"Bolt" and more "Wall-E"

The only thing I had previously known about "Bolt" was having seen a one-sheet of sorts inside the Animation Building at DCA. I knew that the movie was about a dog, but that was it. For some reason, I had thought it was live-action, not animated. And since it really just brought to mind "Underdog" (which I didn't see), I wasn't sure this was something I was going to be interested in seeing. And then they showed the trailer for "Bolt" in front of "Wall-E", and now, I'm there. Guess that means we're going to the El Capitan the night before Thanksgiving. It looks like it's going to be a cute and fun movie, and I don't think I'm even going to mind that John Travolta is the voice of Bolt. I actually didn't even recognize him until his name came up as a credit. I'm kind of amused that Ronn Moss does a voice in the movie - I wonder if he's going to sing or if he's just going to marry the same stable of women over and over again. The official website for "Bolt" now has the trailer that we saw. Here's the link - click on the trailer link at the top middle.


the Wall-E zone

There had been reports previously that the walk-around Wall-E who had been making appearances at various museums and such around the country would be arriving at DCA this summer. Well, apparently, contrary to those previous reports, Wall-E won't be showing up at DCA anytime soon. He seemed to be doing fine at the other appearances, so I don't know what the issue is. Maybe they're afraid that he'll get mobbed and they won't be able to control the crowds coming up to him, and maybe he can't handle that like Push does. OK, so have him in the amphitheatre, where people can see him but still be kept at a sort of distance. Not nearly as good as having him wandering around freestyle, but better than nothing. Oh well, at least the Disney spokesperson quote leaves the possibility that he could show up later in the year.

As customary with other Pixar and most Disney animated films, we saw "Wall-E" at the El Capitan. I've posted a write-up of our visit that includes pictures of the marquee and the giant Wall-E as well as the themed dessert at the Soda Fountain. There's also a short video of the moving marquee images and a longer video of most of the new live action stage show that precedes the film.

Slashfilm has an article that includes a list of the hidden things to look for in "Wall-E". I think the hidden Mickey is bogus, and a friend who's seen the movie again says that it's not actually Hamm. There are other things that I've heard mentioned, and I want to see the movie again at least one more time in theatres anyway, so I'm hoping to be able to go back in the next couple of weeks.

Here's an article from Disney Insider about Ben Burtt, sound designer extraordinaire, but since I don't know if the link will go away, I'm reproducing the article below.

In the studio with Ben Burtt

Do you hear what WALL·E hears? Chatting with Pixar's Sound Guru

If a robot falls on a deserted planet, does it still make noise? According to sound designer extraordinaire Ben Burtt, the talent behind the stars of Disney·Pixar's "WALL·E," it most certainly does. And you'd be surprised at how many years of research and development it takes to make every squeak, creak, click, and clank seem so real.

"The assignment was inventing original voices and all the sounds associated with the main characters ... mechanisms, movements, force fields. Since WALL·E doesn't use conventional dialogue, I had to convey the story through the types of sound each character made. By providing the illusion that they had feelings, the audience would care about them," Ben explains. With a visual start from preliminary paintings and sketches, he began creating possibilities for WALL·E, EVE, M-O, Autopilot, and other characters.

"I'd audition sounds for Andrew [Stanton], who'd then give his critique -- just like any other artist working for a director. It took about a year to finalize the basic sounds and three to produce the film. Usually sound is introduced late in production, which works for undemanding films. But when a customized world is required, it's best to be involved in the development early so the sounds and visuals become embedded as the storyline evolves. Pixar's collaborative process inspired me to invent sounds based on character art and allowed the animators to listen and create tests inspired by the sounds."

"Different techniques were used to produce thousands of sound effects -- everything from characters touching a wall to spaceships hovering. Many originated by wandering around with a recorder and collecting sounds in the real world, like bank vaults closing, doors clicking, and miniature jet planes flying. When real sounds are imposed into a fantasy world, it helps form the illusion that things are real. And people associate real sounds with something real."

Inspiration was everywhere. For example, WALL·E's a low-tech robot, with lots of squeaky, cute-sounding motors and noises each time he raises his hand or tilts his head. Though carefully selected, many of those sounds were ordinary mixing bowls or electric shavers. But when Ben searched for a particular whirring sound for WALL·E's various driving speeds, he didn't go far. While watching an old war movie, he heard exactly what he wanted thanks to a scene featuring a hand-cranked generator. After some research, he purchased the generator online, brought it into the studio, and was able to tailor the sound's speed with WALL·E's onscreen movements.

EVE, on the other hand, is a high-tech robot accompanied by various musical sounds as if she's floating or being held together by a mysterious magnetic force. So those sounds were enchanting as well as threatening to express her charming and aggressive moods. Ben adds, "The tones associated with EVE are a little bit like music in the sense that you're trying to color the situation emotionally with the sound you're putting in."

"The characters' voices were the hardest because people are highly critical of voices and hear them differently than sound effects. We're experts at interpreting voices and the emotions behind them. I built special circuitry for my computer that allowed me to record my voice, digitally break it down into component parts, and reassemble it ... processing the sound as if it were a musical instrument. The trick with robot voices is to retain the human element so people can identify and care while also giving it a machine-like quality -- you don't want the audience to think it's just an actor in front of a microphone. That was my biggest challenge."

No stranger to robots, Ben was the genius behind the sounds and voices in the "Star Wars," "Indiana Jones," and "E.T." films. He modestly admits, "I'm happy I had the opportunity, though at the time I had no idea of the impact it would have on my career." This 30-year movie veteran grew up loving fantasy, mystery, adventure, and make-believe as an escape to another time and place. "Movies allow my daydreams to become reality." But sound design wasn't Ben's first and only aspiration. He studied physics and wanted to be an astronaut. After graduating from USC Film School, Ben thought he'd make films for a year or two and then go back to being a scientist. "I never went back."

Ben concludes, "Satisfaction for a sound designer is creating a whole world of sound. If you get to do the voices as well, then that's just about as big a job as it comes. 'WALL·E' was my first feature animation ... working with newly invented characters was very exciting. It was certainly challenging to create something we hadn't heard before. That's what appeals to me the most -- solving the unknowns." When "WALL·E" opens on June 27, you can hear for yourself how this audio expert reached for the stars and orchestrated an entire galaxy!

Following is another article about Ben Burtt, this time from the Los Angeles Times, written by Tom Russo.

Ben Burtt: The man behind R2-D2 and Wall-E's beeps

AUDIO PUPPETEER: “We wanted to have this illusion that the voices for Wall-E and Eve and the other characters are part of their function,” sound designer Ben Burtt says of Pixar’s “Wall-E.”

Burtt speaks the characters' language. In fact, he's created a galaxy of unusual noises in his 30-year career: the crack of Indy's whip, Chewbacca's yowl, the lightsaber hum.

IT'S A RISKY MOVE by anyone's standards. Pixar's delightfully adventurous robot-in-love story “Wall-E” boldly unspools without any human dialogue for the first hour or so. This trick seems akin to having R2-D2 carry half of a "Star Wars" film, speaking only in his emotive whistles, beeps and boops. In fact, Wall-E's "voice" comes from the same source as R2's idiosyncratic technobabble: Oscar-winning sound designer Ben Burtt.

In a renowned three-decade career with Lucasfilm, Burtt, 59, created everything from Darth Vader's heavy breathing and Chewbacca's yowl to the hum of lightsabers (the latter famously conjured from the sounds made by an idling movie projector and some chance microphone feedback). The native of Syracuse, N.Y., also came up with the signature crack of Indiana Jones' whip in "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

Soft-spoken and unassuming, Burtt is nevertheless sufficiently sound-fixated that he dots a phone interview with a few illustrative beeps and boops. Laughing, he remembers how "Wall-E," which topped the box office this weekend, earning an impressive $62.5 million, came his way: "I had just finished my 29-year, 10-month tour of duty with 'Star Wars,' and I thought, 'Well, at least I don't have to do any more robots.' But when Pixar called, I could see this was something more like a Frank Capra romance with Buster Keaton thrown in. And you had the challenge of not only creating the sound for this fantasy world, but the even bigger task of creating principal characters built out of sound."

Opening on a toxic, abandoned future Earth, the movie introduces Wall-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) as a rolling trash compactor who's developed a sweet-natured personality in his centuries of lonely service processing mountains of garbage. When a sleek robot called Eve lands for an environmental evaluation mission, Wall-E is smitten, determined to follow her to the ends of the earth and far, far beyond.

Director and co-writer Andrew Stanton ("Finding Nemo") admits that at the outset, he didn't know how he wanted his characters to sound -- hence his recruiting call to Burtt three years ago. The story brings to mind George Lucas' "Star Wars" dilemma in the mid-'70s, when he needed someone to confect a whole galaxy of unusual ear candy, and found his and Francis Ford Coppola's preferred sound man, Walter Murch, already booked. Lucas asked contacts at USC's film school to recommend the next Murch, and was pointed to Burtt, then a standout student who held a bachelor's in physics from Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa. Burtt would go on receive special achievement awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his work on "Star Wars" and "Raiders" plus Oscars for "E.T." and "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade." (Naturally, he also took part in the new "Indy," supplying the otherworldly pulsation for the crystal skull of the title.)

Although layering in sound effects is a late-game process on many films, Stanton consulted with Burtt from the project's earliest stages, much as Lucas did on "Star Wars." Before there were even concrete visuals for Wall-E and friends, Burtt spent a year recording motors, fiddling with vocal manipulations on his computer and "auditioning" hundreds of audio clips for Stanton as they tried to find the characters' voices, literally. Burtt estimates that he created as many as 2,600 sound files for "Wall-E," as opposed to his usual 700 to 1,000 for a "Star Wars" installment or other special-effects films.

"We wanted to have this illusion that the voices for Wall-E and Eve and the other characters are part of their function," Burtt says. "The idea is that there are little voice chips inside them creating their 'dialogue.' It's audio puppeteering. Wall-E will look at something and there'll be a little click of his hands or squeak of his head, and that's all you need to give a sense of him."

Among the more inspired sound sources for Wall-E's movements: an old hand-operated generator that Burtt snagged online after remembering the device from a John Wayne film.

In the end, Burtt used his own heavily tweaked voice for Wall-E's rudimentary speech. "I was experimenting with processing human voice input," he says, "and it was like Dr. Jekyll in his lab: 'Well, there's nobody else around -- I guess I'll drink the potion.' " Audiences have an infinitely easier time recognizing Sigourney Weaver as the computer voice of the Axiom, the space-faring cruise ship that 28th century mankind calls home. "I thought it would be so funny if Ripley was now Mother from 'Alien,' " Stanton says. "She's sci-fi royalty."

One imagines there must have been development meetings in which Pixar had its Disney partners fidgeting over it taking so long for the familiar voices of Weaver and others to turn up. After all, might not an average 6-year-old fidget too? "It was just luck, but the movie's formative years came during Disney and Pixar's [threatened 2005] divorce, so there was a distraction," Stanton says. "By the time people started paying attention, it was obvious it was working."

While Pixar's gambit with dialogue can be seen as ambitious (or even risky), there are creative precedents for what they have done. "There have always been mute characters," notes Jerry Beck, an animation historian and co-writer of the blog Cartoon Brew. "Road Runner, Tom and Jerry, the Pink Panther. But that's what Pixar does -- they take classic animation elements and create something new. And don't forget, their logo is that Luxo lamp -- an inanimate object communicating through movement and sound effects, but no dialogue."

In the end, Stanton had his own issues with speechlessness when making the movie. "It took me probably the entire first year to get over the fact that I was working with Ben Burtt, one of my heroes," he says. Laughing, he adds, "I tried not to reference 'Star Wars' when we were working. But I did have one moment where I needed a sound, and finally, I said, 'All right, Ben, you know in 'Episode IV,' when they're in the sand crawler?' 'Oh yeah, the gonk-gonk robot.' 'Yeah, I'm looking for that.' "

With thanks to the LaughingPlace.com daily Disney newsletter for including many of the story links above.