighter. It’s not going to be like, ‘Oh, I heard that in Transformers. I heard that in Pirates of the Caribbean.’ This is the TIE fighter, and it hasn’t been spread out amongst all the different movies.”
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“Sound has that way to subliminally take you, to connect you to things, and it’s a very easy way to do it,” he continues. “It’s not onscreen. We don’t have to render it. We pay special homage to the lightsabers and the wookiees and the wampas and the TIE fighters and the X-Wings. All of that has a connection back. So those sounds we don’t really want to alter much. [We] take things that are in that same patina [of the old sounds] and create new ships and, you know… David Acord, who was my co-supervisor on The Force Awakens — and we both did The Clone Wars together as well — we’ve just tried to take a blend of what we made in Clone Wars and what we’ve done in the Prequels and now The Force Awakens and just tried to put it in that same zone so it seems like it’s in that same universe.”
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is set for release on December 16th 2016, with a cast that includes Felicity Jones (The Theory of Everything), Diego Luna (Milk), Ben Mendelsohn (The Dark Knight Rises), Donnie Yen (Ip Man), Jiang Wen (Let the Bullets Fly), Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland), Alan Tudyk (Con Man), Riz Ahmed (Nightcrawler) and Genevieve O’Reilly (Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith).
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https://youtu.be/b7Ozs5mj5ao?list=PL18yMRIfoszEaHYNDTy5C-cH9Oa2gN5ng
Originally published June 16, 2016. Updated April 15, 2018.
