WALL.EWhen Pixar Studios were looking for the right person to provide the voice for lovelorn robot WALL.E there’s was just one man for the job. Sound designer Ben Burtt is famous for creating  the “speech” for Star Wars’ R2-D2 and has done everying from create the sound of a light sabre to Indiana Jones’ whip. 

Sky Movies:.  What exactly is a sound designer on a film?
A sound designer is responsible for inventing all that you hear in terms of sound effects.  In WALL.E, the voices are meant to be coming from machines, from robots, so consequently many different techniques were used to create voices, some of the starting with a human voice, and others synthesizing voices in a computer just from scratch.  And some voices were a composite of sounds, little motor sounds or other things that we might go out and gather in a tape recorder in the field.

SM: How did you become a sound designer?
I was always very interested in movie-making when I was a child.  I wasn’t specifically interested in sound.  My father had given me a tape recorder when I was a young lad and I really enjoyed - this was in days long before videos and DVDs -but I used to record movies and television shows with my little recorder, holding the speaker up, holding the microphone up to the speaker. I spent many many hours listening to movies and got very interested in how sound was created for films, and how sound and pictures went together to enhance each other.  I went through school, wanted to be a scientist in physics, but the movie-making aspect of my hobby kind of took and I ended up going to film school.  At that point I also specialized in sound, because nobody wanted to do sound.  Everybody wanted to be a director.

SM: Where did you gain your experience?
The training I had in Star Wars and the Indiana Jones films  gave me a lot of experience starting with real world acoustic sounds and either imposing those sounds into the world of fantasy to give it a naturalness and a credibility to create an illusion, or how to change sounds, to modify them or run them backwards or change the pitch. You could start off with the sound of a WWII bomber and you’d end up with the sound of the Millennium Falcon speeding by.  But it retained the sense of energy, the sense of speed and strength that the original airplane had but people didn’t hear it as an airplane because you changed it just enough. 

SM: Tell us about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
I had the advantage of starting out with a well established sound grammar that existed from the previous three films as well as the television series.  So we had that library of signature sounds of guns and ricochets and faces punches - things that are the fabric of Indiana Jones.  But the film still required the invention of about 700 new sound effects because you go to new locations. There’s temple doors, there’s crystal skulls that make sound. So with one foot firmly planted in the Indiana Jones lexicon, you can move out and create new things on top of it

SM; How did you feel when you were asked to come on board WALL.E?
When I was first approached,  I had just finished the last Star Wars film a few years ago and I had gone home and I said something to my wife like well I’m really glad, no more robots, and I felt I just didn’t have another alien voice or robot inside of me. I wanted to move on and do something else.  However, when (director) Andrew Stanton pitched this idea I was enamoured.  I thought it was a really charming romantic story, and also there was a fantastic challenge for sound design.  I would like to come up with a whole world of sound -  the challenge was to come up with a special set of voices for the main characters in the film, voices that wouldn’t be just humans speaking in front of a microphone but something else.

SM: How did the voice of WALL.E come about?
My job was to come up with a technique for creating a voice…so I’m left alone in my studio many hours and weeks at a time.  I’m kind of like a scientist in a lab, often I would just experiment on myself because I was readily available and I pretty much worked alone.  A lot of the early experimentation when I was trying to come up with a technique to create Wall-E’s voice, I used my own voice to start with.  So like it or not I was going to provide the voice because I was available and I had tuned up my circuitry so to speak to work with using my voice as a starting point. 

SM: Who is he exactly?
WALL.E’S a robot who drives around. He’s like a tank all sped up.  He spends all day compacting trash.  The principle component there is a car being crushed in a junkyard in a hydraulic press.  Different kinds of motors are used, some strictly for expressiveness. How he tilts his head, moves his neck,  leans forward, opens and closes his eyes. Sounds start with a human voice and then they’re processed and re-performed in the computer to give them an electronic component. 

SM: And Eve, WALL.E’S love interest?
Eve is a very high-tech computer compared to WALL.E.  She sort of she floats and is held together with magnetic forces or a force field.  A lot of the sounds with Eve are very musical and ethereal.  She flies around so, of course, we record a miniature jet plane. She has a laser.  No science fiction film exists without a laser, it has to be in there.

SM: What about other characters?
Moe is a little scrubber droid. We started out with one of the oldest cartoon sounds in the world - a little cyclone whistle. That’s used for the little track ball Moe rides around. It’s combined with electric razors to create the sound of Moe cleaning things off. His voice is given a stuttery kind of quality that matches the little motor action of his scrubber.