Visit to Skywalker Ranch

This has been a dream of mine since I was 10 years old. And it was AWESOME.

Yesterday, I went up for lunch to Skywalker Ranch. And it was every bit as fantastic and amazing as I could have ever imagined.

Now, the entire place, and LucasFilm in general is very very very careful about security and such important issues like this. I therefore am not going to post much on here about it (sorry) - I can't. But I'll copy and paste a few things from some links I found about the Ranch on Wikipedia, and some information from the Skywalker Sound website.

According to Wikipedia: (See article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skywalker_Ranch)

Skywalker Ranch is the name of the workplace of film director and producer George Lucas in secluded but open country near Nicasio, California in Marin County. The ranch is located on Lucas Valley Road, although Lucas is not related to the road's namesake, a turn-of-the-century landowner in the area...

Skywalker Ranch is intended to be more of a "filmmaker's retreat" than a headquarters for Lucas's business operations. The headquarters of Lucasfilm, Industrial Light & Magic, and LucasArts are located in Lucas's Letterman Digital Arts Center in the Presidio of San Francisco.

So that's an intro into the place from a Wikipedia article. There's some cool info here on the Skywalker Sound page too. (See here: http://skysound.com/about_ranch.html)

Specifically, check out the QuickTime VR "Tech Tour" on the Skywalker Sound page. This will give you a great idea of where we toured in Skywalker Sound. I can't post any photos from this, I am sure of that. But this link will take you to the Skywalker Sound sound website, and I am
sure their photos will be better than mine anyway. :)

http://skysound.com/about_techtour.html

According to the Skywalker Sound website:

Skywalker Sound is housed within the 155,000 square foot Technical Building at Skywalker Ranch.

There are six feature film dubbing stages, a 300 seat screening room and a scoring stage capable of recording a 130 piece orchestra.

It was REALLY awesome there. We toured around the Main House, had a really nice BBQ lunch, and then headed to the Technical Building where we saw the Stag Theatre, and the Sound Recording stage. Now as I mentioned I can't post any photos. But if you poke around on that Skywalker Sound website, you'll see lots of cool QuickTime VR photos, as well as a bunch of photos they have posted there. You'll get a good idea of what I saw there by looking at those anyway.

I loved it there. Hopefully my description (and the Skywalker Sound website) should be good enough to give you a feel for the place.

Here's a few pictures on our way there and our way out and back to San Francisco. For pictures of inside the ranch, you'll have to check out those links.


Big Rock


Nice trails around the area on the drive around the area