Burtt sourced the base sound for the massive rancor from a tiny but “insanely aggressive” dachshund that belonged to his neighbor. “Despite the fact that it was a cute little dog, Max the dachshund had a vicious streak,” Burtt would say. “I recorded Max as he growled and hissed—he actually bit his owner’s face at another time—and then I pitched that down much lower for the rancor’s roars and howls.”
A rehearsal for Fett’s leap from the barge to the skiff made use of a park swing, with Bob Yerkes dressed as Fett. Off camera, Lucas, Ian Bryce, stunt performer Larry Holt, and other crew stood by as Fett launched himself into a waiting inflatable yellow mattress.
Frank Ordaz in the matte painting department painted the second Death Star model in stages, sometimes using for reference the first Death Star matte painting made for Star Wars (on the right), with the circular indent on the equator (which was later moved north of the equator for the final shots).
Bill George took the lead on creating the filigree of the Death Star model, as it progressed.
Lorne Peterson and Kazanjian inspect the Death Star model in progress, perhaps discussing its cost (behind them are stacks of model kits, whose parts would often be used in creative ways on ILM’s models in a process known as “kit-bashing”; as well as a “pyro tower” Star Destroyer accessory that would later be detonated for the appropriate shot).
Model maker Randy Ottenberg works on the filigree, too, as many model shop crew were relegated to the Death Star gulag.
Assistant camerawoman Maryan Evans on stage as the completed Death Star model is shot against bluescreen.
Muren and Tippett work on the rancor sequence. To duplicate the smoke and haze from the live-action set, Muren placed a piece of glass at a 45-degree angle from the camera and reflected a large white card held above the camera. He also lit the card in a V-shape so the light would seem to come down through the grating. That setup wasn’t attached to the camera, which meant the camera could pan and tilt, while keeping the smoke locked to the background and looking like shafts of light within the shot.
“There was a lot of hit and miss,” Muren says. “And we did something like we did on some of E.T., when Steven would just keep the camera rolling and try it over and over again, without waiting for slates or anything. There is a much better chance that way, if a specific movement doesn’t have to be done, of getting something that will look like a real, living thing.”
Tippett with his hand up the back side of the rancor, which is being spritzed.
Closeup of the rancor with a pig guard’s arm protruding from its fanged mouth. “George was afraid of the rating if you saw the pig guard getting stuffed into the monster’s mouth,” says Tippett. “So it was storyboarded with the creature turning away, eating the pig guard, and then turning back with a little blood on his mouth. But we stuck an arm in the rancor’s mouth so that when he turned back to the camera, there was this arm wiggling around—and George loved it. He laughed in the screening room so much that we ended up making the rancor slurp the arm like a piece of spaghetti.”
DEATH STAR CANYON
“It’s getting pretty scary,” says Ralston. “Everybody’s starting to really feel the effects of the crunch.” On some of the fleet shots, perhaps for relief, Ralston was putting in pictures of his tennis shoe and wads of gum.
Computer printouts revealed the more serious side of each shot’s challenges in Optical: The first image of Endor needed to be reshot with a “smoother move” and needed a new garbage matte; the Death Star model had to be repositioned in frame; bluescreen was often underexposed; vehicles needed to be slower or faster; dirt, vignetting—the problems were endless. As the deadline approached, Nicholson still had six operators, eight lineup and five lab technicians, filling 20-hour days with their labors.
Animation was vexed when shot SB 47—the Death Star firing—had its length changed without their being notified. The animation element of the “destructobeam” had been completed to the length originally given, but now had to return to animation for further work. A background plate for shot ED 5—a closeup of the Jedi ghosts in the Ewok village—needed to be shot, “as none currently exists.” The latest total was 521 effects shots in the film, 482 optical comps.
By mid-February, Lucas had returned from London and Edlund’s crew were nearly finished with the eight or nine shots of the Death Star reactor chamber. “The effect is you’re flying down this tunnel and suddenly, on the other end of it, is like the Grand Canyon,” says Gawley. The fact that the camera moved very slowly while the ships rapidly became very small would combine to give viewers the sensation of an immensely large space, kilometers across.
“It’s very satisfying to go from the very large central reactor back into these very tiny tunnels,” Lucas would say. “It’s a huge change of pace.”
For the energy plasma effect around the electrodes, ILM used lasers, specifically a little argon laser rented from Apogee (the effects company founded by ILM alumnus John Dykstra): an electronic, pulse-fed galvanometer that spun a mirror at a high frequency in order to reflect a laser beam into a spinning cone of light. To obtain different patterns, they injected gases into the path of the laser, using a small electro-optical system to extend and contract the cone, a scanning technique they’d used during the climax of Raiders and elaborated on in Poltergeist. Garry Waller, from the animation department, and stage technician Peter Stolz shot the laser footage, using nitrogen and Freon for the gases, each of which generated a somewhat different look.
“At the beginning of the sequence, the laser effect is just bristling a bit here and there,” writes Edlund. “After it gets hit by a few photon torpedoes [sic], though, it really starts to pulse with this kind of plasmic energy. The whole sequence lasts only half a minute, but if Star Wars has taught us anything, it’s that you can create a very definite impression in a couple of seconds or less. We’re pushing really hard to get the last two shots done by mid-February, so we can shoot the ships and the rest of the elements and get them into Optical in time for Bruce to put them all together.”
A posed shot created for fun by Tippett, as an homage to the epic monster battles in the films of yesteryear, has the 400-year-old dragon Vermithrax Pejorative from Dragonslayer being throttled by the rancor in Jedi.
Muren and Tippett shake claws with the rancor puppet.
Johnston concept art for the Death Star reactor chamber, undated.
Gawley works on the nearly complete Death Star reactor chamber model. The finished Death Star reactor model was about 5 feet tall and 22 feet across. The details were made from a pie-shaped pattern farmed out to a local foam fabricator (Bill Kreysler and Associates), who repeated it 50 times. The perimeter was mirrored Plexiglas with etched brass glued on the sides. “We scratched holes in the plex to let light bleed through to help with the scale,” Gawley says. “The lights we used were those GE light sticks. We used about 500 of those suckers in all the sets to give it a consistent look.”
Final frame of the escaping Falcon and the exploding reactor, with laser effects.
Effects cameraman Selwyn Eddy III at the end of the Death Star tunnel number three, which leads away from the reactor chamber.
The Falcon continues its flight to safety with the explosion right behind, racing through the miniature tunnel thanks to Optical and a team of talented craftspeople.
Gawley, Lucas, and Johnston.
STILL CRAZY … AFTER 400 SFX SHOTS
The model shop had completed all of its models as of February 16, though a few modifications were still required. Crew were now helping with the stop-motion work, mounting models on the stage as shooting of the last elements continued unabated. That same day Debbie Fine sent a memo to Lucas and Kazanjian with her edits of Lucas’s final opening crawl—adding a “that” and a “than” to the second paragraph—so that it read:
Luke Skywalker has returned to Tatooine in an attempt to rescue his friend Han Solo from the clutches of the vile gangster, Jabba the Hutt.
When completed, this ultimate weapon will spell certain doom for the small band of freedom fighters struggling to restore democracy to the galaxy …
A still later revision, undated, would change “freedom fighters” to “rebels” and “democracy” to “freedom” in the third paragraph (and would eliminate the comma after “gangster”).
“One of the things we still have to shoot is the opening crawl,” says Ralston. “Shooting that crawl is actually one of the hardest things on these shows. The artwork itself is only about four feet long and maybe a foot wide. The camera is real low to the ground and we use a tilting lens to eliminate a lot of the focus problems. But everything has to be lined up just perfectly and you spend days running through tests. Every little blemish shows up. Any little bump, any little movement of the camera is going to screw up this big 2,000-frame-long take. Pure torture.”
Every other ILMer was also running at full bore, so that people were beginning to fray at the edges. “As we neared the end, we were all exhausted,” Smith would say. “Like marathoners in the last few miles, the last few months were tough to keep going. By then many of us were running on empty. George used to tell us, ‘If you can keep going, so can I.’ ”
And it wasn’t just ILM. Every other business department had kicked into high gear. Marketing plans, public relations, and accounting duties increased as the release date loomed. “People were very loyal,” Greber would say. “I’d go into ‘A’ Building, which was the administrative building, and I’d have 10 or 15 people working there on a Saturday. I’d tell them they had to leave, because they weren’t getting paid overtime. There was a great sense of purpose, which was wonderful.”
“Jedi almost killed everybody, every department, from costumes to monsters to the sophistication of the mechanics to the special effects,” says Lucas. “Everything was very, very hard on everybody.”
“You have to learn how to override all petty thoughts and perform under pressure,” says Pangrazio. “It can really get to you. Even George says that the pressure of filmmaking can kill you.”
Paul Huston while shooting a miniature Ewok “kite,” based on a Johnston design.
“George loved getting these tacos nearby, so George, Duwayne, and I always ate our lunch just sittin’ around a table right outside the editing room,” Steve Starkey would say. “One time George said to me, ‘I’ve realized that for nine years, every single waking day of my life has been about Star Wars. Every day I have to deal with a drawing, a book, the movie, the cut, the sound, and on and on. I said, ‘George, I think it’s time you go back to those experimental movies you made when you were young, because I think that’s enough of Star Wars for a while.’ But I really sympathized with how consumed George had been with his own vision.”
“This one was grim for me, just as bad as directing,” Lucas would tell a journalist, still without divulging his personal situation. “It’s the demands, the time one has to spend, and the worrying: Is it going to work? Why is everything going wrong all the time? And it’s my personality: I’m very emotionally involved in it and I’ve made a big commitment to it. It’s 10 years since I started this, since April 17, 1973—I turned in my first story treatment May 20.”
“There was a lot of stuff going on that we didn’t know,” Johnston says, perhaps feeling instinctively his boss’s pain. “You have to remember that we were this machine that came up for air when we went home at midnight. We did the work and we were affected by all that stuff, but often we didn’t know why. We were the galley slaves.”
“I think we were underappreciated, that was one of the things I felt,” Edlund would say. “We all hated the Ewoks and the Ewoks were jammed together so quickly. You could see the zipper seams on their backs. So it got a little bit strange to me in that way, and uncomfortable. My management style is, if you have somebody working for you and they don’t argue with you about ideas, then you’re not getting your money’s worth.”
“For George things had to be just right,” Ralston adds. “It’s hard to explain how complex visual effects are and the nitpicking that goes on. This job is monumental—it goes on and on and on—and every aspect of it gets nitpicked to pieces, which takes time you don’t have. You can’t just whip it out. To produce the dreams, you have to go through the nightmares. I hope to God I never see again a film as big as Jedi.”
POST-TRAUMATIC FILM
FEBRUARY TO MAY 1983
CHAPTER ELEVEN
As the visual effects teams mopped up, Burtt and his crew began to finalize the film’s sound design and mix about a week late, on Tuesday, February 22. Lucas’s increased pace in the editing of Jedi added another layer of complexity to their job.
“Jedi is paced a little bit faster,” Lucas says. “Each movie moves a little bit faster. Each one has been taken to the brink; it’s as fast as you can make it and still be able to tell a comprehensible story. Jedi is almost incomprehensible in certain areas. It’s designed more for kids. It’s natural to the way I feel about things. I’ve always been extremely interested in the cinematic side of motion pictures, and one of the key elements of cinema is editorial pace, just storytelling pace. I have constantly been experimenting with trying to get the story told as quickly as possible while adding in as many entertainment values as one can possibly have, to express an idea as swiftly as possible. It’s a form of minimalism.”
“George was trying to figure out at a certain point how few frames he needed for a cut,” Farrar would say. “I think his theory was that he could get below 14 frames for a cut and it would still register. I was involved with experimenting for him, and I was chasing that idea and shot 21 elements in one night, TIE fighters flying through the frame as quickly as possible. I think we proved that it would register in the mind, but did it cut in? I think we used some of it, but the shot was longer.”
“The challenge for sound editing and sound design is always related to how many cuts there are in the movie, how rapidly it goes from shot to shot,” Burtt would say. “Essentially, whenever there’s a cut in a movie, there’s perhaps a necessity to change the sound, introduce a new sound, or modify another one. Do you have a different sound on every cut? And if you do, will it end up sounding like a bunch of bumps—brief moments of sound that are just bursts of noise that come so quick you can’t tell what it is? These are all really significant issues. It’s not only coming up with the sounds, but also sounds that will connect together like music would connect.”
“They’ve started doing the finished sound mix, even though we’re not done with the effects,” says Ralston. “Certain reels are finished and they’ll begin working on those. Meanwhile, we’ll be rushing to get the other ones ready. George is still making changes.”
Because of those limitations Burtt started with reel 5 of the 13. Normally, a mix goes from start to finish, in continuity. “But we actually began work in the middle,” he says. “It’s not a great way to work, doing it out of context, because there’s always a natural flow and feel for the sound as it develops through the movie.”
Reel 5 featured the parade-like arrival of the Emperor on the Death Star, and the volume of the scene was pushed to the limit. “We had fresh ears at the beginning,” Burtt explains. “However, everyone was nervous about having the whole responsibility of the mix as well as the fear of failing to grab the audience, so we tried to ease our fears by making the arrival really loud.”
In a later reel, Terry Eckton edited in Chewie’s sounds. “She becomes Chewie,” Burtt says of her method. It was Eckton’s idea to match the Wookiee’s roar as he swings from the treetops with a loop of Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan cry, mixing and synching everything up rhythmically and tonally with the original Chewbacca cry. “We put it in as a joke and thought it would never get by George, but it was about the only thing he commented on in the whole
reel—‘Oh, it’s great. Leave it,’ ” Burtt says.
Burtt’s tonal masterpiece, however, was the bike chase. Following up on thoughts formed early in his life, about how sound effects were akin to musical instruments, Burtt crafted a complex, layered audio track so perfectly tied to the fine-tuned, fast-paced editing that the sequence became a harmonious and lovely tone poem. “I wanted to show a sequence where sound could be the backbone of the drama,” he would say. “In the bike chase, the sounds themselves had to provide a great deal of the energy. But it’s tricky because you want it to build in intensity, yet it can’t just get louder and louder and louder. You have to have the effect of drama and suspense in the sound without just turning up the volume, so a lot of experimentation went into the sequence as I tried to give it contrast: loud, a moment of quiet—then punching it with something—orchestrating the sound effects like you might orchestrate music.”
The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Enhanced Edition) Page 52
