In anticipation of the digital HD release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens on Friday, April 1 via the brand new FandangoNOW VOD platform, we sat down with Force Awakens sound editor Matthew Wood and visual effects supervisor Roger Guyett to discuss some of the cooler things that went on behind the scenes while crafting one of the most successful films ever made.
Like how they went about creating BB-8's voice.
According to Wood, director J.J. Abrams was adamant right from the start that they had to differentiate BB-8 from R2-D2. "J.J. kept saying that if you're sitting in a room and you hear BB-8 outside coming down a hallway, you want to know that's BB-8 and not some average droid," Wood explains.
In order to inject BB-8 with its own personality, well-known comedians like Ben Schwartz and Bill Hader were brought in to lend, well, character to the newest Star Wars character.
"When we got into the post-production process, we brought in Ben Schwartz to actually say the lines in English what we thought BB-8 was saying," Wood says. "BB-8's scenes were long -- it wasn't just some simple beep boop beep. It was a conversation happening between Rey or Finn with BB-8, so we had Ben Schwartz come in and do them. J.J. Abrams transcribed what he thought BB-8 was saying, and we used that as timing to build our audio samples on top of that."
That was only part of what went into creating the vocal stylings of BB-8; Wood says that when it came time to bring Bill Hader in, they tapped into a little Peter Frampton magic to make BB-8 truly come to life.
"Later on in the process we brought Bill Hader in, and we used a talk box, which is basically taking audio and playing it through somebody's mouth," Wood says. "It's kind of like Peter Frampton, who's famous for doing that. So BB-8's performance went into Hader's mouth like a speaker --- and then we rerecorded that out of the speaker, and some of that became BB-8 in the final product."
Here's a video of Frampton messing around with his talk box.
Wood tells us that in the end, much of BB-8's success really is credited to Abrams, who went out of his way to make it so BB-8 was treated with as much care and creativity as its human costars. "J.J. really wanted a hand in creating that, and he wanted to treat BB-8 like an actor and not just some piece of tech."
Which new Force Awakens character is your favorite?
Stay tuned for more from Woods and visual effects supervisor Roger Guyett in advance of The Force Awakens arriving on Blu-ray April 5 and on Digital HD (including the just-announced FandangoNOW) on April 1.
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