Lucas, Rose Duignan, and Johnston discuss an effects shot while standing next to a wall of storyboards in the main hallway (Tom Smith is in the background). Because the complete boards were located in the corridor, ILM producers would often call “hallway meetings” over the PA system.
“After all the ships and everything are designed, the job is a matter of keeping an eye on shots and elements and models,” says Joe Johnston. “We try to make sure that everything is coming out the way we collectively hoped it would. It’s the perfect job, because the people here are talented enough that you don’t have to really oversee anyone. You just check in once in a while.”
“Even though it wasn’t a formal role or anything, Joe was really the guiding light of the whole thing,” Huston would say. “The Art department and the Model Shop were under his domain and we all looked to him for leadership. It wasn’t so much that he would tell us what to do, it was more about keeping him happy. If he liked what you were doing, you would never hear from him. If he didn’t like it, Joe didn’t want to tell anybody what to do, but he would be kind of sarcastic.”
“Star Wars was really unique; it had that going for it,” says Johnston. “Empire had to be technically and aesthetically advanced from that, and Jedi has to outdo Empire. It keeps getting harder every time. I think the public has grown to expect that they are not going to see the same old thing. They want to see something better.”
INTERLOCKING MINDS
During all of ILM’s work, Lucas would be in the fore, with Marquand and his editor, Sean Barton, assembling the director’s cut of the picture before handing that, too, over to Lucas. But their work was not going smoothly.
“Once shooting was over I’d talk all night or wake up screaming or make myself tea or go for walks at three o’clock in the morning,” says Marquand. “But the good thing about George is that he laid off. I had to do my cut and he said, ‘I don’t want to see it. I want to see it when it’s all put together. Don’t ask me for advice during the sequences. I am going away. And then when you tell me that it’s ready for me to look at, then I’ll take a look. And then we’ll start to talk and there will certainly be things we will want to change and there will be things that we like the way they are.’ ”
Ben Burtt and his sound crew, including Randy Thom and Gary Summers, had been officially on the job for about six weeks, using Barton’s black-and-white safety cut to lay in and experiment with sounds. One of their first tasks was to salvage what they could from the production sound recorded at Elstree. “Usually I can only hear David Tomblin and George’s camera, which doesn’t have a blimp on it—it sounds like a sewing machine,” Burtt says. “I was going to send a note to David saying, ‘We don’t need to loop you. We got all your dialogue clean.’ ”
“There is video content at this location that is not currently supported for your eReading device. The caption for this content is displayed below.”
Telematics (or videomatics) are featured in Marquand’s cut (a black-and-white dupe) of the attack on the second Death Star (portions are without audio), which is intercut with Imperial Moff Jerjerrod (Michael Pennington) ordering countermeasures; Ben Burtt performs Ackbar’s lines, circa August 19, 1982. (1:11)
Lucas spoke briefly with Burtt, and Marquand stepped into Sprockets a few times to discuss the 1,000 projected audio effects. A lot of sound editing was going to be done on tape instead of film, a method Burtt had started on Raiders. “Doing it this way allows one person to do more,” he says. “The more you work with a new system like this, the easier it is to detach yourself from some of the traditions. We begin by collecting sounds, and then do editing, combining sounds, and mixing at the same time.”
The last stage would be a final mix, a process that had been accomplished for the first two Star Wars films in Hollywood. This time around that crucial stage, including Foley, would be done at Sprockets, as planned. Sound design, the philosophy espoused by Burtt and Lucas, had one person do all three steps—sound collecting, editing, and mixing—instead of an assembly line of different people. “Since I’m involved from the beginning, the process can reflect one viewpoint, or signature, upon the entire soundtrack,” Burtt says. “It can be my vision and the director’s to the best of my ability to carry it out.”
Burtt’s audio library was the heart of the operation, with a wall of shelves stocked with tapes featuring thousands of sounds: Wookiee growls, automobiles, explosions, motors (large and small), electrical effects, and myriad categories organized alphabetically by subject.
Ben Burtt at the old San Anselmo mix room at 321 San Anselmo Avenue, which was used from 1979 to 1982, before the flood precipitated an emergency move to Sprockets (“C” building) in San Rafael. It was here that Burtt had started preliminary research on Jedi.
The VHS packaging for Star Wars. On June 11, 1982, having been released in May, Star Wars became the first film to earn a Golden Videocasette Award for topping the $1 million mark in video rental income.
“Nobody has looked at the entire film yet,” says Burtt. “George hasn’t and neither has Marquand. They’re waiting a few more weeks until the editors get it all together. I’ve looked at the whole movie; I’m probably the only one who’s seen all of it. It’s great, though there are some weak spots. We have some real problems with the Ewoks in terms of being convincing and George doesn’t seem too optimistic about the time or money needed for ILM to fix the Ewok thing. At this stage it’s always a little shaky. It’ll come together.”
At Sprockets, Burtt presided over a state-of-the-art setup, including a machine room housing two Magna-Tech 35mm mag 4/6-track recorders, and a Dolby CP200 cinema processor. Even the Computer Division had gotten into the act. “Our goal is doing things so the creative people never have to make the same decision twice,” says Ed Catmull. “You want to make sure that if you tighten something up—lose a couple of frames—the other things, such as ambient sounds, all stay at the same level. That’s actually easy. If you have to add frames, that’s more difficult, but there are processors capable of doing all of this.”
“We occasionally come up with ideas, like this 24-track business we are using now with time codes that interlock tape machines and film—that’s new,” says Burtt. “Compared to most sound-editing operations, we are somewhat innovative in our technology, but it’s all using equipment found elsewhere in the world. We’ve stolen a few ideas from video editing, a few from music recording.”
Because of the influx of new creatures, Burtt’s biggest job would be the development of their voices. “I’m working on what I call the all-alien version,” he says. “Every character speaks another language, one you won’t understand. It’s an extreme approach to see what happens in certain scenes and whether you can still understand the action. With the Ewoks, for example, a lot of information is conveyed through body language, and sometimes it’s more interesting that way.”
BOULEVARD OF SLOW GIANTS
Edlund’s crew began the barge shots on June 1, while Muren and his group began the ground battle sequences. Three days later, two films with ILM visual effects were released: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn and Poltergeist. Both became huge successes, though not as big as E.T., which was rapidly breaking all box-office records. “On the three shows, we’d had a lot of problems and everybody fighting, but, in the end, all those shows were hits and the work was great and everybody was thrilled,” Duignan would say.
Muren also continued work on the bike chase. After the initial tests, Garrett Brown, Muren, and ILM specialists had made modifications to the normal Steadicam rig. Kenyon gyroscopes were mounted at 90 degrees from each other to help stabilize the camera (a system similar to one used on the 1981 German film Das Boot, whereas a standard Steadicam relied on a system of counterbalanced springs and levers). “We wanted to make the camera roll slightly when entering the turns,” Muren says.
With his modified Steadicam rig, Garrett Brown films background plates for the speeder bike chase, with Muren (on right) and e
ffects cameraman Michael Owens (the green horizontal guide thread can be seen traversing the center of the photo). Muren and his crew filmed even more footage from a moving car. They first sprayed about a quarter mile of a wider rocky path green with a kind of fiber-fill and then filmed it backward, as hundreds of ferns were placed into the camera’s path to create the proper look when played back going forward.
Steadicam inventor and operator Garrett Brown.
Machine shop “master wizard” Gene Whiteman and assistant cameraman Mike Owens had also overhauled a lightweight Mitchell VistaVision butterfly camera for the rig, adding a small 200-foot Mitchell magazine (a sufficient size, given that they would be shooting only 45 frames per minute); they built a roll cage for the camera, which Muren could operate from behind while Brown was walking the path. The entire camera and electronics package with motors, gyros, video assist, and roll cage weighed 26 pounds.
After a brief stop at ILM to check last-minute arrangements, Brown, Muren, and crew flew up to Humboldt Redwoods State Park on June 14, to commence three days of shooting among the tall trees in the Avenue of the Giants and Founder’s Grove, south of Eureka. The crew was supplied with lightweight aluminum ramps that could be placed over ravines and obstacles, as well as potted plants, rubber leaf-mats, and ferns to disguise any equipment in the shot. They also brought tools for clearing a navigable route, reels of green thread, and squirt cans of chalk to indicate the “True Path” that Muren had previously selected.
“On this first location I was in some pain from a minor bit of surgery on my left foot, but dealing with all of these complications was so absorbing, that I literally felt nothing until the end of each take,” writes Brown.
With the ground chalked and the path “threaded” at five feet high, Brown walked the modified Steadicam camera with eyes glued to his guidelines and with Muren shouting above the noisy gyroscopes, “too high, too low, drifting right.” Brown could also refer to a video camera target fixed with crosshairs. “It was like laying out a freeway,” Muren says. “You might walk 120 feet and start to move very slowly to the right for a turn and then slowly straighten out 300 feet later. It was very difficult to lay those things out and retain the feeling of speed without overdoing it.”
To create that illusion of incredible speed, given that Brown’s stride per second was five feet, they shot one frame every 1.3 seconds; in between each frame he would walk about seven feet—so when footage was played back at 24 frames per second, it would look like they were traveling at about 168 feet per second, or more than 120 mph.
“I have always been interested in speed,” says Lucas. “I guess I’m part of the first generation that grew up with television and I think television and my love for cars and fast-pace rock-and-roll resulted in a cinematic need to try to push the boundaries even further.”
* * *
CAMERA SAGA
Hardly a single visual effect would exist on film until photographed by a camera—and ILM had the best, largely thanks to the efforts of Edlund and the ILM machine shop. On Star Wars and Empire, one of the problems had been a shortage of cameras, with only two, plus a single high-speed camera. Jedi would eventually have four tracking-system camera setups—the Dykstraflex, VistaCruiser, Auto Matte, and G-9 Rama—as well as a few extra cameras for special circumstances.
The original Dykstraflex, built for Star Wars, was still intact, while a Technirama camera had been rebuilt into the “G-9 Rama,” with a new follow-focus, and equipped with a 250-pound gear head on top of a boom arm, which sat on a 20-foot track and had the ability to tilt 90 degrees on one side, 45 degrees on the other. “It looks like something from outerspace,” says Edlund.
ILM had also modified cameras to shoot at incremental speeds to fit almost any lighting, and these had often been equipped with specially built lenses. To program the shots, “Jerry Jeffress and Kris Brown have come up with just the most dynamic, malleable system anybody around here can imagine,” Edlund adds. “We now have a smoothing and modification program that has everybody parading up to this Hewlett-Packard unit: It enables you to graph a move you’ve just joysticked and look at it in relation to the RAR that you’ve shot (the black-and-white move test).”
By seeing graphically how the camera move was working in relation to what they could see on the RAR via the Moviola, camera teams were then able to apply Kris Brown’s modification program to smooth out lumps or add lumps where needed, to compress the program or to shift information within the move to make the shot work. “It’s going to save us,” Edlund concludes. “Without it, we wouldn’t be able to do Jedi; it would just take too long.”
Design engineer Mike Bolles works with an optical setup.
Edlund and the Empire camera with electronic system designers Jerry Jeffress and Kris Brown, and technician Gary Leo.
Electronic systems designer Jerry Jeffress (clean shaven) stands next to the VistaCruiser camera (whose raised lettering was taken from, perhaps, a junked Oldsmobile).
Stage technician Peter Stolz and animation lead Garry Waller experiment with a hologram light effect.
Assistant cameraman Pat Sweeney works at a motion-control station.
Key players at ILM: visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston, optical supervisor Bruce Nicholson, visual effects supervisor Richard Edlund, ILM art director Joe Johnston, and visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren.
Richard Edlund, with the VistaCruiser camera.
* * *
THE MODEL SHOP RISES
Downey High School held a 20-year reunion party for its class of 1962 on Saturday, June 26; the 585 alumni had a surprise when classmate George Lucas made the two-hour drive to Modesto (“Where were you in ’62?” had been the tagline of American Graffiti, a film based on his high school experiences). The following Monday he was back at work, occasionally stepping into ILM to see how things were going.
Progress was steady by the end of July, with three day and three night crews shooting elements. Selwyn Eddy and his camera colleagues had begun a tradition of midnight barbecues, which soon became popular with all the night folk. “It started as a little thing in the woodshop,” Farrar would say. “They put a couple of sawhorses up and plywood on top and we’d all bring whatever we wanted to barbecue, sides, and somebody would bring wine. At first it was about five or six people, all the camera crew, and then pretty soon the animators were in and the Matte department and Optical. Pretty soon it was like 40 people, on this big long table. They’d announce it over the speaker system.”
In the Model Shop, Paul Huston works on an X-wing. A typical model began with a light aluminum mold or pattern. The model maker would then cast a really thin fiberglass shell. “We have experimented with various types of resins and have come up with a compromise between strength and finish which seems to do the job,” says Steve Gawley.
After painting the shells, they used tiny drill bits, not much wider than a hair’s breadth, to make openings for the neon lights to shine through. “The paint has to be chosen with great care,” Gawley adds. “It has to be thick enough to keep the lights inside from traveling through the body of the paint, but thin enough so that you can drill tiny pinholes all over it without it cracking or flaking. And, by the way, I’m talking about hundreds and hundreds of little holes.”
This particular large X-wing model, which Bill George and Mike Fulmer also worked on, was designed specifically for a long shot that would have zoomed in on Luke in his cockpit as he leaves Tatooine on his way to Dagobah—but the shot was cut from the movie.
Wesley Seeds is photographed during the different stages of building an A-wing starfighter model.
Model shop supervisor Lorne Peterson examines the in-progress large X-wing model.
The 102 shots of “RA,” or “rebel attack,” had been broken down into its hundreds of elements. Testing had begun on the Endor moon painting. Already 4,142 hours of location and bluescreen work had been completed, along with 2,415 hours spent on videomatics and 2,035 hours on animation. In th
e matte painting department, four test comps had been shot. “Of 450 shots, we’ve got maybe one or two finals at this point, one of which is a shot of the photon torpedo [sic] exiting the Death Star, which we took from the first show and recomposited,” says Edlund. Of the hundreds of storyboards generated, at a cost of $185,863, many were now being modified.
“As soon as ILM got involved with all the shots and they had the input of all the cameramen and everybody else, things just flip-flopped like crazy,” says Lorne Peterson. “All the storyboards had to be changed as all the departments started saying, ‘Well this is possible, this is impossible, how about something else?’ But by this time we had less than one year to go!”
The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Enhanced Edition) Page 42