Pointing to an ad hoc Death Star clock, Rodis-Jamero emphasizes, perhaps, how little time is left in postproduction to Tippett, who reacts appropriately.
GLIMMERINGS
Suddenly there was light at the end of the tunnel: “I was lucky enough to see the last three reels of the film where most of the heavy-duty action takes place,” says Ralston. “It has a terrific feel to it. I’m really anxious to see how John Q. Public will react. If they’re loving the trailers, wait’ll the film comes out. They’ll go crazy!”
“There was a point where I saw an assembled sequence and I was just overwhelmed with how well everything worked together,” Huston would say. “The quality of everything got so high during Jedi: the design of the shots, the photography was so excellently done, the models were so well constructed and detailed, the optical compositing was so flawless. There wasn’t anything that stuck out as awkward; all the rough edges had been sanded off by that time.”
Almost on cue, however, more problems arose in late February. Ralston’s nemesis returned; indeed, the MA sequence, in which the rebels pilot their stolen shuttle to Endor, had never been completely vanquished. “When the film began coming together, George discovered the angles weren’t working, so footage was tossed out,” Ralston explains. “Conceptually, the shot went through many changes. We were throwing stuff out left and right. It was never what George wanted and each time he altered the sequence a little, it would end up affecting the seven shots before it, which caused a great deal of grief. Our reshoots came up in dailies so often that it almost became a joke. As my comment on the whole situation, I’ve started placing a human skull somewhere within each of the various elements.”
Lucas continued to modify shots as February rolled into March. During the sequence in which the Emperor arrives, he called Ralston over to editorial to show him where he wanted four TIE interceptors to make a more obvious turn and where to place another 50 TIE fighters in the distant blackness of space.
“Every now and then, because ILM was right across the parking lot, George would call over Joe or Dennis or Ken,” Dunham would say. “Once we were editing a 35mm sequence with the bunker in the forest and George says, ‘I want a small walker in the woods back here.’ The room went dead silent. Dennis says, ‘But, George, that’s not a VistaVision plate.’ George says, ‘I know. I want a walker right there.’ It hadn’t been done before. Nobody even considered doing that kind of an effects shot on regular 35mm. The guys went back and found a way to make it work.”
“George is asking for some incredible stuff—he wants to put a chicken walker into this one handheld shot that was moving all around,” says Ralston. “That meant hand-drawn roto mattes and plotting the camera moves so that the background elements and foreground elements would all lock into that plate. Horrendous stuff!”
“We have another horrendous shot that George insists that he wants,” Muren says. “It’s right after one of the walkers has been blown up. You see its head flying apart in a high-speed closeup and then we cut to a shot of it standing there with its head gone. The problem is that the only shot George could find where the Ewoks turn to look back at the walker has a tilt on it—so our tilt has to match exactly—and we can’t cover it up by having the walker moving around.”
Originally, the ground battle was supposed to have fewer than 50 shots, but over the months Lucas had doubled its size in editorial. “Cutting the film was hard,” Lucas would say. “It’s always hard. Part of it was my curse: I go through and really rework a movie in the editorial phase. The way I describe Steven is as a director: Steven shoots the movie and then you just cut it together. I shoot around the movie, and then I have to figure out a way of cutting it into a movie.”
“It was a movie that was created a lot in the editing room,” Starkey would say. “George always saw this picture in his head, and, often, it wasn’t exactly what was shot. So he would build scenes and then go in and create an effects shot to create transitions just to satisfy what he was seeing in his head. He was building shots with elements, which you could do to some degree on the optical printer. Editing is really writing and George didn’t stop writing when he was editing.”
“We had a couple of incredibly long pan shots in the ground battle, like 90 degrees, and we’d look at them and say, ‘Nobody would do a shot like that—we’d be crazy to try a shot like that,’ ” says Muren. “But then we’d project up the plate, plot the thing out a frame at a time through the camera, and then play it back with motion control on our model move—and it works!”
“We are busier than we have been before,” says Johnston. “We’ve tried things that we never would’ve tried on Empire. I think if we were starting from scratch, if Jedi was the first film we tried to do as a group, we would be in big trouble. It’s only because we have worked together for so many years and we know how each department functions that we’re able to pull this off. It’s a giant tapestry of everyone’s different talents.”
“There’ll be a bunch of stormtroopers lying dead on the ground and George will want all but two of them painted out,” says Ralston. “Then, over on the side, we’ll put in some trees to hide a prop that doesn’t make sense anymore. Some bikers are sitting in the scene, so you have to paint the supports out and maybe add some other bikers flying around. It’s just unbelievable some of the things George is asking for—and what’s even more unbelievable is we’re doing it!”
Audio element not supported.
Visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston talks eloquently about how ILM creates a special effects shot and its evolution. (Interview by Garrett, 1983). (3:46)
A case in point was shot SB-19, in which dozens of TIE fighters swarm the Falcon. Added late in post, SB-19’s myriad elements had been filmed in early February—so many, in fact, that it would go down as the single most complex shot in the history of ILM—and were now being comped together. “That shot must have the most complicated composite of all time, which Mark Vargo did,” Edlund would say. “There were something like 70 elements in that shot and I don’t know how many passes on the camera.”
“These two shots where the Falcon is flying through all the TIE fighters and everything is coming at you and then going away and there’s hundreds of ships going around it in groups of four or eight—just to figure that stuff out …,” Farrar would say. “We used every technique that we knew, including spine curves and so many revolutions of a motor over X amount of frames for moves on either a model or the camera.”
“There’s one shot that will break all records for opticals,” says Ralston. “It has about 60 to 70 single elements in it. Not only is there a fleet of ships out there, but also lazers shooting and flak blowing up—and it’s all moving, so the star fields are also moving. To choreograph that is very difficult, just to get everything to go the right way and not be in such a mess that you can’t follow the action. That’s hard. You load up the Moviola and, ‘No, that synch doesn’t work,’ so you retard something for five frames … ‘No, that’s not quite it.’ You just play with it like that. It takes a long time.”
“This was a chance to do a real dogfight,” Lucas would say. “Some of the shots in the sequence took 24 hours to run through the optical printer and if one person made one mistake, you had to start all over. Some of the times at dailies it would get pretty traumatic; you’d have so much time and money invested and just no idea if it was going to turn out.”
“There was this one shot chasing a TIE fighter up and over the hospital ship, which took me almost a week to get right, just one background ship for one shot in a movie,” Farrar would say. “It was terribly difficult because you’re trying to make this camera do things that it doesn’t want to do.”
“It was so much pressure,” Nicholson would say. “And I put more pressure on myself than I should have. I was supervising the compositing and I took on too much. There were other people who could have helped me out with some stuff, but I didn’t delegate enough. I was just burnt to a crisp by the end of the
project.”
“You can get away with murder when there are 70 elements in the shot,” says Ralston. “But it was frightening for a while because this show was so gigantic that there was no time for horsing around. None at all. So I was afraid the first time I put wads of gum and my tennis shoe in that fleet shot. I was sitting next to George in dailies—and, boy, if he’d picked that out, I would’ve been nailed. For obvious reasons he was worried about getting the film out …”
Burtt and his sound crew began work on reel 5, which featured the arrival of the Emperor (with live-action now composited into the matte painting); even as late as February 1983, Lucas was enhancing this shot, instructing Ralston on what the background TIE fighters should be doing.
A final frame from the bike chase. The sounds of the speeder bike came from a variety of sources: a P-51 and a P-38 aircraft, both recorded at air races, mixed with an electronic element, a whining sound used primarily for pass-bys. The “whoop-whoops” came from a scouting trip taken during the location shoot at Yuma; Burtt and Gary Summers recorded S-3 Vikings as they practiced taking off and landing on a mocked-up aircraft carrier deck at the Naval Air Station El Centro. “They throttle real slow as they make adjustments to the landing—‘whoop, whoop,’ ” Burtt says.
Another different “whoop” was an extremely sped up helicopter sound recorded at Fort Hood, Texas. The sound of a wheezing air hammer recorded outside Elstree Studios was used for the closeups of shifting gears.
Final frame of a shot requested by Lucas: an Ewok turning around (in foreground) to view a static, destroyed chicken walker and a moving one. This visual effect addition was described as “horrendous” to complete by many at ILM, given that both AT-STs were being added to what was originally handheld photography.
Effects cameraman Don Dow reshoots the shuttle for a sequence that went through many iterations.
A matte painting for the Endor ground battle had to be ordered (Chris Evans fulfilled) when Lucas altered a shot late in post, placing stormtroopers where they hadn’t been before.
Final frame.
Gawley and model maker Marc Thorpe place objects on a glass backing. Often background ships in complex space battle shots were nothing more than photographs artistically placed on cards and melded into the shot by the optical department.
A Johnston storyboard of SB-19 (July 12, 1982) lists the multitude of elements necessary to complete it.
Johnston (on right) checks a bluescreen shot of an AT-ST on the ILM stage, as Paul Huston and pyro technician Thaine Morris prepare to explode the model’s “head.”
Lucas discusses Ordaz’s matte painting used for the Emperor’s death plunge. Ralston collaborated with Garry Waller and Peter Stolz on laser photography for the Emperor’s “death pit.” “There’s one matte shot when Vader throws the Emperor down the shaft that I never liked,” Barron would say. “I didn’t think it was effective, because it relied on a full matte painting of that very technical subject matter.”
Frank Ordaz and his matte painting of the Emperor’s “Death Pit.”
On February 27, after two more days of looping at Goldwyn’s Studio “E,” Hamill returned for a “bonfire retake” in the Ewok forest/Skywalker Ranch, working for four hours after sundown under the direction of Ian Bryce (final frame).
A key set image of the Emperor’s lightning bolts, which were completed at a cost of about $15,205 by, mostly, outside contractors.
An undated Johnston storyboard of SB-92.
Unlike SB-19, shot “SB-92” or “space battle shot number 92,” aka “the killer shot,” did not make it into the film as planned. “George came to us with a shot that he and Joe had designed, and it was the most complicated shot in the movie,” Duignan would say. “I said, ‘Let me get back to you.’ I looked at our schedule and I had to go back and say, ‘Let’s try for it, but I just can’t guarantee that it will get done.’ ” SB-92 is not on the list of Final Omits, signifying that it was probably included in a modified, scaled down form. It may have included the modified rebel blockade runner from the first film, as ILM Progress Reports list the blockade runner as an element filmed for SB-92, before the shot disappeared from the records.
The modified ship being shot by Ralston.
Final frame.
* * *
THE CHILDREN HAVE ENTERED THE FOREST
Many of the approximately 50 AT-ST, or “chicken walker,” shots were accomplished with a forest miniature and models, sometimes in-camera, or sometimes using bluescreen, over a period of two months.
Barbara Gallucci and Paul Huston headed up a team of small-scale forest builders, under Lorne Peterson’s supervision. Most of the redwood trees had four-inch-diameter trunks, but some were as wide as 18 inches and a few were only half an inch. Dried tumbleweed, sprigs of juniper, and other leaves created bows and branches. A few living ferns and other plants were scrounged up at the last minute to bulk up a background, but they wouldn’t last long under the hot lights. Several sections of forest were eventually constructed using two different scales.
“We tried making them out of a variety of things, including small redwood trees,” says Peterson. “Eventually, Barbara came up with a technique of taking sono tubes, usually used for concrete molds, and applying foam in cut strips.” Gallucci then sculpted maybe four or five with different diameters, which were molded. Trees were cast out of either flexible or rigid urethane. “We’d done a lot of tree stuff for E.T. and we’d learned a lot,” Peterson adds.
Two sizes of model AT-STs were constructed. For the stop-motion version, a 16-inch model armature was machined from aluminum and steel by Tom St. Amand and a precision exterior built by Bill George.
“Phil Tippett came to me and said, ‘I want you to build this thing as one piece; I don’t want any little things glued on,’ ” Bill George would say. “I guess what had happened on Empire was that Phil would grab the whole thing almost in a bear hug and he’d wrench it this way or that, which has a tendency to break off model pieces. So I had to engineer all the little plates so the chicken walkers were ‘Tippett-proof.’ ”
Construction of the four-foot AT-ST, for destructive purposes, was supervised by Paul Huston. The heads were made of thin epoxy and aluminum-filled epoxy, some out of urethane, some out of brittle wax, and others out of a .05-inch nickel for the shot in which Ewoks crush a walker’s head between two logs.
“George came through the model shop with Howard Kazanjian and I had three large chicken walker heads on my workbench,” Huston would say. “I explained to them that I had sculpted the head and made a mold and then had three copies made at a place in L.A. that electroplated nickel into a mold. But when I said that each one had cost $500 George looked angry. Luckily, Howard had heard the whole spiel and said, ‘Oh, it’s okay!’ After that, I started using paper cups and trash cans to make my models.”
Huston still made certain there was enough detail in the cabin interior to be believable, in case, when the head was crushed, the interior became visible. “It actually had little men inside it,” Muren says. “The little guys never showed up, though. We were hoping as the door flew open, one would flop out. They even had lead weights in their bodies so that they would flop correctly rather than bounce like little rubber men.”
Filming the AT-STs, Muren used a lot of go-motion effects. “We’d used it in Dragonslayer and in E.T., where we had to matte the kids on their bikes in front of a bright sky,” Muren says. “Mike Fulmer, who’s a model maker, was one of the first to suggest that we didn’t need to do some of this stuff with motors. He figured that since we shoot at a continuous speed, about one frame per second, that a person working with wires could move the puppets. It worked. And so a lot of the go-motion shots are done without stop-motion and use fewer motors than before.”
“George likes to see stuff like the two-legged AT-STs, cos he’s really a kid himself,” says Johnston. “We’re all kids.”
Model makers Barbara Gallucci, Bill Buttfield, and Barbara Affonso a
t work sculpting and preparing flora for the miniature setups of Endor.
Huston at work on the cockpit of an AT-ST, stocking it with details so that when its head was detonated, realistic debris would be seen on camera. To differentiate between the two types of walkers, the chicken walkers and the AT-ATs, Tippett referred to them as “two leggedy” and “four leggedy.”
Affonso sculpting trees to be used in the Endor miniature setups for the speeder bike chase.
A miniature Endor setup was placed in the ILM courtyard, with a painted forest backing (on the right).
Paul Huston at work on a backdrop painting for an Endor forest sequence.
* * *
THREE MAILERS
In Sprocket Systems’ C building theater, Burtt and his crew harmonized the final mix. The new auditorium was beautifully designed, technically as well as aesthetically. “We like to boast about it,” says Kazanjian. “But it probably has the best sound system in the world.” Indeed, MGM was, reportedly, copying it for its own new theater.
“The system is named after Tom Holman, an interesting guy,” Greber would say. “He came up with this concept of a crossover network.” The network’s name would simultaneously fit Holman and itself—TH for his initials, X for crossover—and would fit the history of the company by referencing Lucas’s first feature, THX 1138.
The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Enhanced Edition) Page 53
