‘Star Wars’ R2-D2, Darth Vader & Lightsaber Sound Designer Ben Burtt To Be Feted At Locarno

The Locarno Film Festival will pay tribute to award-winning Star Wars, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Indiana Jones sound engineer, editor and voice actor Ben Burtt at its upcoming 77th edition in August.

The veteran technician will be feted with the festival’s Vision Award Ticinomoda, the prize dedicated to creatives whose work has extended the horizons of cinema.

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Highlights of Burtt’s career include creating iconic Star Wars sounds such as R2-D2‘s beep, the swoosh of the lightsaber, Darth Vader’s heavy, mechanical breathing and Ewokese, the language spoken on the moon of Endor.

He also created electronic warble of 2008 robot character WALL·E and modelled the rasping voice of the alien protagonist of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) on a chain-smoker he came across in a coffee shop.

Burtt has won a slew of across his career including two Academy Awards for Sound Effects Editing twice, in 1982 for E.T. and in 1989 for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, as well as two Special Achievement Sound Editing Academy Awards for Star Wars (1977) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).

Burtt is also an accomplished director in his own right, directing documentaries on varied subjects – from space flight and the space station in Blue Planet (1990) and Destiny in Space (1994), to the history of American crime with The American Gangster (1992) to his own field: Special Effects: Anything Can Happen (1996).

More recently he created Behold, a non-linear film experience on movies and Outer Space that plays in a permanent gallery at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.

“Ben Burtt is a key part of the Star Wars mythology. A young and precocious sound effects prodigy, he created a library of organic sounds to bring the universe of the film noises to life; these creations became inseparable from the mythology of the Lucasian saga,” said Locarno Film Festival Artistic Director Giona A. Nazzaro.

He detailed the process behind some of his iconic sounds including creation of the hum of the lightsaber, from the whir of of a movie projector mixed with a cathode ray tube, Chewbacca’s verse, which combined the cries of several animals including a bear, a walrus and a lio, and. or for the sound of spaceship doors opening and closing, repurposed from the sound of the doors on the Philadelphia subway.

“Ben Burtt is a pioneer and visionary who has fundamentally changed the way we perceive sound in cinema.” said Nazzaro.

The Vision Award Ticinomoda awards ceremony will take place on Locarno’s Piazza Grande on August 14 in Piazza Grande, followed by a public conversation on August 15.

The 77th Locarno Film Festival will take place from 7 to 17 August 2024.

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