Johnson checks R2-D2.
R2-D2 is then fired out of a hole by a pneumatic cannon, for the pickup in which the bog creature spits out the droid.
MIND-OVER-MATTER MAGIC
According to ILM’s in-house optical continuity list, by January 22 Lucas had officially changed the film’s opening shot from the tauntaun to one out in space featuring a Star Destroyer that launches several probe droids. Nevertheless, the enormous difficulty of the tauntaun shot remained.
“The first shot of the tauntaun was originally the first shot in the film,” Muren says. “It was intended to be the ‘grabber shot,’ as dynamic as the opening shot in Star Wars. After some thought, though, George decided to start the film off in space. I think that decision was made to remind you of the first film and to establish the source of those brilliant probes that race toward the ice planet.”
“The opening shot in this picture isn’t as dynamic as the one in the original—but then it didn’t need to be,” says Edlund.
“I was starting a style,” Lucas says. “I said, ‘Each one is going to start in space. Each one is going to start with a Star Destroyer or some kind of a ship,’ because the titles go into the stars, we pan down to wherever, and then we start the movie.”
“The background was one that George picked out,” says Comstock of the tauntaun shot, whose background plate had been shot from a helicopter flying into a huge ice field, slowing, and ending up with a shot straight down. “He said he’d really like to see the tauntaun fitted into that particular scene. We all rolled our eyes a bit, because it was obviously an unusual plate to have to fit something into.”
“When George suggested that we try this shot, I was thinking, Just how do we do it?” says Muren. “I thought we could build a big model, but I knew it would never quite look right. I thought we might have to eliminate it and try to do another shot instead.”
“It became Dennis’s pièce de résistance,” says Edlund. An internal ILM note explains in brief the work that went into OP-9: “Most challenging shot. Move plotted by Sam Comstock on Oxberry Animation Stand. Dennis shot taun bluescreen, full frame VistaVision, alternate frames. Next frame card under taun with keylight shining down providing a shadow. Bruce Nicholson separated the two images—taun against blue and white card underneath—and made taun against black matte and the separate shadow element. Those frames were individually cut up and placed on registration block on the bed of the Oxberry. He plotted it first and shot each element a frame at a time with the move. Plotting the move took three weeks. Shooting time was 10 to 15 hours straight. Never been done. Conceived by Dennis.”
In other words, Muren had to first re-create the tauntaun’s body orientation as if it had been in Norway and filmed with the Wesscam in the helicopter; he experimented with the tauntaun until they got it right, and then Tippett performed the tauntaun’s moves, making it run in place, suspended on a rod. Next, Sam Comstock rephotographed it, repositioning the registration block every frame to match the position of the snow-covered ground, while using the Oxberry animation stand with the VistaVision format, so the image would fit the scene; then, with Nicholson, they worked out the shadows and the mattes.
“Some of the effect was filmed in live action, but some shots are stop-motion,” says Johnson. “Matching the stop-motion with the live-action shots was a problem, but one that was solved with great success. A lot of calculated study of the live-action terrain enabled us to cut from model shots made at ILM to the VistaVision plates made in Norway with the same sort of craft going through—Luke’s snowspeeder, for example—and I defy most people to tell the difference.”
“Fortunately, I had already done those cockpit shots with the three-foot miniature walkers, so I had some practice in matching background moves,” says Comstock. “Dennis approached me and asked my opinion on how I might contribute to the shot. Both he and Phil knew from the start that this was going to be a very difficult shot, no matter how it was done.”
“I’m amazed that we figured it out, because it breaks every rule of special effects,” says Muren. “George gave me the piece of film, described what he wanted, and said use any way you can to get it done. It was terrifying and really exciting at the same time. We broke it up into components—and that idea of breaking up the shots, so the mind can tackle one problem at a time, is a methodology we’ve always used at ILM.”
The newly designed wampa was filmed against a white backdrop by St. Amand, Berg, and Tippett.
The wampa was then filmed against a cloudy sky by Bill Neil and Tippett.
Final frame.
On the way to Dagobah, R2-D2 was actually repainted black instead of blue to avoid becoming transparent. Because of bluescreen, it was “the only way to make the shot work,” says Ralston.
On, January 11, 1980, a historical confluence occurred: the son of Ub Iwerks (with Walt Disney, the creator of Mickey Mouse) sent a letter to Edlund at ILM, thanking him for a recent tour of the facility. “It’s wonderful being able to put words in the mouths of characters that have the same kind of place for young children that Mickey Mouse had for me,” says Kasdan.
Muren’s records on “OP-9: Apparent Angle Change on Taun”—just a part of the complexity involved in the aerial first shot of the tauntaun and rider.
A diagram of logistical setup for the same shot—complete with jokes. For example, an arrow points “To very, very scary sign warning normal people not to enter (or to even THINK of entering).”
Details of three final frames from OP-9—the result of huge efforts on the part of Muren, Tippett, and Sam Comstock in the optical department.
BLAZING ON
As January rolled into February, finding enough hours in the day for any shot became a rarity and tensions increased at ILM. Editing room notes dated February 6, 1980, report that Lucas was improving dozens of effects shots: “Fix matte lines, lose diffusion, correct color, make cable thinner, soften lasers, remove shadow at bottom of ship, crater should be darker and browner …”
“There just isn’t time,” Edlund says. “We’ve worked our way through the production schedule and as we’ve completed shots, some of them are perfect, others had to be redone, and yet others have gone onto a ‘could-be-better’ list that includes all the shots we could probably get by with if we had to.”
“We’ve also had problems with suppliers who sent us defective pieces of equipment, which really didn’t help matters,” says Johnson. “So it’s been quite a struggle for everybody and we’ve all been working very hard. Most everyone has been on six-day weeks, working long 12-hour days, ever since the end of August. The optical department is working 24 hours a day and will be doing so right up to the end. Obviously, the bulk of the pressure is on them now, having to get all of the composites done, whereas before it was on the camera department. Some of the more than 400 effects have required 100 pieces of film going through the optical printer!”
The model shop was also hard at it, ultimately doing 108 miniatures for the show, according to an inventory, including seven Cloud City buildings, a small R2-D2, Lando and Luke puppets, and so on. “The medical frigate was added late in the picture,” says Edlund, who counted at least 50 major pieces.
“We spent lots of overtime getting things ready for camera—all the way up until right before the release when there was a big additional sequence added,” says Huston. “We built a bunch of models in the last two or three months before the release that had to be designed and engineered. We spent what seemed like endless hours working on things.”
“There’s so many things about that film and the shooting of it—it was just mind boggling, exhausting,” Ralston laughs.
“We were working six, seven days a week for months at the end to get it done,” says Muren. “A lot of the stuff changed and we didn’t get it ready in time. Some of the gear also didn’t get ready in time, so the final four or five months of that show was just a really incredible push to get it out in the theaters in time.”
“Tow
ard the end of our work on the film, it got a little tense,” says Ellenshaw. “You don’t want to switch horses in midstream too often, because every time you do, it sets you back a week or two while you’re bringing along the new method and doing tests. So it becomes a little tricky as the weeks start compressing on you and you begin counting the days. There is a lot of finger crossing and a lot of hoping that you can stick with a method that is going to pan out.”
“When faced with a special effects problem, there are always a lot of directions in which to go,” says Johnson. “We try to find the path that will yield optimum results. This means that sometimes we can go back to basics. For example, instead of flying models with motion-control cameras, we’ve hung them on wires in some cases. I think that it is the intelligent use of every technique available that makes the difference—instead of saying that we have motion control and so are going to do everything with motion control.”
As the pressure mounted, some crew developed butterfingers: The Dykstraflex was crashed through a bluescreen, and Jerry Jeffress dropped the high-speed Empire camera while a French documentary crew was filming.
“We’re just burned out,” says Tippett. When asked what his favorite part of the work is, he replied, “My vacation at the end.”
“It was certainly kinda touch-and-go in terms of, if the film was actually gonna get done in time,” says Franklin.
“I think we had about 100 people working at the facility six days a week,” says Bloom. “I had the place running 24 hours a day, night shifts, day shifts for all the different cameras. But we were beginning to turn ILM into a working special effects house.”
THE DARK LORD’S TRICKS
The pre-mix of the dialogue and sound effects had begun in LA the previous month. “We were in full-bore mixing by the beginning of February,” says Ladevich, “which went on until probably the end of April.”
On February 21, 1980, Kershner was interviewed while at the Samuel Goldwyn Studios, in Looping Room D, where he was supervising the layers of audio effects and additional dialogue recording (ADR). “We’re in the final stages of the sound mix,” he says. “We did all the music two months ago in England. The film has been edited for many months, the special effects are being completed right now.”
“The people that went to the mix all the time were Ben, George, assistant sound editor John Benson, and myself,” says Ladevich. “Usually I flew down with Ben, but we’d all show up Monday morning for the mix. During the week, it wasn’t like we had lives in LA and then we’d all fly out Friday night. I remember one night we went to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to listen to reel six; we took this magnetic stripe six-track and we put it up without picture. We didn’t want to hear it with picture, we wanted to hear it by itself. I’m sure the people from Dolby were there and the mixers. We listened to it and, of course, the sound in the academy theater is terrific. Then we listened to it again and there was a lot of discussion afterward, but I just listened.”
“On Empire, we had the ability up here to do some pre-mixing, a little more than I did in first film,” says Burtt. “I can control things a little bit more but, once again, we didn’t have our own mix room, so I had to go to Los Angeles and stay there for three months to finish the film in conjunction, technically and creatively, with the gang down there.”
“There was always this kind of nervous anxiety associated with Empire,” Ladevich says. “But it was terribly exciting. There was this terrific emphasis on quality. Everything was about quality. It was a terrific opportunity and environment in which to learn the craft, because everything was about how good you could make it.”
“Harrison was talking very fast in the cockpit set during the meteor scenes,” Kershner says. “But when we went to dub him back in Hollywood later, he asked me to go check the projector. He said, ‘I can’t talk that fast, the projector’s off.’ Of course, the projector was running at the right speed, so I said, ‘You were speaking that fast because the adrenaline was high when you were doing the scene.’ ‘I can’t do it,’ he said. So we kept running the ADR over and over, and finally he got into it and of course he could talk that fast.”
“The nice thing was the contrast of sounds we had in Empire, from the busy, noisy snow battles to very quiet jungle,” says Burtt. “We alternated between the quiet, tense, and suspenseful scenes and the contemplative scenes, so the overall design of Empire was pleasing to the sound person.
You didn’t have too many sequences that were just too barbaric for too long. Those hills and valleys, I think, made it a balanced film.”
“When I first saw the dialogue that said, ‘Luke, I am your father,’ I said to myself, ‘He’s lying, I wonder how they’re gonna play that lie out,’ ” says the voice of Darth Vader, James Earl Jones, who recorded his lines in late 1979/early 1980.
Lucas directed Jim Bloom in pickups of Luke hanging upside down in the wampa cave (for close-ups of his boots stuck in the ice and his hand extending for the saber), on February 19, 1980.
Additional pickups had already been completed back in England on January 18, 1980, where five or six partial sets had been constructed at Elstree Studios. “Kersh and Mark Hamill came over and it was bang, bang, bang,” says Watts.
Lucas directed effects cameraman Jim Veilleux in another pickup as an Imperial officer who is killed when an asteroid smashes into his vessel; his death via hologram was added to footage already shot in Elstree of two officers, which, in turn, was composited into film of Vader and extras on set.
Final frame.
Rodis-Jamero and the final model for the cloud car.
Selwyn Eddy III works on a pod car shot.
An exhausted Muren, Rodis-Jamero, and Tippett still have the energy to clown around.
Animator John Van Vliet and Johnston in the art department.
On February 5, Jim Bloom sent a letter to Marjorie Eaton, in Palo Alto, enclosing a sheet with the “five lines of dialogue you will need to know for lip synching. We intend to photograph you sometime between Monday, February 18, and Friday, February 22.” Originally scheduled for November, Eaton was filmed at ILM as the Emperor, though her test didn’t prove satisfactory; she was replaced by Elaine Baker in makeup, with the Emperor’s voice later supplied by actor Clive Revill.
“It’s interesting because the Emperor was an actress, dubbed with a male voice, and monkey eyes superimposed,” says Hamill. “There is certainly something strange about him. This has got to be due to the fact that he looks and sounds a bit like Obi-Wan.”
“To make the hologram of the Emperor, we shot an actor in makeup with the eyes blacked out,” says Ralston. “We wound up shooting the eyes of a chimpanzee, then matchmoving the eyes of the actor and rephotographing it from a TV screen. Actually, that was true of all the hologram shots.”
“They’d send up the auditions of the voice-over actors and I’d say which one I liked the best,” says Lucas.
Other important voice-over work was done by Jason Wingreen, who dubbed Boba Fett’s lines, and, of course, Frank Oz, who returned as Yoda. “I didn’t want Yoda to sound like Miss Piggy,” says Lucas. “I was a little concerned about that, so I’d wanted to use a different actor. But I’ve discovered over the years that, in terms of puppetry, the person who is actually acting the role is really into it. They really live the performance, so it’s very hard for anyone else to duplicate that performance. It was really a matter of me not being able to find another actor who could have performed it as well as Frank could—the same thing had happened with Tony Daniels.” (In November 1979, Frank Oz’s contract had been finalized.)
On March 9, additional dialogue changes were made in reels one through three, from “First transport is clear …” to “The first transport is away!”; from Luke’s “Artoo, are you okay?” after the droid is spit out by the monster in the swamp, to “It’s lucky you don’t taste very good.”
Kershner with Oz as the latter performs for the first time the final voice of Yoda, during th
e additional dialogue recording (ADR) sessions.
Kershner works with Fisher during one of her ADR sessions.
Daniels performing C-3PO’s dialogue; both of the droids’ internal motor sounds also received a sound tune-up, as those had been rushed in the first film. Sound editor Terry Eckton worked for about six weeks on finessing them.
Foley artists recorded myriad sounds for the carbon freezing scene (such as footstep sounds on a metal grill). Back in November 1979, Burtt had selected all the Foley “snow sounds,” including snow being wiped off a sleeve, and so on.
Notes for reel 9, scene 371, dated September 1979, revised the exchange between Darth Vader and Boba Fett in the carbon freezing chamber.
“Revised Secret Pages,” dated November 1, 1979, clarified the words for reel 11’s climactic reversal scene. A note on the second page modified Luke’s rescue by the Falcon (ultimately, he would collapse, falling off the antenna into Lando’s arms).
A page dated January 25, 1980, goes over some of Yoda’s lines that Frank Oz would have to record.
The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Enhanced Edition) Page 50