McQuarrie’s hangar entrance matte.
McQuarrie’s hangar entrance matte.
A stop-motion taun added to the final frame and the foreground ice deleted.
A second matte by Ellenshaw was created for a similar shot of the hangar entrance, but from slightly farther away and with painted snow tracks.
Final frame. For the final shot, a front-projected low-contrast color plate was reduced approximately 70 percent and another painting was added to the right side (at one point, a right-to-left pan was planned). Both mattes were married with live-action footage that had been shot at the Blue Ice location by second unit in Finse, Norway.
A matte painting by McQuarrie combined the live-action set with a painted roof, which was then flopped for the final shot.
Final frame.
Another matte by McQuarrie married with the live-action set. Grease pencil numbers were added to the glass in order to line up the matte with the original plate. It was a difficult shot because the plate was out of focus; they therefore chose a lighter take, reduced it 70 percent, and then darkened and painted over soft areas until the only live-action element left of the set was part of the Falcon.
Final frame.
A storyboard (by Johnston) and finished matte painting of a portion of the rebel hangar by Harrison Ellenshaw.
One of the first mattes combined a painting by Ellenshaw of the generator combined with second unit.
Final frame.
Final frame of another generator painting by Pangrazio combined with the live-action probe droid.
Michael Pangrazio at work on a matte painting of the rebel generator.
A McQuarrie matte painting was composited with live-action footage of the Executor bridge and Vader (the half-bridge-set having been duplicated to create a complete bridge) to render a final shot.
Final shot.
Pangrazzio works on a star painting on tilted glass (to avoid reflections), which would meld with miniature work.
Final frame of a similar shot in which the Falcon emerges from the asteroid field.
Most matte paintings were done in acrylic or oil paints; when the latter was used, an agent was mixed in to accelerate the drying process. Pangrazio used oil paints; McQuarrie, acrylic and sometimes tempura; Ellenshaw used primarily acrylics.
A Dagobah matte painting by McQuarrie served as the background to a shot in which Luke’s X-wing levitates toward him care of Yoda.
Final frame.
Another Dagobah matte by Ellenshaw helped create the establishing shot of the bog, after going through about six iterations, being flopped, and then combined with the live-action X-wing and water.
Final frame.
For the same shot, Tippett built and Ralston animated stop-motion flying creatures.
“Dagobah is a great opportunity for a sound designer,” Burtt says. “Because you can create an unseen world that’s off camera. You can give it a vastness that’s not really there. I started out recording some birds at a zoo in an echo-y aviary. When I slowed the recording, they became spooky howls. Mixed into that were raccoons in a bathtub (so they wouldn’t run away).”
Various planets were painted for Empire, including a moon by Pangrazio.
Additional planets were used in other shots (Two final frames).
While still another figured in a publicity composit of Luke’s X-wing.
A persistent problem for the matte painting department was its second floor location (where it had been for Star Wars in Van Nuys, too). Second-floor rooms were more prone to vibrations. Ultimately, Krepela would have to use the PA system to warn everyone in the building to be still when he was shooting a matte painting.
Johnston at work painting an aerial view of Dagobah, which Pangrazio helped create (with clouds painted on a separate piece of plexiglass on the far right).
A touched up final frame of Luke’s X-wing blasting out of orbit made use of the Dagobah aerial-view matte painting. The plexiglass surface of clouds would be placed a few inches above the painted surface and then lit, which would create real shadows of the clouds on the planet surface (which could also be moved).
Production illustration of Han in window with cloud car by McQuarrie, summer 1979: “I showed this to Mike Pangrazio,” McQuarrie says. “He did a nice job of creating a matte painting to cover this moment.”
Pangrazio’s matte painting made use of miniature buildings constructed in the model department, as requested by the painter (the final image in the film would be flopped and would exist as three layers: clouds moving slightly; cloud car flying over rotoscoped matte of the foreground painting; and the matte itself. Both the illustration and the matte painting include a tower in the background from one of McQuarrie’s early concept sketches for Darth Vader’s castle).
“Ralph kept saying to me, ‘I don’t want to know anything about how things work around here, I just want to paint,’ ” says Ellenshaw. “And I said, ‘Fine, you paint. Any shot you want to start, you do it and let me worry about making it work.’ Well, he started coming in eight, ten, fifteen hours a day, just painting, while I was lucky to spend half my time painting, what with looking at tests and handling personnel affairs.” Even with their efforts, it was late in post before the matte painting department started turning out its shots. “Jim Bloom would come in about once a day and say, ‘Hi, how are ya? Need any help?’ Then this kind of furtive look—‘Anything I can do for you? Mix your paints, maybe?’ ”
To hit their deadlines, ultimately, the matte department crews had to work 24 hours a day, with completed shots coming off the optical printer every day or two in February–March 1980.
Matte photographers Robert Elswit (later, an Academy Award–winning cinematographer) and Michael Lawler prepare to shoot a matte painting.
A concept drawing by Johnston of Cloud City, with approximate measurements.
A matte painting of a sunset that would figure behind a Cloud City miniature, attributed to McQuarrie.
Pangrazio’s matte painting of clouds in the foreground combined with a matte painting of cloud city by McQuarrie to create an establishing shot.
Final frame of distant Cloud City, which McQuarrie painted on an animation cel.
A third painting by McQuarrie of Cloud City was needed as the Falcon nears the floating metropolis.
Final frame, again with clouds by Pangrazio.
“Here in Cloud City, we’re dealing with real backgrounds shot by Brian Johnson from an airplane,” Muren says. “So we had light-colored backgrounds with a lot of bluescreen—the same problem they had on Superman—and this factor multiplied the difficulties 10-fold. In order to achieve a high degree of realism, we’ve gone heavily into diffusion on the spaceships. We’ve knocked the blacks out of them; we’ve degraded the image.” “We did some tricks where we would do some dissolves so the Falcon would look like it was flying out of clouds,” Ralston says. Johnson adds, “Matching the moving clouds was a nightmare for the optical department.”
For a shot of the Falcon landing on Cloud City’s platform, a matte painting by Ellenshaw was combined with footage taken by the night crew of the very heavy Falcon model (originally built for Star Wars).
Another matte painting by Ellenshaw was used for Han’s point-of-view of Lando.
Final frame.
A second matte by Ellenshaw of the same angle, painted to simulate evening colors, was used for when the Falcon takes off as stormtroopers try to blast it.
Final frame.
“We composited the shot and the next day in dailies, we were surprised to see that the lasers were upside down and coming out of the top of the building,” says Ellenshaw. With just days to go before the film came out, the shot was fixed.
Assistant cameramen Chris Anderson, Richard Fish, and Selwyn Eddy, along with Ralston, shake hands during a night crew session with the original Falcon model that resulted in the final frame of the ship’s arrival on Cloud City (with retro-rockets animated by John Van Vliet). “The night crew was a craz
y group,” says Ellenshaw. The victory handshake celebrated getting the very heavy Falcon to land without a camera or model shake after a full night’s work.
McQuarrie works on a matte shot for the sequence in which Solo and Lando meet.
After reminding everyone to be still over the PA system, Krepela photographs the matte painting (Final frame).
“Most days George would come to ILM about 45 minutes before afternoon dailies to walk through the facility and see how everyone was doing,” says Ellenshaw. “It was valuable to get his feedback and not have to wait until the paintings were finished and composited to hear that he wanted changes. It saved countless man hours.”
ILM assistant cameraman Selwyn Eddy III works on a shot of the Falcon landing on Cloud City.
A cel overlay painting done over a storyboard by Ellenshaw, created after the fact for PR.
The final matte painting by McQuarrie.
The matte was combined with live-action to create the final sequence (Final frame of the heroes arrival).
A matte painting by Ellenshaw extended a Cloud City corridor, making Luke seem small and vulnerable upon his arrival.
Final frame.
In creating his painting, Ellenshaw had to compensate for a live-action plate taken with a wide-angle lens; he used an airbrush to obtain the soft shadows on the walls’ indentations.
Mark Thorpe works on miniatures of Cloud City buildings, requested by Pangrazio, which were painted and lit for lighting reference.
They were also photographed, cut out, and pasted into other matte paintings.
“Typical of George was his very clever concept of showing the passage of time in Cloud City,” says Ellenshaw, “by going from sunrise to daylight (Luke’s arrival) to sunset for the Falcon’s departure.”
A matte painting of the gantry by McQuarrie enhanced the scale and grandeur of the film’s cllimactic duel.
Final frame combines the painting with the live-action footage.
A matte painting of the Cloud City gantry by McQuarrie.
The Cloud City in a final frame from the film.
Matte painting by Ralph McQuarrie.
Matte painting by Ralph McQuarrie.
Ellenshaw at work on the East Landing Platform matte painting, upon which sits Slave I.
Slave I also existed as a model, for shots against bluescreen.
Final matte painting, in which most of Fett’s ship is a photograph of the painted miniature, excluding the cockpit canopy; the building on the right is also a photograph.
Final frame in which the blinking red light was added as a doubleexposure; a “moving split,” according to Ellenshaw, was used to hide the live-action forklift carrying Han in carbonite.
Matte department supervisor Harrison Ellenshaw at work on the cockpit of Fett’s ship.
A Johnston storyboard, dated December 3, 1979, helped visualize the space slug “tunnel.”
The space slug “tunnel” was then made into a model (with Muren).
The space slug “tunnel” was then composited with footage of the Falcon for the final frames, early 1980.
Peterson worked on the model of the space slug mouth and teeth.
The Falcon’s escape recalls Pinocchio’s from the belly of Monstro the whale (animated by Wolfgang Reitherman in the Disney film of 1940; final frame).
The space slug puppet (conceptualized by McQuarrie and built by Tippett and Doug Beswick).
MYSTERY KID
“Kenner Toys and the other licensees were doing great in 1979,” says Ganis. “There were big plans for continued licensing, which was an enormous part of the company, very important. George said out loud that it was the reason he was able to create plans to build the ranch and to fund ILM and so on. But when I walked in, it was a world that was kinda new to me; I didn’t really know the licensing world.”
Although it had made about $100 million the previous year, Kenner’s success was based on the first film and Lucasfilm wasn’t having an easy time fulfilling its plans for Empire. Indeed, the whole proposition was questionable to the business world, because, historically, sequels never lived up to the original movie; merchandise expectations were therefore pretty low.
“I would pack up my little licensing kit and go off to a department store in Cincinnati where there was a major buyer in the shoe department,” says Ganis. “I would take out my portable slide projector, find a place to project it onto a wall, and do my Empire presentation and go home. That one, I’ll never forget. When I walked outta there I asked myself, Is this what I’m doing with my life? And the answer, happily, was, Yes.”
“I’ve said that I do a lot of research and people immediately think of marketing research,” says Lucas. “They think, Oh, he figured out how to make money. But it wasn’t market research; it was research into fairy tales, folklore, and organized religion. It was really my anthropological studies that I put together to make the film.”
“We gave fans more than you give anybody and let them spread the word as an idea, as a concept,” says Ganis. “We dealt with the press in a way that was delicate and extremely well thought out as opposed to trying to get as much press as you possibly could. And we were very shadowy when it came to discussions about George, creating a mystique. People didn’t know George. They knew of the success, but they didn’t know the kid from Northern California.”
Owyeung works with the large-scale walker “feet.”
The “feet” were filmed with the HSE camera crushing a snow speeder.
That footage was then composited with the live-action footage (that had caused so much trouble during principal photography) for the final frames.
A camera report for the “walker foot” shot, December 18, 1979.
Edlund shot the “walker’s ass” and additional elements for the foot shot in January 1980.
Gawley and model maker Samuel Zolltheis are horrified by the fate of Owyeung.
Miniature pyrotechnicians Joseph Viskocil and Dave Pier prepare the larger-scale walker for its trip and fall.
Final frames.
Six final frames show how the weather continuity varies from shot to shot during the battle on Hoth: Some second unit footage (first, fourth, and fifth frames) featured a blue sky, while ILM struggled to make the battle go from a clear day to a snowstorm.
Model shop foreman Gawley (partially shown), machinist Udo Pampel, and model maker Marc Thorpe examine the large-scale walker model in progress (destined for pyro shots).
From left:stage hand Bill Beck, special effects camera operator Bill Neil, stage hand Ed Hirsh, special effects technician Ted Moehnke, stop-motion animator Jon Berg, model shop foreman Steve Gawley, visual effects supervisor Richard Edlund, and key grip Bobby Finley.
The bog creature is taken by truck to Lucas’s pool foundations.
Pickups are prepared (Lucas leans on a shovel, while Johnson stands at the edge of the unfinished pool watching divers with the creature).
After preparations have been made, Edlund (in red lumberjack shirt) watches, with Johnson at far left with cables, as Lucas talks with Kazanjian (on right, with hand in his back pocket). “I never knew what a grip was, but I met Dickey Dova that day,” Mike MacKenzie says. “Here’s this guy shimmying across a pipe frame they’d rigged up over top of this muddy pit, because they’d had to hang a diffuser screen because the sun was too bright. It was really fun.”
The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Enhanced Edition) Page 49
