Joe Skinner: Less than an hour past the Golden Gate Bridge, you will find maybe the most iconic post production facility in the entertainment industry. It’s called Skywalker Ranch, and I drove up there recently to meet with Al Nelson, supervising sound editor and sound designer on Top Gun: Maverick. Nelson’s work on the film is cleaning up the awards circuit, and it’s nominated for an Oscar this year for Best Sound.
Note: Clip from the trailer for Top Gun: Maverick.
Joe Skinner: Skywalker Ranch is where the sounds of Top Gun: Maverick all came together. The Ranch is the culmination of George Lucas’ vision for a sound studio that can also double as a scenic “filmmaker’s retreat.” On the roads to get there, they seem to go on forever through Northern California’s rolling green hills. It really was a thrilling trip for me. I had a concentration in sound design during my own schooling, and I was long ago taught that sound is 51% of a film. Much of the work in sound design is subconscious. There is a subtlety and a humility involved in the craft that I find fascinating. As I got inside the ranch, I passed by acres filled with cows and vineyards, and even a small man-made body of water called Lake Ewok. And at the end of the road is a large rustic building called Skywalker Sound. This is where Al works, and it’s where we met up for our conversation.
Al Nelson: Hello, my name is Al Nelson. I create, select, discuss, venture to establish sounds that help tell the story that the filmmaker is trying to tell with their film.
Joe Skinner: I’m Joe Skinner, and this is American Masters: Creative Spark. In each episode, we bring you the story of how artists bring their creative work to life. For today’s episode, Al Nelson gives an inside look into the history of sound design at Skywalker Ranch, and into his own process.
Although Al Nelson seems to be affectionately known around these parts as the “dinosaurs and jets” guy for his extensive sound designs on Jurassic World and Top Gun: Maverick, he also has a 27-year body of work that navigates the subtle needs of all kinds of films: everything from major commercial movies like Knives Out, to documentaries like 20 Feet From Stardom, to animated classics like WALL-E and Toy Story 2.
Al Nelson: In all films and even in documentaries, we are adding and selecting and being very meticulous about what sounds are heard and when, like I worked on the film Knives Out and Marta, the character in the film, she gets in this little beat up, little car and she’s on a police chase. We record that model of vehicle and we make sure we’ve got that. But then you sit with the filmmaker and it’s like “Eh, that’s not fun.” You know, it’s gotta be extreme. The police SUVs are going to be these big V8’s and we make them extra powerful. And then this little car that she’s in, you know, we actually ended up using like Vespa motors.
Note: Sound effects gathered from Nelson’s collection.
Al Nelson: You know, you find the worst sounding cars, but with personality, and you get them to rev to extremes and you attach that to that vehicle. And if you’re doing your job right, then you’re telling the story and you’re also being authentic in that it’s believable. The scene is believable and it’s fun. So it’s stuff like that that gives musicality and emotional context to the sonic landscape.
Note: Scene from Knives Out illustrating Marta’s car.
Joe Skinner: But before Al Nelson developed this large body of work, before he knew anything about sound design at all in fact, he was a college grad out of Florida State on a much different path.
Al Nelson: I was more a music person growing up. I played instruments, mostly guitar, played in bands, studied music. So that’s kind of where my passion was. From my early days, I took for granted that there are artists who take the time to select what sounds are heard in a film at each moment. And one just assumes that, okay, well there were microphones on set. And so what we hear was there.
Joe Skinner: Nonetheless, after school, Nelson found his way to San Francisco, looking for work in new forms of media after a friend convinced him the Bay Area was the right place to be.
Al Nelson: I met a studio owner who let me join the team as an intern. And I learned the way all sound interns should learn. I learned how to make coffee, go out and get the muffins, and then set up the studio and clean it up and then slowly learned how to set up the microphones and worked my way into learning digital systems and all of that. And so from there I heard about this fantastic facility, Skywalker Sound, which I knew nothing about. From there, I was able to start, on the ground floor as well.
Joe Skinner: Al gave me a brief tour of Skywalker Sound, which doubles as a tour through memory lane for him, since he’s spent the better part of 27 years in this very space. There’s a 300-seat screening room, a giant recording studio for full orchestras, and machine rooms where Al spent his time on projects like Jurassic Park: The Lost World back in the mid-90s.
Note: Scene from Jurassic Park: The Lost World.
Joe Skinner: It’s certainly another iconic film known for its sound design.
Note: Scene from Jurassic Park: The Lost World continues.
Al Nelson: When I set out, I was going to do music and then to me it was a big left turn because now I was doing sound for film and initially I was really more of a technician. I was loading up the mag machines and loading in dailies from production and doing a lot of more technical things.
Joe Skinner: We took a peek in one of those machine rooms to take a look at the old tape decks. Unsurprisingly, they weren’t there anymore.
Al Nelson: And then even as I got more into sound editorial and then sound design, it seemed more literal and more functional to me. But once I arrived here and started to meet people, started to learn more about what film sound was, I became just enamored and obsessed with getting to know these people and their, you know, creative process. And I was in the machine room and I was just fascinated seeing Gary Rydstrom go between his sound design room and the mix stage and creating these dinosaurs and seeing what sound design can actually be, up close, which was, was all just an enigma to me up until then.
Joe Skinner: Gary Rydstrom was the sound designer who came up with the iconic sounds you have come to know and love from Jurassic Park and its sequel, imaginatively combining whale songs, donkey sounds, and other unlikely animals to create the bellow of a Brachiosaurus.
Note: Brachiosaurus sound from Jurassic Park.
Joe Skinner: And the roar of the T-Rex – with a mix of a baby elephant, tiger and an alligator.
Note: T-Rex roar from Jurassic Park.
Al Nelson: As I worked my way out of the machine room as a technician. Ultimately this is sort of the ladder here at Skywalker where you first learn how the process is and then you learn all the gear and you learn how it all operates. And then you start to get opportunities to be more creative. And so one of the positions I was given was assistant sound designer, and that involved working for the sound designer and primarily gathering sounds for them for whatever the project was. I was fortunate to work with Gary Rydstrom on Toy Story 2. For example, Zurg and Buzz have a big battle on an elevator.
Note: Scene from Toy Story 2 illustrating the scene Al Nelson would be gathering sounds for.
Al Nelson: Gary said go find and record lots of elevator sounds. And back then we had the internet, but it wasn’t the internet of today. You know, you basically could get phone numbers and then you’d call all these people. And so I remember calling these buildings and asking to speak with the building maintenance people and saying, “Hi, can I come and record the inner workings of your elevator?” They were like, “What?” I remember going to some high-rises in San Francisco and it was super exciting. I’d bring my microphone rig, they’d stop the elevator, and you’d get in on top where all cables are and you ride and nothing. It’s like, “shhhhhhh.” This isn’t interesting at all. Those elevators were too clean. Then I remember going to the UC Berkeley campus on a Sunday when nobody was there and getting on all those old clanky elevators. And I couldn’t get on top of ’em, but I remember getting inside of ’em and I would actually jump up and down and just get as much of the more quirky sounds that those elevators made as I could. And then ultimately, it’s not always the sound that you think you need. It’s the sound that works best for the scene. We had, at my house, one of those old spring garage doors with the big giant springs. And I remember opening and closing that garage door and slamming it and taking a ball-peen hammer and banging the springs and getting all these heavy, steel clangs and clanks.
Note: Sounds of garage door clanks from Al Nelson’s recordings.
Al Nelson: And Gary did what he did. I just gave him all this material.
Note: Scene from Toy Story 2 illustrating the sounds Nelson gathered.
Al Nelson: We found a guy who had this big giant Cadillac for Al’s cadillac. It’s all animated, but he drives this big ugly Cadillac and he steals the toys and they end up in the trunk of the car. And so we went out and we recorded this Cadillac out on the side streets here in Marin County.
Note: Screeching car sounds gathered from Nelson’s collection.
Al Nelson: And we had an intern, she was eager to get in the trunk and record from inside the trunk while we drove the car around. This car was so old and beat up, we couldn’t get the trunk back open again.
Note: Screeching car sounds gathered from Nelson’s collection.
Al Nelson: We were finally able to, and just after that we got pulled over by the local sheriff for peeling out on the side roads of Marin County.
Note: Scene from Toy Story 2 illustrating the sounds Nelson gathered.
Al Nelson: Those are just a few of the many sound adventures working for Gary Rydstrom, so much fun just getting out of the office and hunting for sounds. And that was the early days of learning that the world is full of sounds and you gotta go out there and get your rig and just listen and get lots and lots of flavors and colors. And then go back to the studio and see what you can do with them. And so, when I sit with Gary Rydstrom he just gets so excited with new sounds and with the way sounds can tell stories. He’s been doing this much longer than me and, yet it’s still new and exciting to him. These are people who have a cinema history. They’re icons in sound. They’re just an encyclopedia of experience, and they’re so generous and genuine in the way they interact with you. They just are so passionate about that form of storytelling and it’s contagious.
Joe Skinner: Sound designers like Gary Rydstrom are, as Nelson says, icons of sound. Leading up to today with Al Nelson himself, these artists learned from each other’s work here at Skywalker Sound. And no person in this creative field has had a more storied legacy than Ben Burtt.
Al Nelson: I’ve been at Skywalker for 27 years, and embarrassingly when I came here, I knew nothing about the history. I didn’t know who the sound designer was for Star Wars until I was in the house that was basically built for him.
Joe Skinner: Ben Burtt was really the man who started it all here at Skywalker Sound. He’s actually one of the first people to ever call themselves a “sound designer,” and he’s responsible for some of the most iconic sounds from Star Wars.
Note: Lightsaber sound effect. Chewbacca sound effect. R2-D2 sound effect.
Ben Burtt: I called myself a sound designer because I really wasn’t functioning just as a production recordist or just a sound editor or just a sound mixer. I did some of the jobs that all three of those people might do.
Joe Skinner: Not only was Ben Burtt an inventive sound effects artist, but he was a voice actor too. He even voiced the heavy-breathing sound of Darth Vader in the original films.
Note: Darth Vader voice effect.
Al Nelson: Ben Burtt, who George recruited from UCLA straight out of college to create the sounds for Star Wars is one of the most generous and genuine and kind people I’ve ever met. We have a volleyball court at Skywalker and he got these volleyball games going so that’s how I first got to really know Ben was playing volleyball. I was kind of an up-and-coming sound effects editor. I was kind of straddling the line, but he was asked to do Steven Spielberg’s film Munich, and it was really late in the process and I remember him coming in and sitting with me in my office and saying “Let’s get to know each other.” And we just talked about who we were and where we came from and and what we liked about movies and what we liked about other things, and it was kind of just a “let’s get on the same page. Let’s have a dialogue so that we can then communicate from there.” And then from there, he was juggling all these reels and all of these different things, but he knew exactly what sounds needed to help tell the story, and he was guiding me as to what to focus on. He was coming at it from, you know, as Spielberg’s ears and also as a filmmaker himself and as a storyteller guiding me. And gosh, you can know everything inside and out of Pro Tools and all the bells and whistles of every sound box in the world, but that’s the kind of guidance that is invaluable. He sat through a screening with us on Top Gun and had incredible insight. And his son Benny Burtt is one of my best friends and I call him my secret weapon. Benny is who I spent weeks with, including on the aircraft carrier recording jets for Top Gun. So it’s a family affair, and two incredible people.
Joe Skinner: As Al Nelson grew through these working relationships, he became a bonafide sound designer carving out his own legacy, leading sound design efforts on projects like How To Train Your Dragon and Jurassic World, among countless others. This path led him to our present moment – with his own Oscar-nominated work alongside director Joe Kosinski on this year’s Top Gun: Maverick.
Al Nelson: Fortunately, we’ve worked with Joe Kosinski here at Skywalker since Tron so we were able to chat about it in very, very early days. And one of the earliest conversations was the jets are key to that film and to the soundtrack, and we should get as much material as we possibly can. You want a full palette of sounds and, with jets, they have many different personalities and depending on how you record them, where you record them, their perspective.
Note: Jet sounds from Top Gun: Maverick.
Al Nelson: So we would spend a lot of time recording and not just jets, but as much material as we could record for Top Gun: Maverick, even before production started so that by the time the filmmaker’s working on their director’s cut, we’ve already got a library, we’ve already worked through what creatively sounds what doesn’t sound good. We’ve really had a chance to define our palette.So in working with the producers, we knew they were going to be shooting some early stuff out the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. So my colleague, Benny Burt, and I flew out to Virginia Beach and deployed on the carrier for a week out into the Atlantic. We were taken to all nooks and crannies of the carrier to record from the front of the boat, the bow safety area where the Jets launch right over your head from the catapults.
Note: Jet sounds gathered from Nelson’s collection.
Al Nelson: We were below the deck where you hear the jets land in the cable room where these massive hydraulic systems retain the cable and then rewind the cable for the next jet arriving. Incredible machinery with incredible sounds and incredible personality.
Note: Jet planes taking off. Sounds gathered from Nelson’s collection.
Al Nelson: And then you have the jets circling overhead coming into land launching, and we had both F-18’s and F-35’s as well as prop planes and helicopters. You know, it could just be kind of same-same, but it wasn’t because we had so many different flavors and so many different options and so many different opportunities to change it up and create the palette that then became these jets in the story that we were telling sonically.
Note: Sounds gathered from Nelson’s collection.
Al Nelson: The other thing that I think is important isn’t just gathering the sounds onto our hard-drives and having that material, but it’s being present and experiencing what it’s like to be a naval aviator, sitting at luncheon and dinner with these women and men who fly these machines and talking to them about it. What it’s like. What it’s like to fly the jets and how complicated it is and what’s the most dangerous thing you’ve had to do and experiencing being that proximal to a jet as it launches, which is pretty hard to reproduce. It goes right through your body. It’s visceral. So all of that is as instructive as actually just gathering the sounds.
Joe Skinner: Throughout Al Nelson’s creative process, he needs to understand the emotional throughline of the storytelling and keep a bigger picture in mind. Having a solid sense of character is an important part of this process.
Al Nelson: One of the very important things we learned on Top Gun was from Tom Cruise who was very invested in the film in all aspects, as one can imagine, including in the soundtrack. And he spent a lot of time with us. The way he perceives film is both from the audience but also as Maverick. So you have to understand Maverick And Goose and Phoenix and all of these characters. When Phoenix’s plane is on fire, what is it like to be Phoenix? Engine fire, left. Engine fire, right. We don’t necessarily need to hear radio communications, you know, we don’t necessarily need to hear the thruster. We need to hear the alarms and the danger. So, understanding to tell the story and the story character’s perspective and from the perspective of the audience viewing and investing in the character. And is our sound helping that relationship or is it distracting from that relationship? We don’t need all those ambiances. We don’t need the sound of the thrusters when we’re in the cockpit and Rooster is saying-
Note: Scene from Top Gun: Maverick.
Al Nelson: And Phoenix is saying “He’s gone. He’s gone. You can’t get him.”
Note: Scene from Top Gun: Maverick of a quiet moment when the pilots are worried that Maverick is gone.
Al Nelson: A more literal sound person might have some big jet rumble or wind or you know, who knows what PA coming in, beeps, et cetera. And that’s not the moment there. And so it’s knowing what sounds to play and the right sounds to play and also knowing when not to play any sound. You could make it this chaotic scene, but that’s not the moment. You’re in Rooster’s head there and Maverick has been killed, and so the sonic decision there is to play just that dialogue. And you’ll notice that Phoenix’s voice in that it’s slightly distorted in just the right way. And has this desperation to it. And you’ve got, you know, Rooster, just his breaths and Phoenix and that’s all you need there. So the decision there for sound is just to play it from Rooster’s perspective, and so that’s all we need to be paying attention to. And that’s our storytelling with sound. And it doesn’t sound like that in real life. But yeah, as we started this conversation, we decide what sounds to play and when to play them based on what’s best for the story. And in that case, that’s what the story needed is just their breaths.
Over time, more and more, I start to realize that the skills that I gathered early on as a musician and as a composer apply very directly with sound design. Especially something like orchestration. You don’t often listen to music where every instrument is playing all the time. You have moments where you crescendo to a full orchestra, but the violin takes the theme and then the flute takes the theme and then, the cellos take the theme or, you know, just the horns play and then just the strings play. In the same way there are places in sound for film where you just need to hear the voices. You just want to hear the things that are helping tell the story. The themes. Our goal is that it feels natural. It feels like it belongs. It feels like it’s meant to be that way. If you do it intentionally and based around the story, then it just feels like that’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’s all about doing your job convincingly.
Joe Skinner: Thank you so much to Al Nelson for inviting me up to Skywalker Ranch and spending the better part of his day with me to show me around.
American Masters: Creative Spark is a production of the WNET Group, media made possible by all of you. This episode was produced by me, Joe Skinner. Our executive producer is Michael Kantor. Original music is composed by Hannis Brown. This episode was mixed and mastered by Josh Broome.
Funding for American Masters: Creative Spark was provided by the Rosalind P. Walter Foundation, Thea Petschek Iervolino Foundation, the Anderson Family Fund, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, and the Philip & Janice Levin Foundation.
