Given the iconic role that music and sound have to play in the Star Wars galaxy, Meta sat down with Skywalker Sound Audio Director & Supervising Sound Editor Kevin Bolen for an exclusive interview.
Tell us a little bit about your background.
Kevin Bolen: I’m a Supervising Sound Editor at Skywalker Sound, as well as Skywalker Sound’s Audio Director for interactive experiences. My background ranges from AAA video games to feature film post-production, and for the last decade I’ve been specialized in immersive entertainment, including numerous collaborations with ILM with projects like Vader Immortal.
What led you to working at Skywalker Sound?
KB: I was incredibly lucky for my first professional experience in the audio industry to be working on Dead Space and other AAA games with the teams at EA Redwood Shores and Visceral Games.
I’d been a fan of Lucasfilm and ILM and Skywalker Sound since my earliest memories of watching Star Wars, Willow, the Ewok movies, and other films, but I hadn’t seriously considered going into post-production for films until I met someone working for Skywalker Sound while I was between contracts at EA. We chatted a bit, he was willing to pass my resume along to the Engineering Supervisor, a position opened up, and Skywalker Sound was willing to bring me in and teach me everything about their unique approach to post-production workflows.
Having worked on audio and sound design for traditional flatscreen games, feature films, episodic streaming shows, and immersive entertainment (VR/MR), how do you think about the creative overlaps and divergences of these media?
KB: In my first few years at Skywalker Sound, my projects quickly evolved from mostly 5.1 surround sound to 7.1 surround sound to Dolby Atmos and other immersive audio formats, sometimes with sound objects, overhead speakers, playback metadata, and a variety of new and increasingly complex delivery platforms and real-time processing as streaming and digital distribution become more prominent. At the same time, the creative intent of each unique experience and how well it translates to every audience on every platform remained paramount.
While on one hand, we are creating new and novel forms of entertainment in VR and mixed reality that weren’t previously possible to create or experience in previous mediums or on previous platforms, on the other hand, we’re continuing the incredible legacy that Skywalker Sound, Lucasfilm, and Industrial Light & Magic have already established for realizing groundbreaking creative visions with bleeding-edge and sometimes disruptive technologies. It’s become tradition for us to facilitate the very creative process that leads to the convergence of technologies like using game engines to render cinema quality experiences in real time, changing an immersive audio mix based on which direction a listener turns their head, or using gaze tracking to change the outcome of a story.
From the sound perspective, as long as we start with the intended experience of our listeners first-and-foremost, we can craft a production process that achieves our creative goals, even if we have to invent some brand new technology in the process. It’s never a question of “if;” it’s always a question of “who” and “how.”
Star Wars is an iconic franchise with a storied history spanning nearly 50 years. How do you approach your work for a given project?
KB: What I love about Star Wars is how the entire galaxy is built upon a foundation of juxtaposition, contrast, and possible contradiction. It’s the combination of timeless mythologies and narrative archetypes with popular storytelling conventions and lovable characters, where heroes can be unlikable and villains can be vulnerable, and droids are people, too.
I really enjoy reading the first draft of a script, or watching a rough cut of an episode, or flipping through the concept art in a pitch deck and being mindful first of what is new and unique, and responding emotionally to what elicits my own reactions or inspires an idea. You can only enjoy being the naive audience for so long before you have to become an informed creator instead.
Once that unconstrained first impression is made, only then I go back and rewatch or re-read, and start spotting all the things that could or should be based on established precedent. I work closely with our Star Wars Sound Librarian and all of the sound designers and sound editors at Skywalker Sound to look for interesting opportunities to either add continuity or add diversity to the soundscape for any given project depending on what it needs. I’m also an avid reader, so many of my ideas and approaches to sound aren’t based solely on visual or audio media but on the underlying fiction itself.
What themes and motifs do you use to ensure a sense of interconnectedness and continuity in your work, particularly on Star Wars properties?
KB: Every sound designer, editor, and mixer brings their own unique style and aesthetic to their contributions to Star Wars, so I like to combine the new and the old, the traditional and the unexpected, and make fun new combinations that feel like my own. It’s incredibly empowering to have developed an almost omniscient perspective from contributing to stories from so many different eras, from the Reign of The Empire for Vader Immortal and The Bad Batch, to the Rise of the First Order for Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge and Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run, and then back to The High Republicfor Young Jedi Adventures and short immersive stories in Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge’s “The Temple of Darkness”and “The Sacred Garden.” I love combining one or two sonic elements from previous eras for continuity, with a touch of something created for a story that has yet-to-come, and then juxtaposing those familiar sounds with something totally not from the Star Wars universe.
What does the ongoing Star Wars epic mean to you on a personal level?
KB: I believe Star Wars to be unique amongst all other science-fiction and fantasy franchises. On one hand, it offers approachable perspectives into timeless narrative archetypes and mythological structures, but on the other it allows for lovable characters and approachable story conceits well-suited to pop-culture adoration. Professionally, I’m a Supervising Sound Editor and Audio Director for some of the coolest science-fiction stories to ever have been told, but personally, I’m a father of young girls who can empathize with the characters of Young Jedi Adventures and grow up to be self-rescuing princesses. To me, Star Wars is both fantasy and reality.
What’s something surprising or unexpected that people might not realize about the audio direction and sound editing that goes into Star Wars titles, particularly immersive experiences like Vader Immortal and Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge?
KB: For established universes like Star Wars, I think a lot of fans assume that we have an enormous library of sounds and visual assets from everything that has come before that we can simply reuse every time they appear. While we do in fact have an extensive and meticulously curated reference library of every sound that has ever been created, when we make Darth Vader’s lightsaber ignite in Vader Immortal , it’s always a unique sound created specifically for that individual story beat and emotional context.
Whether for a short form location-based experience like Secrets of the Empire, a feature-film length home entertainment experience like Vader, or a 10-12 hour anthology like Tales, we create tens of thousands of unique sound files or more for every Star Wars story we contribute to. We are all fans first and foremost, so no sound is ever just “good enough”. We want the DC-15A blaster carbine wielded by the TK troopers in The Bad Batch to sound slightly different than the classic Imperial E-11 medium blaster rifle heard in A New Hope and Vader Immortal, and it should sound slightly different than the F-11D blaster rifle used by the First Order in Star Wars: Resistance or Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge. Every iteration of this familiar type of weapon should sound authentic to fans, but the nuances of the sound design are always authentic to its specific place and time in the Star Wars continuity.
When relevant, we always start with established precedent, but given the chance we will always redesign and refine an existing sound to better fit each and every unique presentation.
Do you have a favorite anecdote from your time working on Meta Quest’s growing library of Star Wars content that you can share?
KB: In Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge: Last Call, we wanted our virtual Dok-Ondar to sound exactly like the physical character that guests encounter in Dok-Ondar’s Den of Antiquities in Galaxy’s Edge, so we reached out to Cory Rouse, the Walt Disney Imagineer who provided Dok’s voice in the parks. Cory voiced both Dok speaking in his native Ithorese as well as the Galactic Basic Standard spoken by his translation droid in Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge: Last Call.
When I visited Dok-Ondar’s Den of Antiquities in Galaxy’s Edge in March 2025, it felt like meeting up with someone that I had actually known, and not just a fictional character from a game, because I remember interacting with Dok and his translation droid, plus learning the nuances of what Dok means, versus what his droid tells us in Tales. (SPOILERS: Dok is a distrusting curmudgeon and if it seems like he’s being nice, his translation droid is just trying to convince you to risk your life to get something that Dok really wants.)
Read the interview in full here. In celebration of Star Wars Day, Meta are offering discounts up to 66% off all Star Wars titles currently live on the Meta Horizon Store, now through May 5th at 11:59pm PT — happy gaming!
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