This was inspired by real life lightning that you often see before hearing the thunder.
To complete the sound effect, Burtt added a delay which would create an audio black hole before the twang of the sonic weapon. However, Lucas did not like them and ended up going with the sounds heard in the film. Burtt experimented a lot with what he called the 'space ether explosions,' which were explosions in space that were suppose to sound different than explosions you would hear in the atmosphere of a planet. 'The idea behind this weapon and the explosion actually harkened back to what Ben Burtt had tried to create during the production of A New Hope. For the takeoff sound of the Slave I, Burtt combined a trumpet's whine with the horn of his own 1971 Dodge Duster while it was on a desert road.' - From Concept to Screen: Slave I | 'To create the sound for the Slave I, Ben Burtt did what he always did whenever he had to create a sound for a spaceship: look at how the ship was designed, how it looked like, how fast it would move, and what it could do. More recently, he currently does original sound effects for the prequels and all of the Star Wars video games. Ben Burtt hosted the film clip in 1978 that demos Boba Fett's initial prototype armor, which was all white.īurtt later was the sound designer and supervising sound effects editor for The Empire Strikes Back, and then the sound designer and sound re-recording mixer for Return of the Jedi.
