Lucasfilm Engineers Explore Unlikely Echo Chamber to Capture Audio
By Karla Robinson
December 6, 2012
December 6, 2012
Skywalker Sound, the audio division of Lucasfilm, sent sound effects engineers below the San Francisco Bay to record the unique sound chamber of the recently reconstructed Bay Bridge.- After clambering down ladders, stairs and a crawl space, the crew set up expensive recording equipment to capture the resonance of the concrete chasm. And then they fired blanks. And banged trap doors. And yelled.
- “The pistol gives off a ‘full frequency event’ — that is, the sound covers the full range of audible frequencies, giving a complete impulse response,” Wired explains. “Back at Skywalker, the editors will use Altiverb to digitally remove the sound of the shot.”
- “Then we can run whatever sound we want through that program, and it’ll sound like we’re in here,” says Casey Langfelder of Skywalker Sound.
- “Each microphone they have, called mid-side mics, houses two units — a front facing element to capture the event, and a figure-eight shaped one that records stereo,” the article explains. “Because the sounds reaching the side mic have bounced off the surroundings, they helps give a sense of ambient space, says [assistant effects editor Benny] Burtt. Together, they allow the sound engineers to adjust the width of the sound, making it project a sense of space.”
- The crew took advantage of the recording opportunity before the bridge was reopened.
- “Now that we’ve recorded the Bay Bridge tunnel span, we can create an impulse response for it at each distance we recorded,” says Burtt. “Any time we need some sort of subterranean cave or super-echoey location, we can plug an effect into this and have the response without actually going back out to the bridge.”
- “You never know where these sounds might wind up,” Langfelder says. “They could wind up on ‘Star Wars,’ or they could end up on other things… our library is always growing.”
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