Exclusive Interview: Skywalker Sound’s Kevin Bolen, Plus ILM’s May the 4th Sale

Explore Mustafar and Darth Vader’s fortress with cinematic storytelling, lightsaber duels, and more in Vader Immortal Episode I, II, and III. Go from droid technician to hero in Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge and the Last Call add-on content. Or test your skills on a collection of 10 epic tables in Star Wars™ Pinball VR.

Given the iconic role that music and sound have to play in the Star Wars galaxy, we sat down with Skywalker Sound Audio Director & Supervising Sound Editor Kevin Bolen for an exclusive interview.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

KB: I absolutely loved working with Wilbert Roget II and Cris Velasco on Vader Immortal. Wilbert was already so well versed with the established Star Wars score influences from his experience at LucasArts that almost immediately we started looking for ways for his music to express a much more intimate perspective on Vader and his motivations. I like to think of Vader Immortal as a gothic-fantasy with psychedelic flashbacks elucidating the dark past of Mustafar and its people and their struggles under their new master.

We wanted to acknowledge the legacy of John Williams’s scores as well as the power of Michael Giachinno’s score for Rogue Onewithout re-interpolating the Imperial March, because this wasn’t a story about The Empire and The Rebellion but rather a uniquely intimate look into one of that era's most respected, feared, and/or misunderstood personalities. The themes and motifs Wilbert established felt appropriately brooding and intimate as we led ZO-E3 and Vylip through the bowels of Vader’s monolith, but then blossomed appropriately for some of our awesome action set-pieces.

Cris Velasco originally joined the team to help us augment the score from the story of Vader Immortal Episode Ifor the Lightsaber Dojo mode, and was a perfect fit to continue the evolution of the score through Episodes II and III, expanding on the mystical and historical themes of Lord and Lady Corvax, the Mustafarian people, and their own tragic histories.

KB: The unique anthology presentation of Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge gave us freedom to evolve the music of Star Wars simultaneously in multiple different directions. For the main adventure set in and around Black Spire Outpost during the Rise of the First Order, we teamed up with Bear McCreary, who had previously worked with Director Jose Perez III on the 2010 video game Dark Void. Over the course of the main story, Seezelslak, the proprietor of our central cantina location, would tell various Tales allowing players to experience stories set in previous eras like The High Republic and the Age of Rebellion, so we wanted to have a completely unique approach to the score in those different times and places in Star Wars history.

While the High Republic had been introduced by Lucasfilm Publishing, it didn’t yet have an established music style, so we collaborated with composer Joseph Trapanese to develop a style that would feel authentic to Star Wars fans, but be recognizably distinct from Bear McCreary’s score. We’d met Joe while working together on Myth: A Frozen Tale, his first score for VR, and felt like he’d bring something special to the sound of The High Republic.

KB: We knew from the opening of Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge at Walt Disney World and Disneyland’s Oga’s Cantina that DJ R3X’s playlists were going to feature a really diverse blend of fun and uptempo music. We also knew that instead of galactic tourists and affluent traders, Seezelslak’s cantina was going to cater to a scuzzier quality of customer: your typical working-class bounty hunters and assassins looking to avoid the crowds at Oga’s. We’d also been given access to some music and commercials that can be heard on Black Spire Radio in Galaxy's Edge, but not heard in Oga’s Cantina or on DJ R3X’s playlist releases. Once we knew what Seezelslak’s neighbors and commercial rivals were listening to, we set about producing interesting music that felt adjacent to the styles heard in Black Spire Outpost and elsewhere in the galaxy, but more instrumental and downtempo and befitting our lovable laid-back bartender with, shall we say, dubious standards of cleanliness.

DJing and electronic music production had actually been my original gateway into professional audio engineering and post-production, so I assembled a fairly extensive list of both mainstream and underground music references from my own record collection for Danny so that he had references for exactly what we were looking for. We wanted Seezelslak’s cantina jukebox music to sound like music that could be produced by an individual or a small band using “real instruments” like keyboards and modular synthesizers that might actually exist in the Star Wars universe, and not the ubiquitous virtual studio technology plugins of the real world. Danny took our initial concepts and ran with them, delivering a variety of songs that not only fit the environment, but were able to integrate seamlessly with Joseph Trapanese’s Tales scores when Seezelslak’s storytelling transports us to different times and places within Star Wars history.

KB: VR is an exciting medium for sound, because unlike most screen-based games or films, the way the player or listener turns their head, or the distance they choose to stand from a storytelling character can (and often should) affect what they hear, both in the diegetic sounds coming from the virtual world around them, but also non-diegetic music and even the haptics that shake the controllers they might be holding. For Tales, we were delivering on the Meta Quest and Meta Quest 2 platforms, so we wanted to deliver satisfying audio experiences on both the integrated speakers and headphones if the player chooses to use them.

Many VR experiences, especially those presented in a first-person point-of-view, often benefit from binaural spatialization, which can make certain sounds be perceived as coming from outside one’s head or headphones and enhance the sense of immersion or presence. By using the Oculus Spatializer Plugin for binaural rendering, now known as the Meta XR Audio SDK, we were able to consistently “externalize” much of the diegetic sound in Tales, giving satisfying direction and distance to all the little sonic details of Batuu, from burbling pools of acid in Hissiq Springs to snarling Demlins corrupted by dark artifacts in Temple of Darkness.

However, we’ve learned over many years and variety of XR experiences that the effectiveness of binaural rendering can vary from person to person and from sound to sound, so we’ve developed a technique of blending binaural and traditionally panned sounds in real-time with non-spatialized sweeteners and stereo sounds to “fill the ears.”

Particularly with non-diegetic music like the score from Bear McCreary and Joseph Trapanese, sometimes we push and pull the perceived soundfield by transitioning between binaural rendering and traditional stereo sound. We find this works well for dense action sequences where we want music to be present, but maybe pushed back a little bit in the soundstage so that gameplay critical sound effects can have more accurate positional presence. But when a deeply emotional story revelation happens, we don’t want the music to feel “external,” we want it to speak directly to the player, so we often transition to true stereo music and often some non-binaural sound effects as well.

KB: My gateway into Star Wars was the Ewok films, and so as a kid Return of the Jedi was a favorite. As I matured, Empire Strikes Back became my favorite.

More recently, I absolutely adore Tales of the Underworld and the other short-form animation series. Bad Batch is my favorite long-form animated series, but Ahsoka and Andor are tied for long-form live action.

That said, I’ve also played a ton of Star Wars: Hunters, but I have to be honest in that I can’t wait for the Knights of the Old Republic remake, as deep single-player RPGs are my jam.

KB: Some of my earliest childhood memories are of watching the Ewok movies on VHS and the Star Wars: Droids animated series on TV before I was even old enough to watch the films. Though I’d been a lifelong fan of Lucasfilm, I didn’t think working with Star Wars was an achievable career goal; I considered Star Wars something that I would always appreciate as a fan, but not pursue as a professional contributor. It was only through a serendipitous introduction to a Skywalker Sound employee when they were looking to recruit a new entry-level Recordist that I was given an opportunity to make my dreams a reality.

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.

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.

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.)

KB: Sound supports story, first and foremost. Sometimes the story is conveyed visually, but in VR and other immersive mediums, often the story is conveyed in a way that our limited field of view cannot perceive at all times. Our field of audition expands our limited field of view to encompass an entire story experience even if we can’t see it, so sound direction can often convey critical narrative development whether or not the player is paying attention to our visual presentation.

Where it gets really interesting is when sound chooses to support visual expectations and when it chooses to subvert visual expectations. Sometimes we emphasize realistic simulation, but sometimes we emphasize cinematic realism, and so we can use subjectively directed audio to encourage our players to feel different levels of physical and emotional immersion. We understand that feeling immersed in the virtual world is not necessarily the same as feeling emotionally invested in the hero’s journey, so audio often provides an additional layer of connection between physical player and player-character.

KB: Immersive audio is an incredibly subjective experience. We’ve got decades, if not centuries, if not millennia of visual storytelling expertise based on images and written language, but the craft of sonic storytelling is still very much derived from the spoken word and music.

For our audience to feel true presence and immersion that encompasses both visual presentation and dynamic soundscapes, we must be willing to experiment and iterate more frequently than our visual counterparts. We should not take for granted that the traditional methods of foley and sound design that serve linear or screen-based visual storytelling will translate effectively into mixed reality or extended reality stories. If anything, the established practices of sound creation only provide the minimum-viable amount of detail required to support immersion, presence, and authenticity required for mixed-reality story telling.

In order for our stories to truly transcend our limited field of view and reach the extent of our immersive field of audition, we as story creators need to take advantage of every aspect of sound as an unconstrained connection to our audience beyond the limited spectrum of what their eyes can see.

KB: Play with your sound. You might not turn off your visuals when watching a show or playing a game, but don’t hesitate to experiment with the balance of voice, music, and sound that works best for you. Develop opinions. Do you prefer speakers or headphones? Do you like your music loud? Can you follow the story more clearly with subtitles on? Do you enjoy closed-captions that describe the intended perception of music and sound effects and not just the literal translation of spoken dialogue?

The perception and interpretation of sound is a deeply personal experience, and the more attuned and opinionated you are as a listener, the more effective we can be as sonic storytellers.

Craving more Star Wars content? Wishlist Star Wars: Beyond Victory, which is in development from ILM now, and click here for a first look at the upcoming mixed reality playset.