People
Ben Burtt
Sound · follow into films and chains
Biography
Benjamin "Ben" Burtt, Jr. is a sound designer, film editor, director, screenwriter, and voice actor. He has worked as sound designer on various films, including the Star Wars and Indiana Jones film series, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, WALL-E, and Star Trek. He is responsible for creating many of the iconic sound effects heard in the Star Wars film franchise, including the binary speech of R2-D2, the lightsaber hum, the sound of the blaster guns, and the heavy-breathing sound of Darth Vader, which he made by breathing into a scuba regulator. Burtt has a reputation for popularizing a sound effect dubbed the "Wilhelm scream", which was taken from a character named Wilhelm in the 1953 film The Charge at Feather River.
Notable films
Where to start
Highlights from credits and KinoChain journeys.
Alien
Appears in a KinoChain journey
WALL·E
Appears in a KinoChain journey
Star Wars
Sound Designer
Death Race 2000
Appears in a KinoChain journey
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Sound Designer
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Sound Designer
The Empire Strikes Back
Sound Designer
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Sound Designer
Chains
KinoChain journeys
Public chains that pass through their films — or name them as a bridge.
Trapped and Playing by Someone Else’s Rules
With the upcoming release of Jumanji: Open World, we trace the evolution of the survival game subgenre, following how the core premise of human beings forced to...
10 films
Full Throttle
From the neon-lit streets of Tokyo to the dusty backroads of America, this chain follows the adrenaline, the engineering, and the outlaws who live for the race.
8 films
When Studios Marry: Films Born of Corporate Chaos
From the ashes of mergers and acquisitions come some of cinema's most fascinating experiments. This chain traces how boardroom decisions shaped the art on scree...
8 films
The Art of Listening
From the whisper of a surveillance tape to the roar of a wartime beach, these eight films prove that sound is not just heard, it is felt. A chain of masterpiece...
7 films
Pure-Hearted Heroes
Sixty years after Batman '66 taught us that heroism can be bright, sincere, and utterly without irony, this chain celebrates films whose protagonists believe, s...
7 films
From External Beast to Internal Trauma
Here is a five-film narrative chain that traces how the monster evolved from an exotic physical threat into a psychological mirror of society.
5 films
20 Home Video Releases Every Film Obsessive Should Own
There was a brief, glorious period in the late 1990s and early 2000s when buying a film on home video felt less like acquiring a product and more like being han...
20 films
Signals in the Ash
From a father's vigil to a robot's devotion, eight films trace the fragile threads that hold humanity together when the world falls quiet.
8 films
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