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Episode II: Sound Search

October 19, 2000 — Episode II is now firmly in the post-production stage, as the digital footage shot in Australia, Tunisia, Spain and England is being edited together to form a rough cut of the film. During this process, Supervising Sound Editor Matthew Wood is hard at work gathering what will become the unique sounds heard in the new Star Wars movie.

“I’m actually going out and recording new sound effects,” explains Wood. “I’m taking the recording gear we used on the set and I’m going out into the field and recording various interesting sounds to apply to the film.”

Wood started this task while in Australia with the main production. “I was over in Australia for a couple a months. I was recording various sounds out there, after reading the script. Right now, I’m building up a library of organic, interesting, unique sounds. I’ve got a fairly big library that I’ve been accumulating over the past ten years that I can always dip into, but I want to try to go with a lot more new fresh sounds in this film.”

The local fauna of Australia provided Wood with an important ingredient in his sound recipe. “There was a trip that I took down to Melbourne while I was there,” he recounts. “I went to Phillip Island, and there were a bunch of penguins that migrate to this one spot down on the very south-eastern part of Australia. I was able to go out there and record. A lot of these penguins have really interesting sounding calls – they have three or four different calls. They just come up to shore around six o’clock at night, and they burrow in their nests. There’re hundreds of them. I was able to get rather distinct calls, because they call out to each other.”

The vociferous penguins are currently slated to lend their voices to a new alien species in Episode II.