Skywalker Ranch

Today the Cars2 characters team celebrated the completion of our work on Cars2 by taking a trip up to Skywalker Sound located at Skywalker Ranch in San Rafael, California. It was the first time I'd been up there and wow!, is it a nice place! 5,000 acres of beautiful countryside with rolling hills, a lake, farmland (so they can get a tax break!), and a few buildings where about 150 or so people work for various George Lucas owned studios. In most places it felt like a national park.

We started at the Main House (pictured above), which houses some of Lucas' collections and libraries and has some insanely beautiful architecture. We had a lunch there, and even saw George Lucas himself at one of the tables in the dining area talking with his main producer, Rick McCallum. Then we went to the Skywalker Sound building, where some of the highest quality sound mixing and recording is done for some of biggest movies of all time. We got to learn how sound fx and foley are recorded and then mixed in with dialogue and a music score to get the final audio for a movie (we got to see some examples from Cars2, which they are trying to finish this week). Sound fx are sounds that people go out into the real world to record, while sound foley are sounds that are recorded in a studio by banging different objects together to mimic real world sounds. The second picture above of the box is what was used to do the sound foley for WALL-E.

After the tour we went to a restaurant to eat and play some trivia where we got to learn some really interesting things about each other's past lives (guess who this one was about: "I played keyboard and bass guitar in a high school garage band named "White Lightning"...). :)