Lucasfilm Skywalker Ranch Technical Building

Nicasio, CA

Skywalker Ranch, occupying over 4,700 acres of land in remote Marin county, was conceptualized by director and producer George Lucas in 1978. Salter provided acoustical consulting services and design for this film, sound-recording, and post-production building, including a 300-seat screening room, music scoring stage, ADR, Foley, and pre and final sound mix and editing suites. The recording stages established new thresholds for quiet background noise produced by ventilation systems. The room acoustics design for critical listening and mixing studios was driven by updated criteria for speech intelligibility in recordings. In response to the new standards, our firm consulted on the new addition, which entailed increasing the number of sound design rooms and remodeling the mix stages. The studio’s films have received more than a dozen Academy Awards for sound mixing and editing.