First opening in 1987, the original Star Tours attraction at Disneyland included what was the most complex optical composite created at Industrial Light & Magic up to that time. A “view” out the window of a starspeeder was in fact a state-of-the-art flight simulator developed by Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI) and Rediffusion Simulation with miniature effects by ILM. Among the thrilling encounters for passengers onboard was a harrowing trip through a cluster of icy comets which the crew dubbed “ice-teroids.”
Compositing in this photochemical era involved a piece of equipment known as an optical printer. With iterations dating back to the earliest days of cinema, optical printers combined separately-photographed elements by recapturing them – one frame and one layer at a time – onto a new roll of film negative. Optical printers and the artists who operated them created the final effect one viewed onscreen with everything carefully (and painstakingly) blended together. Going back to Star Wars: A New Hope (1977), ILM had developed the most sophisticated compositing techniques yet seen, allowing for even greater refinement and finesse.
The ice-teroid shot in Star Tours combined some 60 elements of individual sections of film. By comparison, the most complex shot of a space battle in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983) just a few years earlier had little more than half the number. One of the two optical printer operators to work on the new shot for Star Tours was Jon Alexander, hired only that year in 1986….