Tag Archives: effects

Legendary sound designer Ben Burtt, who was responsible for the sound effects in the first Star Wars trilogy, explains how two dozen iconic sounds from ‘A New Hope’ were created. To wit:

The base sound for the blaster shots came from a piece of metal hitting the guy-wire of a radio tower — I have always loved the noise that high-tension cables make. And I never noticed that Vader’s use of the force was accompanied by a rumbling sound. Anyway, this is a 45-minute masterclass in scrappy sound design.

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Using old school analogue visual effects like ink dispersing in an aquarium and pinholes in tissue paper to represent stars, Thomas Vanz creates a very impressive and highly plausible representation of a dying sun going supernova. To wit:

Novae is a movie about an astronomical event that occurs during the last evolutionary stages of a massive star’s life, whose dramatic and catastrophic death is marked by one final titanic explosion called supernova. By only using an aquarium, ink and water, this film is also an attempt to represent the giant with the small without any computed generated imagery.

Vanz shows how he did it here and here.

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