by Edward Gross
BRUCE LOGAN
(second unit photography: miniature and optical effects unit, Star Wars)
I had met with George and Gary at the beginning of the production when they were interviewing visual effects people. I found George to be very organized, the man knew exactly what he wanted but not always how to get it. He gave me marching orders and then left me alone to figure out how to do it. I’m not sure that I even watched dailies with him as my unit was at another location across town. He must have liked what he saw because our unit moved to bigger and bigger stages and we shot bigger and bigger explosions. George got back from shooting the live-action in England, and because the signature motion control effects system was being constructed, not a frame of film had been shot. Panicked, he called me up to head up a second effects unit to shoot puppeteers in black suits “flying” miniature spaceships on black rods. Not surprisingly this did not work out very well. So my unit moved on to do some of the signature explosions in the show.
My claim to fame is that I blew up the Death Star. When I think back to the first day of our unit, I remember Joe Viskocil, our powder genius who constructed all the miniature bombs, I realize we were just a bunch of unsupervised kids running the orphanage. Joe came in the first morning and there was a huge explosion and a cloud of smoke coming out of the little room on wheels that was used to load film. Luckily, there was only a loss of hair and a rash on Joe’s arms. It was an interesting way to start. But it never really got any better as the explosions got bigger and better. I remember running around the stage wiping burning napalm from my arms after one of our larger explosions. Later, looking at pictures of our shoot, I see that our only fire protection was a single handheld fire extinguisher. Ahh! Simpler days.
JOHN DYKSTRA
The studio sent people in to try and organize the facility in a much more traditional fashion. It was a nontraditional environment. I am sure you have heard the stories. We had a hot tub in the parking lot that we cooled off in. Remember it was triple digits in the San Fernando Valley in the summertime when we were working on stages with thousands of watts of lights. It wouldn’t be unusual for the stages to be 120 or 130 degrees and there was no air-conditioning, so we would go out to the hot tub to cool off during the day and people would work in the night time when it was cooler outside and as a result, the stages would be cooler to do the photographic aspect of it. Everyone who worked there was completely engrossed in the making of the movie and they lived there pretty much as a family in a weird way, and I think that was also really difficult for George and the studio, and from the studio’s point of view to support because we were obviously going against the grain of the corporate structure.
CHRIS CASADY
(animator: miniature and optical effects unit, Star Wars)
I was part of this hiring wave that was supposed to ratchet up production and get this damn thing done by the deadline, and I was part of beefing things up. I understood that George Mather had preceded me not much earlier for the same purpose and that he was sort of brought in to be the hatchet man, or the adult in the room a little bit. Sometimes you’d hear Gary Kurtz talking about what he called “a hippie mentality” at ILM—which is not untrue. My experience of Mather is that he was really sort of there to intimidate us a little bit, and to be the adult and to look after things—particularly these late hires and the night crew and things like that. It felt like Jim brought him on as an adjunct to him.
Mather was the guy who had the ultimate chart. I think he sat down and looked seriously at the calendar and the shots and the shots and the calendar and tried to fit shots into it. “You’ve got two hundred shots to do, you’ve got seven months left. That means so many shots per day. That means the stage has got to put out three shots every day. That’s two for the day shift or something.” So with Mather, my memory was that he was dishing out these assignments. You know, “Dennis Muren, you have to knock out three finished spaceship shots per night if you’re going to make this deadline.” And so it seemed like we were sort of answering to him. He sort of intimidated us a little bit up in the animation department. Or that’s how I felt about it.
DOUG BARNETT
(special mechanical equipment: miniature and optical effects unit, Star Wars)
George asked for one more dollar than Dykstra was making. He got it. Dykstra would just sort of run down George Lucas in the hallways. He had no sense of courtesy with George Lucas. And Lucas just despised that, because George is short and small and Dykstra was tall. Jim Nelson was tall. So they hired George Mather to just push on Dykstra, I think, and make the place work. He’d be there, day or night. He had come from real low-budget stuff, so he really had this idea that we didn’t have to spend a dime more.
ADAM BECKETT
(animation and rotoscope design: miniature and optical effects unit, Star Wars)
George Mather, our production supervisor, mentioned the fact that for about six weeks it really looked as though we might get the plug pulled on the picture. That was late in 1976. Hardly any shots were done. Millions of dollars had been spent and we had something like thirty thousand to forty thousand a week in payroll. Production just wasn’t there. Can you imagine Star Wars not being finished? I think that near-catastrophe is a fantastically romantic aspect of the whole story, though it wasn’t exactly pleasant at that time.
DENNIS MUREN
George and Gary are a couple of amazing people to be able to pull off the show like that. I had to say pull off, because that sounds like a card game or something. But it was a real effort they put into it. They never gave up.
* * *
In truth, by the middle of production everyone should have realized that the effects were becoming a much bigger problem than anyone realized.
PETER BEALE
We’re halfway through, we’re a little bit behind schedule, but not much. We’ve eaten a little bit of the contingency up and we’re going to start doing the process work. The day before we’re starting, we’ve got the front screen projection set up, all the equipment set up. I think we’re starting with one of the fighters. The front projection plate arrived. We got it up and the first thing we discovered was that it was difficult to synchronize the actors’ reaction to the starship flying past. They were going past so quickly that by the time we knew they were coming, woof, they’re gone. We had problems trying to anticipate and synchronize the actors’ reactions to the background that we were projecting. George Lucas had actually edited the fighter sequence out of footage from World War I and World War II. He had used Blue Max and other films, so we had shot-by-shot, and we had to imagine the X-Wing fighter instead of Spitfires, but we had the whole sequence laid out. It was brilliantly done.
Halfway through the first day, I called up and said, “Where are the next day’s plates?” Nobody knew. So I called up Dykstra in the States in California—woke him up early—and said, “What’s going on?” There was a long silence. They haven’t gotten it; they hadn’t done it. They had run into troubles and hadn’t wanted to tell us, and if they would have told us maybe we could have made a thing, so we’ve now got the whole thing set up, we’re planning to film this for a week and we obviously don’t have any other sets ready. We’re in trouble. And so we had to jump to blue screen. George was very unhappy, I was unhappy, because we really wanted to have it done, but in retrospect, it was probably a very good thing, because the synchronization of the reactions to the plates was going to be very, very difficult. When we went to blue screen, we caught up on schedule and things got a bit easier. And morale started going up.
* * *
Once he was back in the States, Lucas took a decidedly more hands-on approach with ILM, creating conflict between himself and Dykstra.
JOHN DYKSTRA
He looked at the material with us. A good portion of the time he was in England, and then he came back and started editing. We had produced a fair amount of the stuff that was in the movie by the time he was back to cut. But, we used his reference footage f
rom the old war movies, the dogfight stuff, that was sort of the template for what it was we were going to do. We took that and interpreted that into a much more extreme version in terms of how close we got to the subject matter with the cameras and the speeds with which things traveled and some of the choreography of what the spaceships actually did.
So he would come and look at material and we’d run multiple elements together in the Moviola [which allows an editor to watch a film while editing] and discuss the dynamics of the shot and we’d go off and do it and he’d come back and look at dailies. But it was tough because you had to look at the shots elementally. We had a device that allowed us to run multiple strips of film in a projector at the same time, but the film by its very nature was fairly low resolution and didn’t have much gray scale to it because of the viewer multipacking. You put three or four strips of film into a projector at a time and in cases where we had more than three or four elements we had to bi-pack or tri-pack or just multiple pack separate sets and then take reference drawings and put multiple sets together to interpret this, which was a long and involved process and he didn’t want to be involved with that much. He wanted to be involved in composites where he actually got to see all of the actual elements together in their choreography.
* * *
The output from ILM intensified through the latter part of 1976. By November, Marcia Lucas had edited a rough cut of the film that ran about 117 minutes. It was at this point that Lucas decided to cut certain scenes to take the pressure off of ILM as much as he could. He also believed this would tighten and improve the finished film.
Another important aspect of Star Wars, likely more than most people realized at the time, was the sound design. That fell to Ben Burtt. The son of a chemistry professor and a child psychologist, he was born in Jamesville, New York, on July 12, 1948. Though interested in becoming a filmmaker from an early age, he first studied physics at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania. While attending university, he made his own films, eventually being awarded the National Student Film Award for his short film Yankee Squadron. For his next short film, entitled Genesis, Burtt was awarded a scholarship to attend the University of Southern California, where he earned a master’s degree in film production. He found early work as a sound designer for the Roger Corman film Death Race 2000 before being hired by fellow USC alum George Lucas to work on his latest film, Star Wars. Never losing sight of his other aspirations, Burtt has directed several documentary films, as well as being an executive producer and writer for the Star Wars: Droids TV series.
BEN BURTT
(sound designer, Star Wars)
George and Gary were searching for people at USC to do special effects and costume design, and artists and model builders to design spaceships. This was in June of 1975. Ultimately, Gary Kurtz contacted some professors at USC and asked them to recommend someone who would be interested in working on the soundtrack [sound design]. I was recommended since I was the biggest fanatic down there in terms of sound effects.
My first assignment was to come up with a voice for the Wookiee. At that time, the Wookiee played a slightly bigger role than he eventually ended up with. The story was still evolving at that point. The first thing they said was, “We have this giant creature who’s like a big teddy bear. He’s a good guy, but sometimes he’s ferocious. We need a nonhuman voice for him that’s really believable, but not recognizable as a known animal.” In a few weeks, it became evident that they wanted a whole repertoire of sounds. I finally saw the script, met George, and talked with them more. They needed all kinds of voices and equipment sounds. They needed sound for weapons and hardware and mechanical devices. Basically what I did was break down the entire script into different categories: special voices, weapons, vehicles, doors, etc. I was trying to find sound that would be appropriate and original. In a film like this, you’re creating a total fantasy world. Nothing really exists. None of the equipment makes any sound during filming, or the sound it does make isn’t the right one. All the sets look great, but they’re totally dead. There’s no life to them. All kinds of sounds were needed to give it credibility and to make it exciting. It’s not just to make it acceptable. The whole movie is a comic book. It needed really energetic sounds that were visceral.
* * *
In terms of Chewbacca, Burtt explains that his research involved a number of things initially. The first was to determine the different methods people have used to modify sound and produce voices. This led him to collect tapes of a variety of exotic languages and study them for alien-sounding, unfamiliar characteristics. From there, he went to language labs of various universities and studied their tapes.
BEN BURTT
The Wookiee had to be approached differently, because he was a real animal. The challenge there was to find some actual animals, record them, and somehow make use of those sounds for his speech. We initially thought that bears would be pretty good and they were. I recorded all kinds of bears that I could find. I rented bears, went to ranches where they had pet bears, and then recorded all different kinds of animals. I went to zoos and recorded sea lions and camels, and tried to determine what animals had certain speech patterns. Sea lions and walruses were terrific. Bears are very good. As it turned out, a lot of the Wookiee was mostly “bear.” Even bears of the same species still have different personalities.
In the end, I took recordings of bears, camels, walruses, lions, and a few cougars and extracted sounds out of them that were similar in color. The difficulty in dubbing a language is that you have to be consistent. You just can’t cut a dolphin to a walrus. It has to be homogeneous. I picked various bits of those animals, sounds which were consistent, and built word lists out of them. I took each one of them and reproduced it at different speeds, plus or minus, a little bit of one animal or another, sort of like musical notes. Once you have this batch of different sounds, you could draw isolated bits of “words” or syllables. Then you combine them, and try to make up a sentence that gives the desired feeling. The Wookiee ended up not saying a whole lot. He roared when he was angry and he had about five or six “sentences.” But there’s not a touch of the human voice in there. It’s all animal.
* * *
A character like Greedo, the bounty hunter, from the cantina scene saw his language “lifted” straight from Peruvian Incan, while the most challenging “voice” to devise was that of the soon-to-be beloved droid R2-D2.
BEN BURTT
Basically, the essential character, as it turned out, was to combine the electronic with the organic, the organic being the warm, lovable, somewhat human side of his personality. The electronic part was generated by a synthesizer. The other part of his voice was derived from human-produced sounds. There was also a fair smattering of mechanical sounds in there, squeaks produced by scraping dry ice against metal, all blended together. What I did was sit down and decide that R2 was going to say something like, “Look out!” when a soldier approached. Then I’d try to come up with a sentence that had some emotional feeling to it. I’d make some beeps and run my voice through a synthesizer and go into my library of cute mechanical sounds and put them all together. I also blew through a water pipe and got this neat little whistle.
* * *
Achieving the sound of the Rebel Blockade Runner and the Star Destroyer early on led Burtt to record at the Mojave Air Races, which featured high-speed aircraft flying ten feet above the ground.
BEN BURTT
I took those and slowed them down tremendously. A lot of the very high frequencies would therefore drop down to a more audible range. I then mixed that with the “whoosh” of jet planes and a thunderclap. The first ship was the thunderclap and the jet sounds. The second sound was basically made up of two elements: a low-frequency rumble and part of the sound of the Goodyear Blimp slowed way, way down. I spent a long time recording the blimp. It’s one of my favorite sounds. It created the sense of something gigantic moving. The mixers did a lot of special enhancements of low frequencies for that particular
effect, too. In other words, when they did the final mix, they would use special filters and exaggerate the rumbling aspect of it. You could do that with 70mm stereophonic sound, but not with an ordinary optical track.
There are also lots of different kinds of lasers. Han Solo’s laser was different from the Empire’s. The basic concept of the lasers was to come up with something explosive without having it sound like a gunshot. It wasn’t going to be Dirty Harry’s Magnum. Again, this entailed a lot of research. What really worked well, in the end, was the striking of a long cable suspended from a radio tower. You have to find a tower with just the right frequency, and I found one.
* * *
While it would be understandable to assume that much of this was done in conjunction with ILM, it turns out that Burtt actually created his panoply of sounds at home.
BEN BURTT
During the first year of production, they were all in England and the people at ILM were inventing things. I would work at home and spent a little time at ILM shooting computer readouts for the spaceship dashboards. When George came back from Europe, we went to San Francisco where all the editing was done. We worked there for six or seven months just putting the picture together, adding sound effects, trying out different pieces of music, and studying the different versions of the film. We eventually arrived at what we thought was more or less the final product.