[Male narrator #2] Everywhere you turn, people try to tell you who to be and what to do, but what about deciding for yourself?

Roadtrip Nation is a movement that empowers people to define their own roads in life.

Every summer we bring together three people from different backgrounds.

Together they explore the country interviewing inspiring individuals from all walks of life.

They hit the road in search of wisdom and guidance to find what it actually takes to build a life around doing what you love.

This is what they found, this is Roadtrip Nation.

[Darth Vader breathing] [Ben Burtt] You probably recognize that right?

the old Vader breathing.

It's making me nervous.

[Ben Burtt] Yeah you like that?

[Vader breathing] The script talked about Vader having a breathing mask of some kind.

Yeah the apparatus it's me breathing through a scuba regulator.

[Ben] Oh ok.

It's back here, you have to have a scuba tank charged up you know, with pressure.

It was this apparatus here.

I found if I took this little tiny microphone and I put it right inside and held it inside the regulator and then breathe.

(breathing sound) Since the mic was at such an unusually close perspective, it just got this icy cold kind of vrrr sensation.

[Sofaya] So how did you get to sitting at skywalker ranch like doing what you love everyday?

[Ben Burtt] I grew up in Syracuse New York.

Didn't want to grow up and I found that going into movies was one way of not growing up.

That I can still have fun putting on costumes and acting out stories and this sort of thing.

I never looked at my interest in movies as a career.

I never considered it growing up, it was a hobby and I majored in physics.

But along side to that I was still making movies for fun.

So I decided I would stop science for the moment and I would pursue this movie career.

So I went to the west coast and I went to USC cinema and I thought well I'll go out there and maybe two years of it I can get this out of my system and I can come back and be a science teacher and pursue what I thought I was going to do, and I was there for about ten days and I chickened out and I got on a plane and I came home.

I was just fearful of doing this and I can remember my automatic garage door closing and I'm standing on this inside and I thought you know my whole world was ended because there was this door closing.

Clunk.

I was back in my house in my bedroom where I grew up and I thought I had failed completely.

[Ben] That definently resonates with me, maybe all of us but particularly like in Rhode Island is so small and tight knit, it's hard to step out and I feel that uncertainty and fear and then you just freeze up.

Was there any one thing that motivated you to finally get in the car and go, and not turn around?

I used up all my opportunities locally and I needed a place to plant my imagination, that it can grow.

The folks at USC said I could still come back and start another semester and hold it open for me and I thought about it for some months and got the courage for it and I went back.

It took me a second attempt to do that.

It wasn't easy, it was a time of trauma to some extent.

I still was so uncertain about what I wanted to do but when I was at USC somebody called the campus and said we're looking for some young student interested in sound who can come work on this film called "The Star Wars."

We just need some one, well they didn't say so, cheap.

And behind me, that artwork on that screen is, that was what was on the wall in their office.

It was one of the early paintings that depicted what the movie might look like, and I looked at that and I said, "Wow, I made this film when I was 14, a version of it so I'm cut out for this job," and I got the job.

Of course I didn't know where that was going to lead.

I didn't know I'd be still talking about it fourty years later.

[Blaster sound effects] [Ben Burtt] Ok who wants to shoot?

[Blaster shooting] [Martha] There was the whole kind of fandom, because it was just this absurd opportunity that no fan should be allowed to have.

[Ben] It was like taking a time warp back to the original days of making sound because he had the original stuff, like that he created Star Wars that he sparked my imagination as a child.

You know for hours I would play in the backyard imitating the sounds he came up with and it was the way he came up with them, that was the coolest thing of all.

[Ben Burtt] The sound of the lightsabers was the first sound I ever made for star wars oddly enough but... [Sofaya] How?

[Ben] Yeah I was going to say how did you record that?

I was a projectionist at a movie theater and in the projection booth at USC was a projector's interlock motors.

They're just motors.

They go "mmmmmmm."

Like that.

It sounded musical and charming but not maybe dangerous enough.

A short time later I was in my apartment and I had a microphone plugged into my recorder and the microphone had a bad connecting cable on it so it was getting hum, it was "zzzzz" getting into the mic.

and I thought, "Wow that sounds dangerous there I like that sound."

I recorded that buzz and I took the hum of the projector motor and just blended the two together.

And then I took another tape recorder and another microphone and waved it around in front of the speaker.

So you have the hum "mmmmm" like this.

I could produce the movement of the swords that way.

So it wasn't any kind of digital effect or, in those days we had no computers.

Everything was done cutting and splicing sound with scissors and tape.

Physical stuff.

How is your experience with presenting your creative work to audiences?

I personally struggle with really putting it out there because you really are really vulnerable.

Even someone like me, makes things every day that get thrown away.

It just happens.

There's a library of sound on my computer and there's lots and lots of things that I loved and someone did not and it's part of it.

I mean I was hired once a long time ago to make a sound for the movie Alien, you know.

And they wanted a very particular sound of a transmission.

I tried lots of different things and I could not sell one to the director.

And I felt terrible, I had failed.

I took one of those sounds later and used it in Raiders of The Lost Ark for ghosts coming up out of the ark of the covenant, and I got an Academy Award.

So, it was the same sound.

So you know these things happen.

You have to get used to rejection.

R2 was the most difficult project on the first one because there wasn't much precedent for a character that would communicate without using any words and we were really worried who would understand what the heck was going on.

We found that we were talking about it all the time and that we were verbalizing sounds.

You know like maybe R2 should do this and R2 comes in here and he goes "beep boop beep hoop beep" and George would make a sound like that and I would answer him that way and so I realized one day wait a second wait a second aren't we doing kind of what we want?

And so I came up with a process of combining my own voice making performances with the synthesizer.

That synthesizer right there.

The human input to it you know the human part of it.

I turned it on today to see if it still works because often it doesn't anymore, but the basis for R2 was this synthesizer and you could do different pitches on the keyboard [R2D2 sounds] You can make him mad you know.

But the trick to it was the human input, my microphone from my tape recorder in high school and so I could combine my voice at the same time that we were doing (makes sounds) [Group laughing] and the idea being that you kind of get the human input which is sort of a performance right?

And you get the electronic part of it which is the machine so you get a 50/50 blend so some of the best things we've ever done in my opinion were actually done pretty quickly and instinctively.

You don't want to over think it sometimes.

[Martha] So then, what advice would you give to people kind of in our age and you know?

Let me think about that for a second, well I do think it's important to have clear goals in mind you can always change a goal, you don't have to suffer if something isn't working out.

And have faith that you will be able to express yourself successfully within those goals.

Even during those times where you just feel like you're getting nowhere.

I had those times.

Sure, still makes me nervous to think about.

That was a long time ago.

I didn't like that, I didn't like being stuck somewhere.

I think it's part of a passage that's likely to happen to everybody at some point.

[Ben] Ben, that was incredible.

I can only hope to be as plugged in as he is.

Like he has really mastered it.

He was just a really fascinating character.

[Sofaya] And now I can say I've been to Skywalker ranch and I've touched the original script of The Star Wars, like... ♪ [Ben] We are in Emoryville, California.

Outside of San Francisco.

We are about to go in to Pixar and meet with Ralph Eggleston.

There's not really a reference for something that's completely imaginary so how do you make that up to make it like, authentic.

[Ben] It's pretty cool to see that community of artists and creative thinkers working together in synergy to create something unthinkable like Monsters, Inc. Like what?

[Ralph] I always wanted to do animation and film and gravitated to some of the Disney animations especially when I was young.

Especially Cinderella when I was ten years old, like what is this thing that made me laugh that made me cry?

Every emotion but in 85 minutes, this is amazing.

I ended up getting a camera and making a lot of animation when I was a kid about sixth or seventh grade I heard of a school called CalArts.

Basically that was it, I got accepted and I was able to go and John Lassiter hired me at the very end of '92.

So I've been here pretty much ever since.

So you were the for Toy Story... That's what I was hired to do, art direct Toy Story.

[Martha] I'm curious to learn more about your creative process, and what goes into a project generally?

[Ralph] Every project is so different.

One thing I'm trying to work really hard on encouraging a lot of our younger artists here to realize is.

Every four years is a four year graduate course in the subject matter of that film and to just take advantage of that because that's the fun part.

The fun part is doing all the research and really getting into it.

Getting to it's bare essence.

Visually, and then how you present it and all of that.

Can you clarify what kind of research you do?

Because everything here is, you know you can't figure out how Nemo talks you know that's something that you're creating.

Well we trained clownfish to talk actually.

Oh ok.

I thought I saw a video of that.

Well I'll tell ya they were working on Ratatouille when we were working on Wall-E and they got to go to Paris and I got to go to a trash dump.

For our films we go to the places, we crawl in the ground, we climb under things, we go where we're not supposed to go.

With Wall-E we went to JPL and went to a bunch of cruise ships that, very thorough tours of the interior bowels of a cruise ship and also trash dumps, a lot of them.

I don't know, it's fun, it's really fun.

Right that you're kind of drawing on just every type of information.

[Ralph] Absolutely.

Thinking about all of us being interested in creative fields in some way, we're really curious if you have any advice for people our age, not quite knowing what path to take.

Yeah I think the only advice I would give anybody would really be to have fun with some research.

Once you become interested in something go out and find out as much as you can about it.

I mean its not that hard to do especially with the internet.

You know you can always get a dozen books on a subject and read through them and just keep doing that you know, that's just really it but a lot of people get stuck in their little world of what they do and so take yourself out of that and go experience the rest of the world.

Go to different places and try different foods and go see a rock concert then go see a ballet then go see an opera then go see a movie just see everything.

♪ [Martha] So cool, so cool!

Nature is so cool.

[Water splashing] ♪ [Ben] We got the funk situation going on dude.

The fridge isn't working.

Driving to San Francisco to Portland was like, that felt like open road, like that might have been the first time we felt it.

We talked to Ben Burtt and seeing just how he just perceives everything was just like mind-blowing and walking onto Pixars campus and seeing illustrations everywhere.

He relishes in that research like thats the part where he just absolutely loves.

But like for me, I don't know.

I just feel like I have that passion for like anything.

I got to the point where I said Ok I'm going to put my art to the forefront, that's what I'm going to pursue.

So I went to art school.

Now I'm finding out I don't even know where or even how I want to apply it, so now I'm at a place where I don't really know what I want to do.

So that's where I'm at.

[Janice] I also actually wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do because I didn't fit in in engineering, you know feminine and science or feminine and engineering just in our minds are never seen together.

So what *Chick Tech* does is we bring in high school girls that have the aptitude but have either subconsciously opted out of technology or who haven't had the opportunities.

We're looking for the girls that were like me.

I did some interviews with some bigger companies, it was while I was pregnant with my daughter and I actually had two offers pulled after they found out I was pregnant.

I was considered you know not as smart because I was feminine and girly, I was considered not necessarily someone you would hire for a technical job.

Yeah, so I had imposter syndrome, I don't know if you guys have heard of impostor syndrome.

So basically it's the feeling that no matter how good you are no matter how many accolades you get, you're actually an imposter, and you're waiting for people to find out.

A lot of people experience this at some point of time in their lives, but it really hits women and men in non traditional careers.

So women in technology.

I was so sure that I didn't belong and that everybody else was better at it than me, that I just I was terrified of these managers finding out that I was a fraud.

I would have panic attacks, I would cry, it was awful.

So really I'm like, I'm looking at my past and I'm like how can I fix this for other people, how can I help other people not feel like I did.

For anybody coming out of college, what life advice would you give?

Always challenge the status quo.

People are like "oh well you need to be this way to be in engineering."

I'm like why?

Challenge these structures that have been put in place, why are we doing it this way and how can we do it better?

Every generation should challenge that.

That's the healthiest way to move our society forward.

...So it says The most dangerous phrase in the language is: This is how we've always done it.

and I wrote, challenge the status quo.

[Ben] Alright!

[Martha] Cool.

[Ben] Yeah, her story was really inspiring and there's some huge societal pressures that she overcame and some molds and boxes that society tries to put you in that she absolutely shattered and is continuing to do and is doing it for other people and is inspiring other people to do that, and so on and so forth.

That's inspiring, definitely.

There were a couple of moments, um, every time we go through the deal where we explain where we are and why we're having trouble deciding what we want to do, I've specifically not said the words, I'm not a good designer, but like I'm not a good designer, I'm not the best I'm not even in the middle, I've always been at the bottom.

[Martha] What makes you feel like you're not a good designer?

It's, it's, it's like hard not to compare yourself to others when, I'm not going to say the curriculum is built around comparing yourself to others but it's like you're constantly being scrutinized and to feel like you don't stack up is like a terrible place to be.

Like how do you even, I'm surprised I made it four years to be completely honest.

But you earned your spot there.

and even if it is cut throat, you survived it.

It made you stronger.

Give yourself credit for that.

Because it's easy, like Janice was just saying to have that imposter syndrome and feel like.

[Sofaya] That's true, but I'm such a confident person in general so it's easy for me to fake it.

I can convince people that I think that I'm awesome even when I don't and it's like, I just, there's only so many jobs and if you don't work for someone else that means you better have a damn good idea to make a job for yourself, which I don't have.

[Ben] But, that's why we're all here because we all feel that way.

We're reconfirming the uncertainty in each other.

♪ People keep telling me, nothing else matters, just do what you love, do the thing that excites you or whatever, but that's a lot to kind of marinate on and kind of hard to put the pieces together into something cohesive.

I know, we'll see what happens to me in the end, but as of now that's what it is.

[Martha] We're in Seattle [Ben] At experience music project [Leader #4] I think sometimes when you don't know what you want to do, it's because you don't know yourself.

[Ben] Now that we have these big drives we're kind of really getting into our groove [Leader #5] Growing up in a small village, everybody knows you.

I just wanted to be somebody else.

[Leader #6] I got into music not because I wanted to get rich and famous, or even make money and retire.

I got into it because I felt like I had something burning in my heart to say.

Roadtrip Nation extends beyond the program you just watched.

It's a movement that empowers people to define their own roads in life Here's a quick snapshot from the Naviance Summer Institute.

My name is David Woldenberg, I am going to be a senior.

I'm Josiah Smith, I'm eighteen years old and I just graduated from high school.

My name is Jezelle Minos I'm seventeen and I graduated from Corona Del Mar high school.

We're heading over to the Naviance summer institute conference and we'll be interviewing educators I want to ask the leaders like how do you define success, where were you at my age?

Figure out like how did they get their start.

I want them to be questions that will actually benefit me.

[Educator #1] Hey how are you guys doing?

Nice to meet you.

[Jezelle] I'm Jezelle.

[Educator #1] Nice to meet you.

So I guess I'm wondering how exactly you think you're successful or what your definition of success is.

What did you have to go through to make it possible.

What gives you your drive for your passion?

I get out of bed in the morning and I hit the ground running and I really do because I have something that's driving me.

It's driving me to become a better person and you get up and you find something that really drives you or really makes you happy.

Then I think that's really what's most important to helping you reach the goals that you really want to reach.

Each person had a unique perspective to offer.

Let your passion drive you.

Let it drive you.

Your passion with the right plan and place will not steer you wrong.

No matter what you do or where you come from You've got wisdom to pass down.

[Male Narrator #1] Help young people find their way by sharing the lessons you've learned.

Take fifteen minutes to tell us what you love to do.

The doors open We're all ears Become a leader at ShareYourRoad.com