The Lucasfilm Employee Spotlight continues, shining its light on Lucasfilm veteran Krysten Mate of Skywalker Sound, the first woman to have a sound designer credit on a feature film and giving us a new insight into the work of the iconic company and what it takes to work and progress there.
Currently, I am a sound designer and sound supervisor, which have been my roles the last couple of years. I’ve also been a sound effects editor. I started at Skywalker Sound in 1997. Every day can be very different, which is true for a lot of people at Lucasfilm! On the project we’re doing currently, I am the sound designer. I get the picture-edit of the movie from the production team, and we’ll have a meeting about what they want to convey. That can be difficult, because visual effects are often still being created, and we have to create sounds before seeing the final visuals. We help build the audio world around it. So, I could be working on something straightforward like a car chase, or building a whole world that doesn’t exist with two people in front of a greenscreen.
We have to decide the right tone for a scene. Is something scary, fantastical, quiet, or busy? We start building up all the sounds that we need, either things we record brand-new, recordings from the Skywalker Sound library, or we can create new sounds with a combination of materials. Eventually I cut all of the sound to the picture, which always changes. Then we go into a premix phase, where we put all of the effects together inside a mix room and organize them. The last part is the final mix, which we do at Skywalker Sound at the Ranch. I’ve also done them at the Disney Studios and Fox Studios.
So, I don’t really have a typical day [laughs]! But those are the usual phases of how we make a soundtrack for a movie.
