Maul’s Lightsabers in ‘Shadow Lord’ Are Powered by Sam Witwer’s Screams

The brand new Star Wars animated sequence Maul: Shadow Lord is performing some very cool issues with lightsabers—and never simply spinning them round with reckless abandon as a result of we’ve obtained Maul himself and a few Inquisitors who all like to do exactly that with their weapons. They appear virtually in contrast to any time we’ve seen the weapons in Lucasfilm’s previous output: blades that glint and snarl like their wielders do, dwelling flames that carve paths of incandescent vitality throughout the display as a substitute of that usually clear, minimalistic vitality we see from them.

It makes Shadow Lord look even more visually impressive than it already is, and naturally, the concept of lightsabers as gouts of flaming plasma can be naturally very befitting everybody’s favourite barely pathetic however trying-his-best edgelord in a personality like Maul. Nevertheless it seems Shadow Lord‘s lightsabers—Maul’s particularly—are going the additional edgelord mile. As a result of there’s screaming within the sound combine.

Not simply any screaming both, however Sam Witwer’s own howls.

The delightfully foolish factoid was revealed by the supervising sound editor for the present, David W. Collins, in a brand new featurette concerning the course of of making Shadow Lord, which additionally reveals off Witwer performing a few of his personal strikes for animation reference. Whereas Lucasfilm creatives have been fast to notice that the present does not use mocap for its animation, and the footage was strictly as a reference level, there’s nonetheless one thing very humorous about Witwer even giving himself some Maul tattooing make-up for the footage, besides.

It’s lengthy been clear that Witwer has put a variety of time and thought into his method to Maul’s animated legacy over the previous decade and a half, however now no less than he’s put his vocals into it in a really totally different method for Shadow Lord.

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