Star Wars: Porg Sounds Created With Chickens and Doves

The first glimpse audiences got of porgs in The Last Jedi came from a behind-the-scenes featurette that debuted over the summer, offering only a brief look at the residents of Ahch-To. In later trailers, we finally heard the creature’s squawk, which was on full display as they flew around Luke’s location. To create the signature screech, sound designer Ren Klyce looked to other feathered friends like chickens and doves, then added some tweaks.

“That was one of the first sounds we were assigned to do,” Klyce told D23. “[Writer/director] Rian [Johnson] gave us a bunch of adjectives as to what he didn’t want it to be. He didn’t want them to sound screechy, or irritating, or squawky. It was a matter of experimenting through four or five versions of the sound.”

Luckily, the sound designer didn’t have to travel far to snag the sounds necessary.

“At Skywalker Sound there’s a chicken coop with these little chickens, and Coya Elliott, our first assistant, went down and recorded those chickens,” Klyce shared. “And then we took that sound and slowed it down and stretched it out and found little chirps.”

Despite changing the speed of the sounds and adding in some other tweaks, the sound still wasn’t ready to go.

“We found this man who releases doves at weddings and we asked him to come down so we could record them,” Klyce pointed out, while mentioning a fake turkey call also made its way into the mix. “So we have a little snippet of that [turkey call], a little bit of chicken, a little dove, and cut it all together.”

Another new creature in the film are the fathiers, which are raced on Canto Bight while the city’s elite place wagers on the winner.

“When we first got the artwork for them, I thought they kind of looked like goats,” Klyce explained. “So we decided to go record some goats at a goat farm.”

Instead of combining poultry, the sound designer added some ferocity to the vocalization.

“There’s a male goat in there that we recorded, then pitched the sound down and stretched it out—we call him Big Daddy,” Klyce confessed. “And then we added in the sound of bears—it’s a combination of different animal sounds.”

You can hear all of these sounds in The Last Jedi, in theaters now.

[H/T D23]