Tom Kobayashi, pictured here at the Manzanar Internment Camp in 1943, went on to become a respected sound engineer who ran George Lucas’s postproduction facility Skywalker Sound. After Manzanar, Kobayashi went on to serve in the US Army from 1946 to 1951, and later graduated from USC in 1953 with a business degree. His Hollywood career began inauspiciously as an accounting clerk at a film lab.

After over 20 years of running audio postproduction at Glen Glenn Sound, George Lucas recruited Kobayashi to his new Skywalker Sound division under Lucasfilm in 1985. Kobayashi finished constructing a 700,000-square-foot postproduction facility north of San Francisco equipped with top-notch technology developed by Droidworks (another Lucasfilm division), which was an R&D arm that would jumpstart Pixar.

Kobayashi passed away in 2020 but left behind a legacy of postproduction innovation that changed the sound and film landscapes.

https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/fgo2y6/tom_kobayashi_the_respected_hollywood_sound/

#SoundEngineer #GeorgeLucas #Lucasfilm #SkywalkerSound #Hollywood #AANHPIMonth #AANHPI #AAPIMonth #AAPI