A Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away…an epic space drama unfolded to the delight of children of all ages. This December, Dark Room Productions proudly fold it back up to present, for eight performances only in San Francisco, STAR WARS: Live on Stage!
A deliciously evil empire. A heroic rebel alliance. Cool laser battles! Lightsaber duels! Awesome zero-gravity dogfights! And a $100 special effects budget! It’s everyone’s favorite, classic blockbuster performed with a very small block.
starwars.com chats with STAR WARS: Live on Stage! Director Jim Fourniadis who also happens to be the Creative Director of the Dark Room Theater and adoptive father to Maggie “the cute French Bulldog, our mascot, who is still mad at me for making her wear a little Princess Leia costume on opening night.”
(Photo by Scott Beale)
Why did you decide to do a theatrical production of Star Wars?
Well, I thought what would be the least likely film to adapt to a stage the size of a parking space…Answer? STAR WARS!!! Really in all seriousness, I love the original film and, in a very real sense, the special effects, while stunning, are peripheral to the film’s appeal. The story is what counts and George Lucas’s script is timeless.
Is it the whole movie or just favorite scenes?
We pared it down to 1 hour and 15 minutes, so we essentially cut out scenes that were not central to the main plot. In order to facillitate that and to have fun by providing a different perspective to the story, I introduced two stormtroopers to the cast. They act as the classic butler and maid, and function also as audience surrogates. Plus they are pretty funny. Other than that the film is fairly in tact.
What’s your favorite part of the show?
When Chewbacca first emerges. Every night the show stops for five minutes until the audience can regain their composure.
(Photo by Scott Beale)
What kind of special effects can fans expect?
Fairly ironic, low budget and self-aware ones. If you squint you will notice that R2-D2 is a painted bullet trash can with the word “Push” clearly visible on the face plate.
Do you think George Lucas would approve?
It’s hard to say, it would be a little silly to think I could anticipate Mr. Lucas’s response, I rarely am certain how anyone will respond to my work. If nothing else, I think Mr. Lucas would immediately recognize that we are all devoted fans and that our production is fiercely true to the original spirit of his classic film. That level of devotion is kinda hard to fake.
Why do you think fans should come out and see the show?
Because they are hungry for a new way to re-experience something they love. They, like us, have this film etched in their brain and exercising those memories by focusing them through our distorted lens is cathartic and fun.
My only hope is that people will walk away with a sense that in some way they have been given a chance to see Star Wars again for the first time. I think we are all having so much fun on stage, that the audience can’t help but be affected by our enthusiasm. If we can get people to add the memory of our show to their vision of Star Wars, then we will not only have aimed high, but have knocked it out of the park.
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STAR WARS: Live on Stage runs December 5-27, 2008; shows Friday and Saturday at 8pm at the Dark Room Theater, 2263 Mission Street, between 18th and 19th, San Francisco, CA
Oh, I’m sure you saw that photo. It was tearing up the internets this past week: the snapshot of Carrie Fisher, in Princess Leia metal bikini-wear, sunbathing with her identically clad stunt double while on set in Arizona for Return of the Jedi.
It really started spreading once Gizmodo posted it, and could be found on JWZ, Boingboing.net, Buzzfeed.com,and theforce.net. It was when the Daily Mail got a hold of the story, though, that it took a peculiar turn.
Catch that wrinkle? The “pictures have just been leaked onto the internet, more than 20 years since they were taken.” That definitely makes the story even sexier, which, come on, this is a story that hardly needs it. As exciting as the idea of leaked photos is, it’s not entirely accurate. In fact, we can offer you a “top secret” way to uncover this and even more “leaked photos.”
Step 1. Get the 2004 Star Wars Trilogy DVD boxed set. Odds are, you own it. Throw in Disc 4, the Bonus Materials. Navigate to “Video Games and Still Galleries.”
Step 2. Now, go to “Exclusive Production Photos.”
Step 3. Almost there. “View Return of the Jedi photos.
Step 4. Okay. Now thumb forward about 30 or so images and, presto! “Leaked image!”
A wise blogger once wrote, “the Internet has a collective memory of a goldfish for stuff like this.” Hard to argue that point, but we know Star Wars fans are more observant than that! Heck, we’re willing to bet that some of you even remembered that a variation of this photo was made publicly available before the 2004 DVD release. In June of 2003, starwars.com posted this snapshot. We’re certain it’s been burned into the minds of more than one fanboy.
A century ago, filmmaker George Méličs wowed the earliest movie audiences with bold visual effects. He understood the malleability of filmed imagery, and by locking down his camera and recranking partially exposed film through the gate, he was able to achieve startling double-exposures and in-camera composites. Visual effects were born, but so was an annoying limitation on filmmakers: in order to combine the real and virtual, filmmakers had to lock down their cameras to provide maximum stability and control for visual effects.
A hundred years later, the digital breakthroughs pioneered by George Lucas and Industrial Light & Magic have changed everything. Filmmakers are free to move their cameras about, and a visual effects shot can look just as spontaneous as a handheld cinéma verité shot.
Facilitating George Lucas’ roaming camera moves in Episode II was 3-D Matchmove Supervisor Jason Snell, a five-year veteran of matchmoving at ILM. He has worked on Space Cowboys, Sleepy Hollow and Galaxy Quest.
Matchmoving is essential in today’s effects-heavy motion pictures, which require the melding of live action plate photography and digitally created virtual elements. “Matchmoving is the digital recreation of an environment or a set in the computer, including recreating the original camera and camera moves for every shot that a digital effect is applied to,” describes Snell.
Even though digital environments like the Geonosian droid factory, digital characters like Yoda, or digital props, like Count Dooku’s speeder bike, only exist within a computer, they are treated as real objects when it comes to incorporating them into a finished frame. They are illuminated by virtual lights, affected by virtual winds, and photographed by virtual cameras. Because these digital objects have to cohabitate a frame with real objects and actors, it is important to record as much real world data as possible so that they blend together seamlessly.
“I take measurements on every shot and every take of the movie,” says Snell. “I have to measure the camera height, tilt, the lens-size, the distance to the subject in addition to the camera placement within the set for every environment.”
Supreme Chancellor Palpatine’s office is an example of a set that required extensive measurements. Not only would the environment be extended with a digital matte painting of a panoramic view of Coruscant, it would also be occupied by digital characters, Yoda and Jar Jar Binks. When ILM animators create Binks and Yoda, they need to know precisely where the characters are standing, and what the camera is doing in the scene. Snell provides that information.
“Once the set is built and there are blueprints available, I try to get those,” he says. “Then I verify that what the production crew built works with what the blueprints say. I use those blueprints and build the environment back in the computer for everyone to work off of.”
During the hectic pace of shooting a film, downtime equals lost money, so Snell has to work quickly to gather his data. The nature of set construction means that Snell could never get a head start on his measurements. “The problem with sets is that they change right up to the very last minute,” he describes. “You don’t want to get in there a week before and measure out the set because they’ll move a table or they can even move walls right before shooting. I try to wait until at least the day that they’re going to shoot to verify the sets are true.”
Snell would take advantage of whatever downtime there was to gather his data, often measuring during lunch breaks, or recording information on one part of the set while the shoot proceeded on another. “You have to be creative with your time,” he says, which became all the more apparent given the quick pace afforded by the use of HD video cameras instead of film.
“With tape, they could change the camera within seconds,” recalls Snell. “They don’t have to reload; they have the freedom to shoot whenever they want and as much as they want without costing a fortune. That made everything go really fast, which made me have to go really fast as well. That was probably the most difficult thing.”
Dark Horse Comics, LucasArts and Lucas Online proudly present Jango Fett – Open Seasons #1, part 1.
Written by LucasArts’ own Haden Blackman, Jango Fett – Open Seasons offers an in-depth look at one of the most exciting new characters from Attack of the Clones, and details the beginning of the infamous Fett legacy — one that would come back to plague the Rebellion a generation later.
Click below for a chance to win collectible Jango Fett prizes and to preview videogames, books, and trading card games that unlock more details of Jango’s transformation into the galaxy’s most feared bounty hunter. Let the hunt begin…
Sheets of rain pour down from the gloomy skies, buffeting a city built on stilts over a churning ocean. A distant cry of an aiwha is drowned out by the angry hiss of a lightsaber and the shrieking reports of blaster fire as a knockdown, drag-out fight occurs between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Jango Fett.
The digital and miniature arts of Industrial Light & Magic extend the skies and landing platform, and the stunt work of Nick Gillard puts the players in motion. But to make the ceaseless wind and rain of this distant planet real, Episode II relied on Dave Young, Special Effects Supervisor on Attack of the Clones.
Though some use the term “special effects” as a catch-all for anything out of the ordinary in films, it does have a distinct definition separate from “visual effects.” In Episode II, visual effects are the domain of ILM. These are the effects that are put in after shooting — the miniature and digital creations. Young’s crew instead takes care of the effects that are on-stage, on-set, and captured by the camera as it happens. Also called practical effects, Young’s work involves wire-rigs to make characters fly, gimbal-mounted speeder props to simulate soaring and rocking motion in stationary vehicles, and things like rain, smoke and fire.
“We’ve had to do a lot of atmospherics,” describes Young. “We’ve had a lot of scenes with steaming, and that sort of stuff. We’ve done a lot of little fires and things.”
While visual effects have undergone a complete digital revolution in the past ten years, practical effects have also benefited from computer-controlled mechanics and planning. “I think practical effects will still have a role in films because with computer graphics, the actors don’t have anything to react to,” says Young. “I think practical effects will be around for a long time.”
Case in point, although ILM has mastered digital rain and water-spray effects, Young’s crew was still required to turn the inside of a studio into a tempest. “We had 32 rain-heads working indoors dropping seven-and-a-half tons of water a minute into Studio 1,” says Young. “Everything was on its own switch control, so we can turn everything off and on depending on what’s needed. We’re looking at 7,500 liters of water a minute.”
The fountainheads spray upwards, creating an umbrella of water that creates an even distribution of rain throughout the specially constructed set. “Amongst that, we had three large electric wind machines blowing the rain everywhere. Everything is kept off the ground, and completely contained. The electricity is all above us, and the rain-works are beneath that. There are circuit breakers on everything, because we operate on a 240-volt system that is more dangerous than the 110-volt system. ”
Such precautions are necessary since the safety of the crew and performers take precedent over all other concerns. Even the comfort of the stuntmen was a factor. “It did get cold, because it was the middle of winter in Australia [during the shoot.] The stuntmen were wearing wetsuits underneath the costumes.”
Before the complicated shoot, Young had little time to test the rain system to see how it would register on camera. “We tested for the quantity of rain that we wanted, and the size of the droplets. It’s important how much misting we get, because we could block out the bluescreens which are behind the rain. If our mist is too fine, then it will wash out the bluescreens,” says Young.
“It was a challenge sometimes. I hadn’t done a film that involved so much bluescreen before,” notes Young, a veteran of over 100 films including The Matrix and Mission: Impossible 2. “It’s a totally different kind of film. Often, from our perspective, it didn’t really change anything. We still have to do the effects, whatever they may call for. The only thing we had to watch that the atmospherics didn’t wipe out any of the bluescreens.”
Aside from the waterworks, Young and his crew helped animate stationary vehicle props through the use of articulated hydraulic gimbals. In addition to making Anakin’s hot rod speeder, Zam Wesell’s wickedly forked dragster and Owen Lars’ beat-up bike rock and sway appropriately, Young oversaw the creation of a number of bluescreen-skinned creature simulators.
“The animals are simulated,” explains Young. “They’re animals that John Knoll and Rob Coleman are going to lay over our blue stand-ins. We have scenes where Anakin is jumping onto an animal, and it takes off and bucks him off. We can do that on this machine. It does everything. The motions for that came from George Lucas. He told us exactly what he wanted.”
When someone mentions makeup in regards to a science fiction or fantasy film, people generally assume the creation of monsters, demons or aliens. But the presentation of the human face for the camera lens requires dedication and skill as well.
Lesley Vanderwalt was the Makeup Supervisor for Attack of the Clones, handling the makeup of all the principals. Much of her time was devoted to presenting Padmé Amidala’s natural beauty on the screen. Before cameras rolled, Vanderwalt and Director George Lucas needed to come to a consensus regarding Padmé’s look.
“We put together a collage of different pictures I got from magazines and all her different fashion shoots, and sent them to George,” recalls Vanderwalt. “There were looks that were very natural, there were ones with more lips, ones with more luminous makeup if you wanted to go a bit more spacey. We sent three huge binders over and then got him to check and number the ones that he liked. From there, we worked out what colors would suit her.”
Having aged 10 years from a teenager to a young woman, Padmé’s look still has a natural untouched beauty highlighted with accents as she adopts a more adult sensibility. Furthermore, given the number of costume changes she would undergo, Padmé’s look had to work in concert with her wardrobe color. “We determined what lip colors would work best with all the different outfits. I had three different lip colors that I used on her. We didn’t go hugely different in each one; we kept the same palette and just changed things slightly — sometimes more eye makeup, sometimes more lips, a couple of different color blushes, just depending on what she was wearing and what would go better with the costume,” explains Vanderwalt.
“The hero look, P-11, is the one she’s in for the largest part of the film. I kept that pretty natural because that’s when she’s involved in traveling and action, and we didn’t want it to be too girlie.”
For all the principals, Vanderwalt used makeup to warm their skin tones, giving them a tanner tone than their natural skin. It’s not because the script calls for it, though; it’s a necessity to accommodate a shooting schedule that spans weeks.
“We used tan makeup for Anakin, because we thought once in Sydney, Hayden Christensen would probably go out and be in the sun or at the beach, so we kept him pretty tan. We tanned Natalie slightly, because if she got a natural tan during the film, and we then tried to make her pale, you’d get a slightly grayish tinge to the skin, and it’d look pretty unattractive. We prepped the actors with layers of fake tan underneath so that if they did sweat, you wouldn’t get white stripes in the makeup.”
Most of the human principals required a natural look. “With Ewan McGregor, we tried to make him slightly older without going into aging type makeup just by shading in the face. For Count Dooku, George wanted him to be quite the manicured kind of dapper gentleman, as he put it. We went with a very clipped beard and the makeup was minimal on Christopher Lee. I just sort of smoothed out his skin tone a little bit, and that was it really. It was more a matter of [hair stylist] Sue Love shaving him and clipping him everyday.”
For some of the humanoid extras, though, Vanderwalt got to apply more of an artistic touch. Characters such as Luminara Unduli, Barriss Offee and Sly Moore were her responsibility, since they required no complicated prosthetic latex applications but were instead all makeup.
Palpatine’s ghostly assistant, Sly Moore, was a favorite makeup job of Vanderwalt. “The drawings we got showed the character with a bald head, so we did ask the extras casting people if they could find someone like that who was tall, and looked like a handsome, striking character. Fortunately, we’d just finished Moulin Rouge, where we’d worked with an extra, Sandi Finlay, that looked exactly like that. So, we suggested her, and they found her after a number of inquiries. She’s a DJ around town.”
Finlay’s features worked perfectly for the Sly Moore design. The original concept illustrations had a very stark character, with eyes sunken into darkness. “We thought the dark looked sort of vampire-y, and ghoulish,” said Vanderwalt. She did half of Finlay’s face as a faithful interpretation of the high-contrast illustration. The other half was softer. “We did a softer approach where I brought in blue and shaded it through, keeping it a really soft, pastel tone. We let George have a look, and he fortunately went with the same thought we did, so we went with the lighter stuff rather than the darker.”
The nightclub sequence provided a huge assignment for Vanderwalt, and her team doubled in size from a basic team of four to a team of eight. “We started off thinking it was going to be quiet, but then George said keep pushing it, go further. We had some nice full body makeups and some rainbow body makeups and things like that. That was fun. We didn’t have a lot of time, though, since we had to get everybody ready in three-and-a-half hours, but I think we all achieved a great look, in the hair and wardrobe and the makeup.”
Once the makeup is applied, Vanderwalt watches the shooting process to see if the makeup requires any touching up. “Usually for a wide shot, you can see from where you are that the person’s okay. If they’re out in the heat and they’re sweating, we wait until the camera gets in tighter to go in and check to see if the makeup’s sitting okay.”
The use of HD cameras was a new experience for Vanderwalt and her team, though they adapted to it easily. “We did makeup tests in the beginning. I think we were all quite frightened, you know, as to what were we going to see, because it’s such a clear image. I suppose, though, we’re always careful and that’s what you try to be regardless of format.”
Vanderwalt’s trained eye had to compete with the unerring detail of the HD image, which would pick up every little blemish or imperfection. “Natalie had scratched her head changing clothes, and it made an indentation that was visible to my eye. But on the monitors, we couldn’t really see it. I was discussing it with [Director of Photography] David Tattersall what would happen once it was on a big screen — would we be able to see it? I was still concerned, because I could see it, but everyone assured me that it was okay.”
In at least one case, though, a noticeable scar worked in the makeup team’s favor. “With Temuera Morrison (Jango Fett), we couldn’t change him too much because he was in another show at the time. At the beginning of the shoot, though, he walked into a door on the set of the other production. The makeup artist from the other job rang me and said, ‘oh, it’s terrible. He’s got a black eye and he’s got a cut above his eye!’ We thought, great, we’ll use it. When it healed itself, we just kept applying it.”
In less than a month, select IMAX ® theaters across North America will play Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones in its largest format ever. This is not just a re-projection of the standard-sized 35-mm film print onto a larger screen; through the revolutionary IMAX DMR ™ process, the movie has been re-mastered and the image enlarged to occupy up to eight stories of screen and the sound enhanced to include 12,000 watts of uncompressed sound.
Imagine the blue-white shafts of laser energy spearing the immense Trade Federation core ship, and suddenly you’re engulfed in a cloud of dust as the fallen vessel strikes the Geonosian surface. Picture twisting and diving through the luminescent skylanes of Coruscant, as panicked commuters soar directly at you. Or imagine a forty-foot tall Yoda, using the Force to draw his lightsaber as he gets ready to square off against Count Dooku.
“The biggest thing when you get get that kind of sound and that size of image on the screen, is that it draws you into it. You’re part of the experience,” says Brian Bonnick, the Vice President of Technology for IMAX Corporation.
Up until the innovation of IMAX DMR technology, there was no way to project a standard-sized live action film to the scale of an IMAX movie and still maintain a quality performance. IMAX theaters were built for 70mm film format; smaller film formats are comprised of a fine grain structure that would be magnified and detract from the underlying picture, creating a soft, unfocused and poor image. IMAX DMR digitally removes the grain and preserves the quality of the image, allowing it to be projected onto IMAX screens.
The majority of Star Wars fans saw Episode II in a 35mm film format. This means that each film frame is 35 millimeters across. The film area is mostly square — a special lens on the projector spreads the image out to its rectangular proportions. If you were to look at a film frame from a reel of Episode II, the characters would look very tall and skinny (the Kaminoans even more so). The image is compressed into the frame and the projector lens decompresses it. On each side of the image, there are four sprocket holes or “perfs” (short for perforations), which the projector uses to tug long lengths of film through its inner mechanisms.
IMAX is a totally different picture. It’s 70 millimeters wide, and the image isn’t compressed. It’s about 10 times larger in area than 35mm film stock. It’s called 15/70mm format for the 15 perforations that run along the top and bottom of the frame. Regular movies spool into a projector vertically; IMAX projectors move film horizontally for reasons explained later on.
To get a movie projected to the IMAX scale requires a lot of image area within the film frame, and a lot of light shining through it. A 35mm film frame just doesn’t have the resolution to hold up to that scale, and a typical 35 mm projector just can’t crank out the kind of light an IMAX’s 15,000-watt xenon bulb can.
So IMAX DMR technology figured out a way to scan a 35mm film frame, enhance it, and enlarge it to 70mm without sacrificing image quality. “IMAX has been working on this innovative technology for the past five years to enhance the theatrical experience, offering movie-goers an all-encompassing experience which literally brings them into the story ,” says Bonnick.
The first feature film to undergo this process is the recently released Apollo 13: The IMAX Experience. The Ron Howard-directed film was shot in Super 35mm. That film was scanned and converted into a digital form at the highest possible resolution.
“We then apply our proprietary software and it mathematically analyzes and extracts the important image elements from each frame from the original grainy structure,” explains Bonnick. “It creates the most pristine form from the original photograph. It’s clearly the most complex step in the whole DMR process.”
The complex software algorithms makes images sharper and improves the contrast on a frame-by-frame basis. Colors are adjusted to the unique technical characteristics of the IMAX screen. If there are any scratches, blotches, or imperfections in the film image — known as artifacts — those are digitally removed by a special patent-pending process. “We clean the whole thing up from front to back end,” says Bonnick.
Once the entire film has been digitized and enhanced, it is then output back to film, but this time in 15/70mm stock. “This conversion from digital back to 15/70mm is accomplished by using our proprietary 15/70 laser film recorder. It was both designed and manufactured by IMAX. It is capable of providing greater dynamic color range than normal scanners on the market and it has capabilities of capturing resolutions up to 8,000 x 6,000.”
For Apollo 13, once the film was digitized, it comprised nearly 200,000 frames of data. “When we were finished the conversion process, we had over seven terabytes of data — that’s 12 zeroes. That’s equivalent to about 13,000 DVDs of data. Episode II is comparable in frame count. There’s a massive amount of information we’re working with,” says Bonnick.
“People tend to get mixed up thinking that DMR is just a piece of software,” he continues. “IMAX DMR is a total process that clearly involves some very complex software algorithms that process image data, but along with that comes the management of that information. You have to have an infrastructure capable of knowing where every frame is in the process to manage this much.”
Digital to IMAX
With Episode II, the DMR process was spared a step in that the image content already existed in a digital state; there would be no film to scan. But starting from an HD-source brought its own technical issues, as the algorithms set in place for handling a 35mm source wouldn’t entirely suffice for the re-mastering of Clones.
“In a digital film, it doesn’t obviously have grain that we’ve come to know in normal photography,” explains Bonnick. “But it does tend to carry ‘video noise’ artifacts. Two noticeable ones would be when pixels appear to be off-color relative to those in the surrounding area. You might get a flicker from frame to frame. Or when tighter clusters of pixels tend to slightly vary in color from frame to frame. That tends to happen in dark areas, and it looks a bit like a boiling effect. Now these are very, very subtle effects; in most cases I’d have to take you into a theater and describe to you what to look for and you would find it. Somebody who is very up on video would really pick these sort of things up; obviously, in our industry that’s part of our job.”
The DMR pipeline was customized to deal with these unique forms of artifacts. “We’ve designed it to be very open-ended. If we come across an artifact that we’ve never dealt with before, we’re in a position to very quickly write a new algorithm and incorporate it into the production engine in a short period of time.”
Though the software examined each and every frame of image, the re-mastering team broke the film down into shots as discreet units of work and focus. An individual shot (a sustained hold from a camera vantage point prior to it cutting to the next “shot”) is fairly uniform in its re-mastering requirements, though if there are specific artifact issues within a shot, the team then redirects their efforts to the more focused scale: individual frames.
The image re-mastering process took about 14 weeks of work, and was finished by the end of September 2002. “The process is scalable,” says Bonnick. “At the moment, we’ve got dozens and dozens of computers in our render farm. It’s all a factor of how many frames per day you want to process. If you want to process more frames per day in a given timeline under a tighter deadline, then you would scale up the numbers of computers in your system to give you greater throughput capacity.”
The IMAX Experience™ is more than just big picture. It also delivers six-channel uncompressed multi-speaker sound that further completes the audience’s total immersion into Episode II. “We use six completely discreet channels plus subwoofers on their own separate channels. We use ultra-low distortion amplifiers, capable of delivering up to 12,000 watts of power. We employ our own custom-designed speaker-set with over 44 speakers,” explains Bonnick. That sound system is carefully aligned by lasers to deliver proportional point source (PPS) quality.
“The non-technical definition of a PPS speaker is that we have designed it such that, rather than having the dead-center seat in the theater being the ‘sweet spot,’ these speakers are designed to enlarge the sweet spot quite a bit so that everybody in the theater is sitting in a good position to hear the sound as it was originally intended,” explains Bonnick.
The IMAX sound system will not only deliver huge events like the shattering of asteroids or the crash of a core ship, but also soft sounds like the distant birds of Naboo or the hum of background cloning machinery with crystal clarity. “The IMAX sound system has been designed with a very high dynamic range, unlike 35mm theaters. There, when you start to get anything with depth or volume to it, you tend to hear a lot of distortion.”
Those fortunate enough to have caught the original digital exhibition of Episode II in the spring are probably digital-converts, fully aware of the limitations of traditional film. IMAX film is a whole different set of variables, since the quality-assurance and technical advancements in projecting films of this size help overcome many of the limitations of 35mm exhibition.
“IMAX film lasts substantially longer than 35 mm film, because we use the rolling loop technology in our projectors,” explains Bonnick “The film is moved around the lens aperture in a wave motion. We’re not moving it constantly through sprockets that over time wear the film out and enlarge the perforations, which is when you start getting a jiggle in the film. Because of this fluid motion that the IMAX film goes through, we are being very gentle to it, ergo it lasts longer.”
An IMAX projector has a steadiness of .004 percentage change from frame-to-frame. A traditional 35mm film has a .12 steadiness in comparison. Even the heat of the projection bulb will cause a 35mm film to buckle, something that can’t happen in an IMAX projector thanks to a field flattener that holds the film steady and true.
Furthermore, the smaller number of IMAX screens makes quality assurance easier to manage. “The systems are constantly being tuned to ensure the films are running properly, that the steadiness is accurate, and the light intensity and distribution of it are all set adequately, that the screens are clean, that everything is at optimum performance levels.”
An IMAX projector is an immense machine, weighing in at over two tons. The huge platter that spins the oversized film has an upper limit of film length. Most films that play in IMAX theaters are documentaries that don’t clock in much over an hour in length. Feature films have to be cut to 120 minutes since that is the current maximum the platter can sustain. For number-minded trivia fans, the Episode II IMAX print is 58 inches in diameter and weighs 390 pounds! “It’s the limit now,” explains Bonnick. “We are actively developing a 150-minute solution that would be employed as an upgrade to the theaters in the future.”
Coming home from work, you instinctively throw your jacket onto your couch, leave the day’s worth of junk mail on the television, and throw your keys onto the kitchen counter. These are all automatic responses, done without any forethought, but it’s the kind of detail that Set Decorator Peter Walpole tries to capture, even when recreating the distant galaxy of Star Wars.
“If you look back at your own homes, you take for granted everything that you have in your house,” says Walpole. “But if you start to analyze it, you’ll find that it’s layers upon layers upon layers. You have settees in the corner, with cushions on them, and there might be coats on the cushions, or books, or newspapers. That, to me, is the essence. If you were to dress a mantelpiece over a fire, it’s not just a clock and two candlesticks. It would be a clock, two candlesticks, some postcards and a pen, maybe a book of stamps and somebody’s mobile phone. You’ve got to be able to look at everyday life and put it in that environment.”
Walpole is responsible for the design and arrangement of props within the sets that Production Designer Gavin Bocquet builds. In a sense, he’s an interior designer of the Star Wars galaxy, though he’s quick to point out the difference in his work.
“I have discussions with interior designers, and they say, ‘oh, we do the same kind of job,'” notes Walpole. “Well, no we don’t, because they’re doing something that everybody sees every day, whereas we do something that’s going to be seen through the eye of a camera.” Walpole envisions a set as it will appear through the camera lens, and has to make concessions in design to accommodate filmmaking processes, whether it’s supplying foreground and background props to provide a sense of depth, or lowering wall-hangings and fixtures so that they register on camera.
“There’s no point in hanging a light too high up if you can’t see it because it’s not going to be in the frame, so you’ve got to drop it down. It may be even dropped down a little bit lower than you would normally have it,” he says.
Walpole’s involvement with a given prop assignment begins early on, as soon as concept drawings of the environment arrive. “The set is then constructed and painted. At that stage we’re buying the props or renting them or manufacturing them. I have in my head the way that it should look. We then gather them all together, in readiness for the sets to be finished. We can have anything from maybe a week to half-a-day to dress them. I might be dressing two or three sets at once,” he says.
“I work closely with Ty Teiger, the Prop Master. I give him an idea of a dressing plan of how I’d like it. He will go in and block it out, and put all of the main pieces in. Then I’ll come in and finish it off.”
Though Walpole plans each set decoration, he does build in a level of spontaneity in his approach, to allow for new and fresh ideas. “I would plan maybe 60 percent of it,” he says, “I know that I’ve got a backbone structure. Then, I like the rest to be created, so it flows. I wouldn’t like to make a list and have everything there and just place it. It’s great to be able to have lots of things to draw upon. But to get to the stage, where the adrenaline starts to run, and all of a sudden it all starts to work — that’s what it’s like to dress a set. That’s the last 40 percent, adding those layers, having immediate ideas, which I guess is what directors do also. And then walking away thinking, ‘yeah, that’s right.’ If I walk away, and I’m happy, then it’s right.”
Such creativity is essential to his job. As Walpole describes it, he not only has to get inside the Director George Lucas’ head, but also inside the heads of the characters associated with each set.
“You’ve got to think of the background or where the characters are coming from,” describes Walpole. “If they’re a character who is born on Naboo, but lives on Coruscant, would there be any Naboo artifacts in the Coruscant apartment? As you would if somebody from Thailand went to live in America. Would they take their bits with them? It’s just a natural approach to doing the job.”
Domestic Interiors
The sets of Episode II are far more personal than those of Episode I, a distinction that Walpole appreciates. “In Episode I, we had a couple of what I would call ‘domestic interiors,’ like Anakin’s hovel or Palpatine’s apartment,” says Walpole. “Then, there was a lot of Podrace garages, pit hangars and the Theed hangar. In this one, for a set decorator, it’s fantastic because there are a lot more interior sets to do. The interior sets that we’re doing are personalized, whether it be Padmé’s, Palpatine’s or some of the old sets from A New Hope.”
As a love story, Episode II splits its time between spectacular otherworldly locales and far more intimate settings. It is these that Walpole enjoyed the most. “Padmé’s Coruscant apartment is my favorite, as it’s beautiful and not cluttered. It’s much harder to dress a set with fewer things than with many things. Shortly behind that one is Padmé’s Naboo retreat. You’re looking at a Senator and you’re trying to sort of instill that little bit of personal stuff in that.”
In addition to focusing on character, Walpole treats Star Wars films no different than “real world” films set in our galaxy. “I kind of compare it to other periods in history, although it’s not part of our history. There are different themes, different styles, and you know whatever planet you happen to be in.”
This approach, coupled with his practical methodology in building set decorations, gives the films a mix of differences and similarities. “I think if you look at The Phantom Menace and then compare it to the other three films, you’ll see differences. But the approach is still the same. We still use the inside of washing machines. We still look at everyday objects to see how we could adapt them and use them. That was the premise that George Lucas gave us at the very beginning, and that’s how the other three work. So, although there is 25 years difference, the backbone and the structure is still the same.”
As preparation, Walpole uses the original trilogy as research material, having watched the previous four films upwards of 50 times. “I enjoy watching them,” he says. “I’ve got kids who love to watch it.” Even with The Phantom Menace experience not long behind him, he finds watching Episode I illuminating. “Although it’s all fresh in your mind, you’ll occasionally experience — ‘oh, I’d forgotten that’s how we did that.'”
To accomplish his tasks, Walpole’s bag of tricks spans years of experience. “I guess the whole industry is made up of clever cheats and ideas,” he smiles. “It always comes down to cost and speed. If you’re talking about a marble set, then our painters paint the marble effect on paper, and that’s applied onto the structure of the set, and then glazed to have that marble look. You would never be able to construct, time-wise or cost-wise, a set like Padmé’s dining room and have it be completely marble. It’s all one big cheat, whether it’s marble paper, plaster columns instead of stone, fiberglass sculptures instead of bronze. The whole thing’s a bit of a cheat, but we don’t like to let on.”
At first, reports of the amount of bluescreen and digital backlot techniques used in the prequel trilogy concerned Walpole, but he found himself busy as ever. “I was a bit concerned that this might be all bluescreen and I’d just be putting a bowl of fruit or a bunch of flowers in a vase somewhere. But it’s been fantastic, and very different. When you’re dressing a bluescreen set, it’s something you’ve got to take into consideration. There’s no point in putting blue drapes in. But generally, it doesn’t worry me too much, having done Episode I, and also a lot of Young Indy which really educated me on that sort of thing. It’s another tool of the trade that you accept and you make allowances for.”
Bridging Aesthetics
Another challenge for Walpole is bridging the aesthetic sensibilities of the prequels with the originals. Attack of the Clones brings the audience once step closer to the events of A New Hope, and many familiar elements are starting to appear. Fans of the saga will definitely feel a sense of nostalgia as the new heroes spend time at the Lars homestead and garage. The sets were painstakingly recreated from reference photography of the original.
“The information we get from the Ranch has been carefully stored and collated. In this day and age, you can watch the film, then freeze-frame it, and print it off your own VCR if you wanted to. They have a great wealth of photo-reference, that you really have to examine to determine if something’s a light or something’s just a reflection.”
Besides looking forward (or is it backwards?) to the original saga, there are enough wholly new environments to keep Walpole busy. “If I can get my teeth into many different things — from the starfreighter to a bus to some beautiful apartment or a garage — I’m a happy man.”
One new environment is a somewhat seedy nightclub found in the depths of Coruscant. A locale with a character all its own, the nightclub is a place where transients and slumming elite can intermingle, carouse, drink and — as will be seen in the finished film — gamble.
“There’s going to be gaming going on in the background, whether it be a roulette table or some sort of gaming machine,” says Walpole. “We took some aircraft parts, put some screens in them, and tidied them up. We found a couple of old wrecked arcade games that were just a shell. We took those, turned them upside down, and they took on a completely different appearance. The bar itself has evolved. We used the famous plastic beakers and whatnot, and got different shaped aluminum tubes for drink dispensers. George came along at the end and liked everything, but wanted us to just change the center bar slightly. What he wanted was acrylic tubes with liquid in it, so it almost had a church organ effect. That worked really well. I wish I’d thought of it first, but hey, that’s probably why he’s directing.”
Another less-than-polished environment is the hold of an interstellar freighter, glimpsed briefly in the “Forbidden Love” trailer. The gloomy interior was another great opportunity for Walpole to infuse personality into a set. “You would have refugees on the floor, but at the same time, there’d be cargo strapped down by some sort of netting. People take a lot of things with them, so we’re making bags and stuff to carry and bits and pieces of personal belongings. There was kind of an eating area that worked really well, because we put some really weird things in there. A hand-operated plastic tumble dry washing machine type thing — they were turned around, painted and stuck to a wall.”
The four previous Star Wars films have all featured characters dining or preparing food, and Attack of the Clones is no different. Walpole determines the look of the dispensers and utensils. “We will also adapt and utilize catering equipment. Or somebody else found these great sort of slush machines for doings sodas. We will adapt that and use that. We’ve done the freighter hold, which had lots of cups and things. You start to run low on ideas, sometimes. There’s only so many sort of stainless steel stuff.”
But in the end, Walpole delivers, no matter the time or materials constraints. For Episode II, he had less prep time and more assignments than in Episode I, yet still met all the set dressing requirements. “You’ve got to be positive in your approach. If you have six months, that’s great. If you have four months, then you do the same job, but only harder. It’s a funny thing. I hate compromise, but I never look at the fact that you have less time to prepare as a compromise. You seem to work just as hard if you’ve got six months prep than if you’ve got five. It all still gets done. You never have enough time. If you have a year to prepare a film, you’ll still be pulling your hair out to get things done a week before. It’s a strange thing.”
Not that Walpole would have it any other way. “There must be millions of guys and girls out there who don’t really enjoy getting up and going to work. They do their five days a week, and have their weekends off, and their two weeks holiday. I love what I do, and I get a buzz out of it. I think I’m very, very lucky.”
Dressing the Star Wars galaxy is a challenging task for the prop department; you can’t just buy Naboo or Tatooine artifacts off-the-shelf. While some of the props decorating Episode II are cobbled together from real-world gadgets and gizmos, many are machined from scratch by Peter Wyborn, modelmaking supervisor, and his crew.
“The [prop] guys next door built all sorts of weird things out of odd bits and pieces, whereas we tended to get more specific, engineered things,” says Wyborn of his department. “You’ve probably got a bigger variety of craftsmen working here — pattern makers, industrial designers with model-making backgrounds, and engineers. We’ve got three lathes in this department and a couple of milling machines.”
Wyborn was in contact with the different departments to ensure that the modeled props delivered were consistent with the look of their surroundings. “There’s three art directors that we dealt with,” he explains. “The line between departments and sets and props is a little bit blurry, and we found that we were doing things that the Construction Department had been too busy to do. For instance, we made some light fittings about eight feet in diameter. They were all engineered out of aluminum. That’s not really modelmaking. We did the same thing with some of the tables and furniture in one of the apartments. There is quite a crossover.”
For example, while different crews built full-size speeder props or starship interiors, much of the detail within was delivered by Wyborn’s team. “One of the first jobs we had was building chairs for the Naboo craft,” explains Wyborn. “We put pre-built pieces in there. For the speeders, we had to put in the steering column.”
Even Ivo Coveney’s costume props received an additional layer of detail from Wyborn’s crew. “They sent us some arm bands — beautiful arm bands that they’ve made — and they come to us for us to put our darts and grappling hooks and things like that into them.”
For most of the props, Wyborn and his crew were working from design sketches provided by other departments. Other times, they would have much more of a creative role. “They also come along and say, ‘okay, make us a dozen guns.’ So, somebody will sketch it in our department, and we just make them up. When George Lucas came in, there were about 50 guns for him to look at. He came along and picked about a dozen. So, it’s nice that we all get our own input. Not every nut and bolt has been designed by the art director or the designer.”
Early on, Wyborn decides what’s the best method of tackling a design — whether crafting something from scratch or adapting existing pieces. “Sometimes you think you’ve seen something like what you need somewhere, but by the time you actually go out and try and find it, you’re quicker off just making it in the first place. We do go and raid the props department buckets-of-bits from time to time. Sometimes, when the deadlines get a bit tight and you need something shiny or round, you go sift through their boxes.”
Wyborn, a veteran of 20 years in the industry, has been producing props and models for feature films, television and commercials. Though he doesn’t count himself a fan of Star Wars more than any other movie, he has a huge amount of respect for the imagery and craftsmanship of the saga.
“I really enjoyed Episode I,” says Wyborn. “I loved the look of it. I just thought the design was absolutely wonderful. It’s the same on this. The thing that’s so wonderful for us all is that all these things we get to make are so beautifully designed.”
His department inherited a few of those props from The Phantom Menace, but for the most part he was starting from scratch. “They shipped over a few things. Lots of the original lightsabers came over, with their molds. Some of the guns from Episode I came over with their molds, too. We used them, but over three years, the molds start to break down. We do our own molds of those, and clean them up as best as we can. We don’t spend a lot of hours cleaning them up to be absolutely perfect if they’re never going to be seen close up.”
Of all the props fabricated for Episode II, Wyborn notes that his crew — which at its height numbered around 45 — enjoyed developing an arsenal of blaster weaponry the most. “One of the chaps made a beautiful rifle that George rejected because it was probably just too high tech. Most people would design and make stuff that was too Flash Gordon. All the approved designs were spot on because most of the guns are actually just copies of guns already in existence that you add bits and pieces to. I think it took a few people a little while to get the hang of the style.”
A key visual ingredient in the design recipe is the “used universe” look. Items that would be fantastic in our world — blasters, comlinks, armor and droids – are dog-eared, scratched and dinged up from years of use and abuse in the Star Wars galaxy. As Wyborn explains, this isn’t part of the initial prop design. “We actually try to make it perfect, and if it needs to be knocked back, we knock it back,” he says. “Because if you actually make something that’s a bit rough around the edges, well you can’t go anywhere further with it, so we usually try and make it as perfect as we possibly can. We then scuff it up if need be, which is sometimes a little bit of a waste; you spend so much time making a beautiful piece and then they’ll just come along and slap grime all over it.”
Star Wars is a mostly paperless galaxy. When characters want to convey visual or text information, they don’t unfold a map or scribble something down on a steno pad. Instead, they turn to advanced display systems that project their information in lines of colored light.
Episode II has more holographic readout displays than any previous Star Wars film, and creating those images fell to Philip Metschan, a graphic artist working at Industrial Light & Magic’s art department.
Metschan followed a winding career path that landed him, quite unexpectedly, in a role creating images for the big screen. Having studied art at Oregon State University, Metschan hit the professional scene as a web designer, working in New York for prestigious clients like Gucci and Armani. “I noticed that ILM had a graphic designer position, which doesn’t open up very often. I sent in my portfolio, and was out in the area for a conference and had an interview. Two weeks later, I was on a plane, moving to California,” recalls Metschan.
Metschan began working on the web redesign and launch of the official sites for ILM and Skywalker Sound. “It was really busy here at that time,” he explains. “They needed someone to animate the A.I. logo, with the boy walking out of the logo, and everybody was so busy that they gave it to me. I quickly brushed up on a lot of animation programs, and worked with Joe Latteri to put that together.”
From web design to pinch-hitting logo animation, Metschan graduated to Star Wars. “We started getting all the graphic requirements from the Ranch, which, basically is animated graphic design,” says Metschan. “They said, ‘Hey, Phil can handle this.’ And a few years later, 95 percent of the screens you see in Episode II, I did.”
Starting in Photoshop or Illustrator, Metschan use a variety of animation and compositing tools to create the end effects, including AfterEffects, Lightwave, Maya and Commotion. “For the initial designs, I worked much like a traditional graphic designer, but you have to figure out how you’re going to animate them.”
All of the animated on-screen graphics seen in Episode II were added later in postproduction. On set, the actors would occasionally have a backlit colored sheet of plastic film called translights with a design printed on it to aide in effects lighting. “John Knoll [Visual Effects Supervisor] had asked [Production Designer] Gavin Bocquet and his crew to throw in some quick stuff into the set pieces. When actors are interacting with the screens, the screen lights cast different colors on people’s hands or on different parts of the set,” explains Metschan.
While the translights didn’t necessarily dictate Metschan’s finished designs, they did provide some performance cues that needed to be matched. “Ewan McGregor would just point at it. I had to design the screen so that his finger-points fell near something that looked similar to what he was saying, in this case, ‘just south of the Rishi Maze.’ Then Jocasta Nu comes up and, if you’ll notice, she presses the console three times. I told the compositor that I was really careful about timing something that happened on screen with her. They did a great job of timing it up, because if you watch the movie you know that she’ll hit it three times, and these three highlights appear on that screen and then it zooms up to the close-up version.”
In one case, a practical display that was intended as final was replaced entirely by Metschan’s computer-generated one. A background device in the Lars Homestead got a digital touch-up thanks to Metschan’s displays.
“A few times, I was worried about stepping on people’s toes, because these guys had done some pretty cool designs to throw into the sets,” he admits. “I’m a big Star Wars fan, and I noticed right away that it didn’t quite match the graphics from the very first movie. So I took some quick shots, made little movies from the originals, and in a roundabout way, I did my own version to present to George Lucas. I showed him the originals from ’77, then what was on set, and what I was proposing, and he said, ‘Great, that’s right.'”
The recreation of 1970s-era graphical technology was a continuing challenge for Metschan. “You can’t think like a graphic designer that has all the tools that we have at our disposal. You have to think back to what those guys had to deal with back in 1977,” he notes. “They’d use oscilloscopes and other video effects, like kicking the TV three times and turning it on. Being a fan, I really wanted to stay true to that. It did become an even bigger challenge, though, when there were specific storypoints that George wanted to hit. It can’t be ultra-simple if it needs to convey complicated information. If he wants a flying spaceship with a big target on it, you do it, but you can stylize it with color and whatnot to make it look rougher and older.”
Those rough edges also help convey attitude about character, in some cases. For the Slave I, a ship with display screens that hadn’t been seen in the previous films, Metschan used color to suggest character. “You always got a sense that Boba Fett and Jango Fett were these mean, gritty guys. The ship has a look as well that it’s been tossed together. So, I made the displays all in red so it had a sinister look to it.”
Making the Ultimate Weapon
Also in the evil and red department is a cameo appearance that sent a shiver of recognition to many a surprised fan. The Separatists are seen conspiring to build a very familiar and iconic battle station from the original trilogy, identified in Episode II only as an “ultimate weapon.”
“The Death Star hologram and the war room had to be the most challenging,” says Metschan. “Without telling anyone what I did, I stayed late a couple of nights and did my own version that I thought was a little truer to what Joe Johnston and all the original guys had done. I slipped it into [Visual Effects Supervisor] Pablo Helman’s email, and said, ‘Hey, take a look at this; let me know what you think. Maybe I’m overstepping my bounds, but I think this looks more like the Death Star, and maybe it’ll read better.'”
The following week, to Metschan’s pleasant surprise, Helman incorporated it into a shot for Lucas to review. “I was really excited, because I had done it on my own time, and it could have been a total waste of time. But they ended up going with it, and it became a big part of the end of the movie.”
Though the Death Star is key to the scene, the war room is dominated by an expansive holographic map of the battle, with Republic gunships swarming the ground war like buzzing insects. “A lot of the stuff in the middle of the table I did with a couple of the guys in Animatics. They rendered out quick models for me, but I was allowed to art direct the placement of the elements. You’re talking about holograms that have all these really fine lines in them, and you get them on film and they just blow out, so visually and creatively that sequence was probably the most challenging of all of them.”
In addition to a 1970s motif, there is a pre-existing iconography when it comes to alien text. Many fans are familiar with Aurebesh, a Star Wars language developed in the books based off of screen displays in Return of the Jedi. While the Aurebesh, as it has appeared in spin-off products, does appear in the film, Episode II resurrected an original alphabet expressly designed for the classic trilogy.
“The actual font set hadn’t been used since the first Star Wars, and we found Joe Johnston’s original design of the font in the Archives. I took that, turned it into a font, and used it in a lot of different places,” says Metschan. This classic font, dubbed “Star Wars 76” was joined by two new typefaces — “Mandalorian” for the Slave I, and one for the Geonosians. Eagle-eyed fans looking to translate alien phrases into English won’t find that task an easy one.
“Some of the fonts don’t have 26 letters. Some of them only have 19 or 20. I’d be lying to you if I didn’t tell you that, every once in awhile, there’s someone’s initials I know, somewhere in there, if you hold a mirror up and stand upside down and look at it. But George is very, very keen about noticing things that look like English, because he’s very against any kind of English looking characters in any of the screens or signs.”
Of course, careful scrutinizing of the graphics is still rewarding for those well versed in the little details that help tie the saga together. “In Zam’s binoculars I did put something from the original Star Wars in there,” reveals Metschan. “These two grids, and those are from the original Millennium Falcon, when the TIE fighters are attacking when they leave the Death Star. I threw a lot of stuff like that in, just little original things.”
Coruscant Graphics
Even the placement of the luminous Rishi Maze on the Jedi Archive map has provided some conversation fodder for fans, perhaps shedding some light on just what astronomical phenomena Luke and Leia were looking at at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. “I thought about all that stuff,” he says. “Being such a big fan, I do consider who the people that really look into the details of those things. If you’re one of those fans, you want stuff in there that is rewarding.”
Adding to the Star Wars cultural tapestry is the sometimes gaudy but always colorful floating advertisements of Coruscant. Together with Warren Fu, Metschan worked on these luminous examples of corporate branding. One eye-catching sample was a barber-pole like stack of rotating ads delineating a district border during the twisting speeder chase.
“The sequence where Zam turns the corner was supposed to be in the financial district. In [Concept Design Co-Supervisor] Erik Tiemen’s paintings, which we were going off of, there were these glass buildings that were really blue with lots of pinks. It was really grandiose, with a lot of light reflection going on in there. Later on in the process, they decided that things were getting down to the wire and we weren’t going to have the time to spend on that sequence right there. What happened is this really bright sign ended up being put in this dimly lit area, so it just glowed and glowed and glowed!”
The need to populate Coruscant with little details like this was a fun exercise for Metschan, who handled a number of strange requests when it came to providing on-screen entertainment to the patrons of the Coruscant nightclub.
“John Knoll and George had a bunch of funny ideas, like racing chickens, a Podrace on Hoth and nunaball. They threw some stuff together in CG and then passed it down to me to jazz it up,” he recounts. Metschan watched a lot of CNN and ESPN to try to determine the kind of graphical treatment coverage of remote entertainment and sporting events receive. “I ended up recutting the CG, to make it a little more active,” he notes. For example, the Podrace graphic freeze-frames on the winning racer, and then a display notes which Pod placed first, second and third.
For nunaball, wherein a team of droids tackle each other while trying to hold onto a scrappy live nuna, Metschan provided a rotating schematic showing the droid quarterback that got sacked. “It’s fun. You just make up all this stuff. I had originally planned to do a little graphic that pointed out the nuna running away, but I didn’t have time.”
For the odupiendo racing, Metschan added a crucial element missing from the graphic. “We didn’t have a finish line! I put that in. Without it, there’s really nothing. They just run by the camera. It’s all just really silly,” he smiles. “You can have a lot of fun with it, but you have to be responsible and be careful not to put too much stuff in there. At any one time I had two or three screens that I had to do, and I can’t get carried away because I had deadlines to meet the next day.”
Whether crucial to the story or whimsical set dressing, Metschan’s work is necessary to the feel of Episode II. “I really started feeling like an integral part of the production,” he says. “I would never have imagined two years ago that I would, firstly, be working here, and secondly be able to work on Star Wars, and thirdly, be able to work on it from beginning to the very end. Everything just fell in line at the right time.”
If the Mos Eisley Cantina can be likened to a western saloon, then Episode II’s upcoming Coruscant nightclub is an entirely different class of watering hole altogether. Although thematically, the two have much in common — a gathering place for a variety of aliens from throughout the Star Wars galaxy — stylistically, it fell to Production Designer Gavin Bocquet and his crew to give the place a character all its own.
“With the nightclub we’re actually seeing environments that showcase the social life of Star Wars,” says Bocquet. “It’s quite nice to move into those sort of worlds and see how people enjoy themselves in our mad universe out there.”
Often, Bocquet and his crew build designs originating from concept sketches and models crafted by the Art Department. For the nightclub, the Art Department did indeed contribute detail and atmosphere sketches, but the shape of the place came from Bocquet’s crew. “That’s the set that really came from our end” says Bocquet. “There was concept work of environments and what may be in them — things like travel tubes and gaming tables — but there was nothing architecturally, so we sort of started from scratch.”
In addition to sketches, Bocquet’s unit crafted a number of architectural models detailing the working space of a nightclub movie set. “We produced four conceptual models for that set,” Bocquet says. These models, delivered early in preproduction while the script for Episode II was still being written, influenced the outcome of the scenes set in the nightclub. “George Lucas often uses the models when scripting,” explains Bocquet. “He uses them and the concept art to actually work out the scene in his head. He’ll pull parts of our models together and grab a bit from this one and put it on that one, and block out scenes and ideas.”
These models help Lucas work out logistically how the action will progress through a set, and how a camera crew will capture it. “You’re trying to get out of him what he feels he needs initially, as far as volume, and how he can use the space,” notes Bocquet. “It’s not necessarily about style at that point, but just how physically that space works in the filmmaking process. After that, we can start talking about how we detail the set. We came away from that first meeting and produced two or three greater models, which go up another scale.”
While adding details and décor, questions of style and ambience need to be answered. “Is it a very small bar? A jazz nightclub? Is it a rather grand, glitzy place? Is it a sort of a warehouse type environment in the back streets?” asked Bocquet. “George felt it used to be a very glitzy place, but it’s lost a bit of its former glory. So it’s definitely going to become a much more rundown environment.”
Once the set was constructed at Fox Studios Australia, colorfully costumed extras filled in the scene. Given the Coruscant setting, the crowd is appropriately more cosmopolitan than the Mos Eisley barflies. The nightclub also had many more female patrons, several of which can be seen in introductions to the on location video pieces found here.
The Episode II story also called for a section of nightclub exterior and a nearby alleyway, also realized by Bocquet and his crew. “It’s a big composite set for quite an exciting chase sequence that starts up in the skies of Coruscant and lands down in the bowels of the metropolis,” he describes. “There was a lot of discussion early on about how much of the exterior street we would have to build. Initially, we had quite a big Y-section of street where we had the full front of the nightclub plus a street off that where speeders land, and then another street that connected them all together at the back alley where the characters come out of the nightclub at the end.”
Once the sequence was storyboarded and blocked, the amount of required construction was reduced. The action focused on the front and rear entrances of the club, with the rest of the street scenes taken care of with stretches of flooring (nicknamed “techy” floors for their high-tech look) and bluescreen.
However, when production began, Lucas saw another alternative with sections of alley walls that Bocquet’s crew constructed. “He decided that it might be useful to have those as the wider street,” says Bocquet. “We actually picked up one side of the street and just moved it across about 20 or 30 feet, increasing the width of the floor. We then ended up with a much wider section of the street, where he did most of the chase sequences in there. I think everybody agreed — even John Knoll and ILM — that it’s much more useful at a given moment to have as much set as you can to cover most of the shots.”
The old actor’s maxim speaks of there being no small parts, and that is very true for Star Wars. The visual tapestry is so dense with meticulously planned detail that even the most briefly glimpsed characters develop a following. Fans venerate characters like IG-88, Snaggletooth, and Aurra Sing even though they don’t have a word of dialogue, or even a full minute of screen time. Their designs are so intriguing that they demand extra attention. Sometimes, this is supplemented through licensed products, like action figures or spin-off fiction, which allow collectors and readers to learn more about said characters.
With Aayla Secura, the process had an interesting twist. She was already an existing heroine, with a built-in audience of comic book readers who understood her origins before she ever made it onto the screen. After seeing artist Jon Foster’s original cover art for issue #33 of the ongoing Star Wars series, Writer/Director George Lucas saw star potential. Aayla Secura, a blue-skinned Padawan, embodied Jedi strength and Twi’lek femininity in an eye-catching combination of beauty and power. It was the perfect ingredient for the action sequence recipe Lucas and Industrial Light & Magic were constructing, layer-by-layer.
Episode II was well into post-production when the decision to add Aayla was made, so the casting and costuming of this particular Jedi happened mostly at ILM. Stepping into Aayla’s droid-kicking boots was Amy Allen, a Production Assistant working at ILM. It was a fortuitous delay in an unrelated film that saw her entrance into Episode II. “I got to do a lot of hands-on work and really get involved with all the shows that were going on at the time,” recounts Allen. “This included A.I., Jurassic Park III, Pearl Harbor, and all the really big shows. I was on Gangs of New York for quite a long time and then it went on hiatus because the movie release date was postponed. That’s how I ended up working on a stage unit for Star Wars, which was a blessing in disguise.”
A graduate from San Francisco State University, Allen studied film and sought work in the Bay Area, landing a job at Industrial Light & Magic. Though her work was primarily behind-the-scenes, her role as Aayla was actually not the first blue Twi’lek Allen performed. “I had been a Twi’lek for the Episode I DVD,” she says. In a modification to The Phantom Menace for the DVD release, Senator Orn Free Taa’s formerly human-filled Senate pod was instead populated with Twi’leks. “George [Lucas] decided, last minute, to replace that shot. So, I was actually a blue Twi’lek probably two months after I started at ILM.”
Allen underwent makeup and a headdress fitting, and was dressed in a Senatorial aide gown designed for Episode II. She was shot against greenscreen, supervised by John Knoll, one of the Visual Effects Supervisors for both Episodes I and II. “I was interested in being in front of the camera, but it’s nothing that I actively pursued,” she admits. “But when an opportunity arises, one must take it!” Little did she expect what was to come.
Building an “Oola Jedi”
When word came down that Lucas wanted Aayla Secura in the arena, it fell to Costume Supervisor Gillian Libbert to determine how best to turn a character of pencil and ink into flesh and blood. “This is a comic book character, which doesn’t have a realistic proportion to the human body,” says Libbert. “That was our first challange.” The Aayla Secura character, as illustrated by artist Jan Duursema, is more dynamically heroic than a typical human extra. Libbert had to determine how much, if any, of that cut, muscular form to emulate in the costume. “Getting the character to look like what George wanted was our primary goal” says Libbert. “He answered a few questions we had related to the character’s body image, but it ended up that he wanted the costume to look like the comic book character and the body to be human-like.”
Libbert began gathering fabrics and materials to construct the outfit for Aayla, who at the time was often just referred to as the “Oola Jedi.” By the time of Episode II, Secura was a full-fledged Jedi Knight, but she definitely doesn’t dress like the other more conservative keepers of peace and justice. Secura’s brief wardrobe shows a fair bit of blue skin, but that didn’t make Libbert’s fabric-gathering job any easier. “What was helpful was since I was in Sydney [during principal photography], I had an idea of what fabrics were available and not used for any other character. There were a lot of incredible fabrics purchased from around the world to choose from.”
Libbert and her crew had a scant two weeks to make an outfit and dress Aayla for Lucas’ approval. Delving into storage, she uncovered several Twi’lek headdresses from Episode I and the Special Edition Trilogy. Pouring through eight huge costume crates of fabric, she collected materials to present. “I brought many different types of fabrics, leathers and trims for George to pick from. He picked the color of the headdress first and then we began dying fabric.”
Throughout the process, Libbert was on the phone to Scotland, keeping in touch with the Episode II Costume Designer, Trisha Biggar. “I would call Trish to get her advice and throughout the construction of the costume, I would send her fabric swatches and photos as the design progressed.”
As the outfit came together, Allen would come in and be fitted. Libbert and her crew would snap pictures of the developing Jedi. This was before Allen was painted the proper shade of blue, so those pictures were sent off to the ILM Art Department to digitally color Allen’s skin, to present Lucas the whole ensemble in context.
“George liked the overall look. We had to change the headdress a couple of times because he wanted a different style. He was very specific in what he wanted, down to the detailing on leather pieces and the way the leather trim was wrapped around the tentacles or lekku. ” explains Libbert.
Assisted by lead seamstress Barbara Hartman-Jenichen and leather craftsman Alan Peterson, Libbert supervised the costume’s development. The final piece-list consisted of the following items:
1 x boots w/ covers
1 x belt w/ tabs
1 x trousers
1 x leather vest
1 x top w/ bra
Trivia hounds take note — even extra scraps of Jar Jar’s leather tunic found its way into Aayla’s outfit.
The fitting of the costume was quick compared to a four-hour paint job that Allen had to endure. Lauren Vogt, from the ILM Model Shop, handled Allen’s makeup, applying the blue hue thick enough to cover Allen’s own tattoos. “She’d done the makeup the first time I had done the Twi’lek for the DVD, so she got all the little details like painting my nails and everything,” notes Allen.
Hot Lights & Cover Stories
Another performer’s maxim has to do with never letting the audience see you sweat, but in the case of the painted Allen, swinging a lightsaber under the hot lights of visual effects photography didn’t leave her much choice.
“Since I’m embracing this character so much I decided not to wear deodorant because I think that affects the way the paint is on your body,” Allen recalls. “I just stayed away from any kind of perfume, lotion, or deodorant to help Lauren keep the blue paint on. Gillian was just tweaking the costume a little bit. She had gotten real close to me and she said, ‘Well, Ames, you stink!’ Which was pretty funny, but thank God I’m close to Gillian. She can tell me things like that,” laughs Allen. “Oh yeah, I was stinky.”
The hot lights and tight schedule kept Allen active for four days of shooting. Under the direction of George Lucas and John Knoll, she combated imaginary droid and alien villains, led non-existent clone troopers into the thick of a pretend battle, and wandered the corridors of an unseen Jedi Temple.
“It went really well,” says Allen. “I had no training learning how to use the lightsaber, so I just went in and I was completely winging it.” She proved to be a natural, though the two-week rush in developing Aayla so late in post-production meant the character didn’t have her own unique weapon. “There were some extra lightsabers that were made in Sydney, so we used one of those and even used Ki-Adi-Mundi’s at one point” recalls Libbert.
In December of 2001, when starwars.com posted news of Aayla’s upcoming appearance in Episode II, there was a fair amount of bet-hedging in the announcement. “Since the film is still being edited, it’s impossible to know what — if any — her end screen-time will be,” the story read. Since that time, Aayla ended up in over half-a-dozen shots, from the Geonosian arena, to the Clone War battle, to the Jedi Temple.
Since Allen worked at ILM during the thick of post-production, she didn’t have to wait long to discover her recurring cameos in Episode II. “I kept hearing about it after dailies because everyone would make fun of me,” she laughs. “They would send me an e-mail and say, ‘oh my God, we saw you again, we saw you again.’ It started becoming a joke amongst a lot of friends here, which is good because you become close with people when you work with them so much.”
Seeing her face projected on the screen was just the start. As Episode II news began appearing everywhere, Allen got quite the surprise when she found out Time magazine had run her picture in the Yoda cover-story issue.
“At ILM, I sat with two girls, Jeanie King and Christy Castallano, and they were just freaking out when I walked into the office,” says Allen. “They said, ‘Okay, you are not going to believe this.’ At first, we thought it was just on [Time’s] website, but then I checked my messages and it was someone from the Ranch telling me that I’d better go out and get to the closest newsstand because they’re flying off the racks. That’s when I thought — wait, wait, wait. It’s in the hardcopy of Time? I went completely ballistic!”
From national magazines, to additional comic book appearances, to an upcoming action figure, Aayla’s exposure continued to grow. Allen found herself invited to Celebration II, the largest Star Wars convention ever held. She appeared on a panel entitled “Women Who Kick,” alongside such female Star Wars models and actresses as Femi Taylor (Oola), Nalini Krishan (Barriss Offee), Mary Oyaya (Luminara Unduli), Michonne Bourriague (Aurra Sing) and Shannon Baksa (Mara Jade).
“I had no idea what to expect,” admits Allen. “I wasn’t sure how well I would be accepted yet, or how many people would know me. But people do their homework. I met more women who were so excited about it. Women and young girls that were really excited that there was a female character and that she was a Jedi.”
Allen also got to meet Aayla’s co-creator, Jan Duursema, at the convention. “We hugged each other right away, and it was like an instant bond that we had,” she says. “I thanked her and told her the whole story how this had happened and she was really excited about it.” It was sort of a meeting of creators at Celebration, as Allen’s parents also met Duursema. “They really liked her and Jan is sending them some original drawings of Aayla as a keepsake. I know my mom will frame it and put it up in the house.”
Still young, Allen considers her stint as Aayla Secura as a stepping-stone to larger things. She plans on attending more conventions, and meeting face-to-face with Star Wars fans, but she is already very appreciative of all that’s transpired. “I’ve made some friends. I keep in touch with Nalini and Michonne at least a few times a week. That was something that was really cool that came out of this — meeting these women and getting to share this experience with them,” she says.
“It’s been surreal, definitely surreal,” concludes Allen. “It’s unbelievable. I would have never in my wildest dreams have imagined that something like this would have happened.”
January 31, 2002 – When the script calls for a swarming sea of humanity (or near-humanity), or for a half-dozen malcontents to linger in frame, it falls to Ros Breden to deliver the bodies. She served as Extras Casting Director for Star Wars Episode II, and it was her job to cast the background characters without dialogue in the film. These background characters can range from the truly obscure — a passing pedestrian in Coruscant’s underbelly — to something more front and center – Jedi warriors like Luminara Unduli or Bultar Swan.
“For my needs, we actually don’t need any acting ability,” Breden says. “What we need is a look, and a lot of that we can get out of the photos.” Rather than hold lengthy auditions, most of Breden’s selections come from head-shots delivered to her from local casting agencies (local, in this case, meaning Australia). “I had thousands and thousands of photos sent to me by agents.” Those thousands were widdled down in a three-month process to the approximate 800 extras that were eventually cast.
“It’s been an organic process,” explains Breden. She generally works from the script, or from a more detailed brief, when hunting for the right extras. “Sometimes I talk to [writer/director] George Lucas and find out things about specific named extras. I’d put together photos and we’d choose from that.” For large crowd experiences, Breden would get a brief on the locale, and she’d determine the types of people that would mill about there. “We’d base it on an Earth-equivalent of what the patrons might be like,” she says. “For the nightclub scene, it’s interesting, exotic, filled with beautiful women and beautiful men and lots of different and individual looks in there. For something more truck-stop, everyone is a bit more rougher and tougher.”
The legacy of the Star Wars saga made Breden’s job easier, she says. “The response from the community for Star Wars has been like no other production I’ve worked on. People know it and they love it and they’re dedicated to it, and they’re fans. I’ve got boxes of photos that people have sent in. Normally, I wouldn’t get any. It’s been amazing,” she notes.
“The strangest calls I received are people wanting to come from international locations to be an extra for a day. The States, England, everywhere — at their own expense! But even coordinating people from Melbourne is difficult, so it’s kind of difficult when people want to come from the other side of the world to be an extra.”
Once on set, of course, the enthusiasm didn’t wane. “Those that get on for a day walk up to me and say, ‘can I come back?’ It’s amazing!” she laughs. “There’s so many people, and there’s not enough roles for everyone. I’ve had virtually 100 percent turnout rate. Out of the 800, there’s been like eight people that have been late and two that didn’t turn up, which is very unusual for a film.”
While photos sufficed for most of the extras casting, one particular task required a full in-person casting call. “The casting of the young Jedi was probably the biggest casting session that I did,” recalls Breden. “The reason for that was their age. We needed to find children that looked the same — identical twins, if we could find them — so that we could use half of them in the morning and half of them in the afternoon.”
As revealed in Episode II, before being paired to an elder Jedi as a Padawan apprentice, young Jedi candidates train in classes overseen by Yoda. These children would be seen given lightsaber instruction from the wise Jedi Master. “The first session I did had about 60 children. With parents, and guardians, there must have been about 100 people there. We got them to come here and fill out paperwork, and then quickly took them over to Nick Gillard, the Stunt Coordinator. He ran them through some basic moves of the Jedi. That was a lot of people and a lot of kids, from which we chose about 20 children,” recounts Breden.
“The hardest part was trying to keep all the kids happy, and all the parents as well,” she continues. “The kids are only four, and it’s the parents that are actually more enthused than the children. At four, I don’t know that they know much of what’s going on. I think it would be fascinating to speak to those kinds in 10 years time, after the rest of the Star Wars films have been released, and talk to them about it.”
Breden’s job didn’t end once cameras rolled. While the on-set management of the extras was handled by the Third Assistant Directors, she was there to assist. Breden also signed the extras in and out, and handled the paperwork necessary to see that they’d get paid. “The ADs look at where the extras are placed, they manage them, make sure they’re doing the right thing and that they’re not making too much noise, and that they’re in the right place at the right time. The biggest day was the nightclub scene, because when we have 150 extras, everyone of those people have to go through hair and makeup. We’ve got 60 girls that all need full hair and makeup, and that takes a lot of time. Even if you’ve got a lot of extra hands on it, you need to start early.”
For those wanting to become an extra, Breden offers some advice. “You send in your photo to an agency. They’ll send it to us so we can see what you look like. And then you just have to wait for the phone call. It’s a ‘don’t call us; we’ll call you’ scenario. The more different you are, the better the chances. It’s a waiting game. In film and television, there are no guarantees, but everyone’s got a chance. That’s the good thing. I look through all the photos that come in, and everybody who sends stuff in has a chance.”
Once picked, you’ll need to know the rules of being an extra. It’s simple, says Breden:
First of all, you have to turn up on time. That’s the first thing because time is such a big issue on film.
You have to be able to be patient. Because when you get here early in the morning, you might not get on set for hours, so you have to be able to entertain yourself.
You can’t go up to any of the lead actors.
You have to be seen and not heard.
You have to remember where you walk everytime you’re on set, because you have to remember your own marks.
You can never go anywhere without telling the AD, so that you can always be accounted for.
Take good care of your costume.
Never take anything off set.
You don’t eat until the main cast and crew have eaten.
And does the Extras Casting Director require a similar set of rules? “My rules?” asks Breden. “No. Just pick good people.”
Winning numerous awards for its presentation of its feature film, and the quality of its extras, the Episode I DVD set a precedent for what the Star Wars DVD experience should be. The same team that developed that two-disc set returns to bring Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones to DVD.
Unlike Episode I, the Episode II DVD arrives only six months after its theatrical release, hitting stores on November 12. The lessons learned in making The Phantom Menace DVD helped prepare the team for what was to come.
“A DVD takes about a year-and-a-half or so to produce,” says Jim Ward, Lucasfilm’s Vice President of Marketing and Executive Producer, who led the DVD project. “As early as 2000, when we were shooting principal photography in Sydney, we were already trying to figure out what the configuration of the DVD would be.”
While Director George Lucas and Producer Rick McCallum were busily shooting Episode II, Lucasfilm’s Marketing Department was developing the Episode I DVD, and also earmarking content and areas to explore for the Clones DVD. “The Episode I disc gave us a really good benchmark. We had a very good blueprint so that we could multi-task everything and get it done,” says Ward.
“My contribution to the DVD is the movie itself,” says George Lucas. “Because Episode II was shot with a digital camera and created digitally, you can almost say it was made for the DVD format.”
Attack of the Clones will be the first major live action feature mastered direct from the digital source. Because the image stays within the digital medium from start to finish, the feature itself has unprecedented clarity. Lucas credits THX, under the leadership of Rick Dean, Head of Special Projects, for assuring the quality of the transfer.
“They did a phenomenal job making sure that there was no loss of definition to the digital images that were so full of motion and detail,” says Lucas. “Their expertise in image and sound replication preserved the creative work that so many artists and sound designers had put into making this movie.”
“We spent millions carefully developing and mixing the soundtrack and creating infinitely detailed visuals, and it breaks my heart that many theaters out there aren’t equipped to show it the way we intended,” laments Rick McCallum. “But with home theaters now fully digital and getting better and better every year, DVD is now a real safe haven for people who really love films and want to see it as the creators intended.”
While the DVD format is known for its enormous storage capacity, it comes at a price that must be carefully balanced in the mastering process. The more material packed onto a single disc, the poorer the quality for all of it. As a result, Disc One optimizes the presentation of the feature by keeping such extras as deleted scenes and documentaries on Disc Two.
“It’s always a challenge. We sit down and understand what the bit-rate budget is,” explains Ward. “Our first and foremost priority is to make sure the bit rate budget for the film is the highest it can possibly be. Other people will take a lower bit rate on the film in order to cram some other content in there.”
Like the Episode I disc, Episode II uses the fantastic environments of the Star Wars galaxy to deliver the menu information and navigation options. Producer Van Ling worked with digital resources direct from Industrial Light & Magic to create worlds to explore. Each time Disc One is inserted into a DVD player, one of three planetary themes is randomly selected for the menu interface. Viewers may find themselves inspecting the clone hatcheries of Kamino, the towering skyscrapers of Coruscant, or the treacherous conveyer belts of the Geonosian droid factory to select their viewing options.
The movie is divided into 50 chapters, which makes homing into a favorite scene easy. Sound options on domestic discs include an English 5.1 Surround EX track, delivering audio experiences such as the reverberating twang of seismic charges, the wailing howl of Zam Wesell’s speeder, or the layered chaos of the Clone War in THX-certified clarity and balance. Spanish and French-dubbed Dolby 2.0 audio are available on separate tracks.
The second English audio setting is a commentary track assembled by Gary Leva, the same editor who put together Episode I’s commentary. The Clones track features Lucas, McCallum, Editor Ben Burtt, Animation Director Rob Coleman, and Visual Effects Supervisors John Knoll, Ben Snow and Pablo Helman. “We take it for granted that these guys are inventing the process every step of the way,” says Ward. “Everyone else follows their lead when they’re finished, but these guys are the ones that are inventing it. I think it’s wonderful to allow people to understand and learn more about the process through such commentaries.”
Star Wars fans fortunate enough to have seen Episode II in a digital theater will be happy to know that the D-cinema version of the movie — which differed from the standard film print version — formed the basis of the DVD master. “The digital version of the film is on this DVD, but there are also some additional, minor changes. You’re going to have to figure those out for yourself,” says Ward.
Disc Two: The Extras
“Obviously, the movie itself should be the driving force, and the reproduction of the movie’s sound and picture quality should be exactly as the filmmaker originally created it. The opportunity to include ‘extras’ is just one of the added benefits that the DVD format allows,” says Lucas. Disc Two of the DVD set is a trove of extras, called “value-added material” in the business.
Van Ling has again transformed the Episode II locales into menu screens, turning the Jedi Archives, the Coruscant nightclub, the Naboo spaceport docking piers, Dex’s Diner and elsewhere into areas of navigation for Disc Two. As with Episode I, the supplemental material delivers a mix of informative and entertaining goods that illuminate the filmmaking process from start to finish.
“We have a working mandate when we make these DVDs to include value-added material that people actually want to watch, and to leave out games, and make-your-own-scenes and other gimmicks. We’re not about that,” explains Ward.
A long-form documentary, “From Puppets to Pixels: Digital Characters in Episode II,” tracks the trailblazing journey that ILM’s talented artists had to undergo in creating computer-generated co-stars. “That’s where the news was in the making of this particular film, so that’s where our cameras went,” says Ward.
Hundreds of hours of documentary footage shot by Lucasfilm’s documentary group were viewed and distilled into the 52-minute piece, crafted by Jon Shenk in a “fly-on-wall” narrator-less style. Several stories are tracked from beginning to end, the centerpiece being the development of a digital Yoda. It starts with Rob Coleman and his crew working on early proof-of-concept tests of the new Yoda, then follows what was shot on-set, and covers the broad strokes and subtle details of the finished animation — including the most deceptively difficult shot the animators dubbed “The Widowmaker.”
The film also examines the making of CG supporting cast members Dexter Jettster and Taun We, from clay maquette to finished, living form. Rare behind-the-scenes footage shows the interaction that actors Ron Falk and Rena Owen provide before their digital alter egos are inserted into the scene.
Also documented is the perfection of digital doubles, computer-generated stuntmen used for Obi-Wan Kenobi, Jango Fett and Count Dooku during some of Episode II’s most dynamic action sequences. A team of artists worked on the simulated physics of computer-generated clothes and hair to deliver convincing doppelgangers of the human form.
Lucas isn’t worried about disrupting the illusion that so many artists have worked carefully to craft. He instead sees these documentaries as important educational tools. “The visual effects artists at ILM and sound design teams at Skywalker Sound are not magicians giving away their secrets,” he explains. “They are artists sharing their expertise and passion for filmmaking.”
A second documentary, “State of the Art: The Previsualization of Episode II” shines a spotlight on the Animatics Department. Pre-Visualization Effects Supervisor Dan Gregoire and his crew developed remarkably sophisticated low-resolution computer-animated versions of scenes to plan and refine them in a quick and efficient manner.
The Speeder Chase, the Droid Factory, and the Clone War are covered in the 23-minute documentary, complete with examples of the sparse, bluescreen-filled plate photography, and the Art Department’s concept paintings and animatics that fleshed them out. The Clone War sequence in particular has several concepts and shots that never got past the animatics stage in the documentary.
In “Films are Not Released: They Escape,” the documentary cameras follow Sound Designer Ben Burtt and his crew in the capturing, building, and layering of Episode II’s sound universe. Everything from the drone of a Jedi starfighter engine, to the percussive machinery of the droid factory, to the soft smooches of forbidden kisses for the finished picture is covered. “It takes teams of sound recordists, sound designers, foley artists, effects editors and even alien language creators working together in blending all the sound elements to create the final sound mix,” says Lucas of the 25-minute documentary.
These three documentaries are joined by three featurettes (“Story,” “Love” and “Action”) and all 12 parts of the Making Episode II web documentaries, offering valuable educational material to aspiring filmmakers. “If you’re a kid, and you want to be in the movie business, but you’re in a state that has no film school, and you have no concept of what’s involved, it’s very hard to demystify the process,” says McCallum. “I want people who don’t have the ability to enter the system to be able to see how it’s done, so they can understand. This DVD offers that opportunity.”
Further illuminating the filmmaking process is a collection of eight scenes deleted from the final cut of Episode II. Optional introductions by Lucas, McCallum and Burtt explain why the scenes were cut. The original plate photography for these scenes were filled with areas of bluescreen, and ILM was busily delivering the 2,000 shots that would make it into the film. For these scenes, the digital environments and elements were crafted by the Animatics Department at Skywalker Ranch, led by Pre-Visualization Supervisor Dan Gregoire.
The DVD also collects a lot of the marketing material that went into telling the world about Attack of the Clones. Fans may have recorded some of these off television, or seen them here at starwars.com, but the DVD presents this video in the highest possible quality: the Across the Stars music video, the character- and story-based television commercials, and the theatrical teaser and launch trailers. The “Mystery” trailer, which only played online, now gets its largest incarnation through the DVD.
There’s more of course (never-before-seen photos, an ILM effects reel, R2-D2: Beneath the Dome trailer, a few carefully stashed “Easter eggs”) — even after finally viewing every last shred of content, the DVD will continue to be a gateway to further Episode II material in the months to come through a web-link to dvd.starwars.com.
Moviegoers got their first true look at the capabilities of the revolutionary HD system used in Episode II when two theatrical teaser trailers for Attack of the Clones were screened to the public last November. The announcement that Episode II would be shot without a foot of film raised a lot of questions; the trailers’ release answered many of them. Digital not only streamlines processes behind the camera, but also delivers results in front of a hushed audience.
To average moviegoers, the technical details of image acquisition, color-timing and image output are the farthest thing from their minds as they become engrossed in cinematic storytelling. To ILM’s HD Supervisor Fred Meyers, however, they are of prime concern. His work does better serve the story in the end, as the common distractions of the film medium — scratches, pops, reel changes, mismatched colors — increasingly become a thing of the past.
“It’s amazing with this picture,” says Meyers. “You’ve got the tools to blend it all together, so it’s really easy to slip away and immerse yourself in the story that’s on the screen. A lot of the things that we’re used to having to live with are things that can be removed with these new tools. In the past, maybe a scene that didn’t quite match correctly might break your train of thought and pull you out of the story.”
Meyers’ involvement with Episode II started on the image acquisition side — getting a reliable method of capturing images in a digital medium. His role has now expanded to post-production. “I was tasked with engineering the digital HD camera systems for all the principal photography,” explains Meyers. “Now, that has translated back into ILM, with miniature, motion control, blue and greenscreen elements that we’ve shot. We’ve taken all the technology and the camera systems, done some enhancements to them from last summer, and translated that into the photography here at ILM.”
Now gathering images of miniatures of effects elements at ILM is a newer version of the HD camera. “It’s slightly smaller and more appropriate to mount on the special effects motion control system. It also involves newer technology, such as a fiber optic interface with the recording system we use,” says Meyers. “I wouldn’t say they’re the next generation, but they’re the next in line. They have additional feature sets for application in the studio here.”
In traditional film, effects artists developed a formula for adjusting the speed of the camera to convey the proper sense of scale in the final image. Large objects or environments tend to have slower, more ponderous motion. To simulate that, the film was over-cranked at a higher speed so that when projected back at a regular 24 frames-per-second, the motion was slowed down.
The HD camera shot at a consistent 24 frames-per-second rate. To simulate speed effects, ILM turned to software solutions. “We’ve pulled a whole bunch of tricks out of the CG graphics realm that have been used to simulate both high and slow speed photography,” explains Meyers. “We have applied those to the HD cameras in a way that allows us to take individual frames and manipulate them, combine them, or skip frames out in a way that simulates longer exposures that would have been done traditionally with film cameras and motion control. We’ve done that in a way such that we get the motion blur, and we get the equivalent of increased or longer exposure times. ”
An example of this effect is visible in the Forbidden Love trailer; a shot of Padmé and Anakin captured in real-time was slowed down for effect. “The capabilities of the HD cameras are such that it’s a very equivalent simulation,” says Meyers. “You wouldn’t be able to tell the difference in motion because it simulates exactly what would be happening on the longer exposures of a film camera.”
Digital Release
The image quality of Episode II is now far more malleable than could ever have been achieved with traditional film. As the movie continues down the postproduction pipeline, ILM is blazing new territory by becoming a digital lab, handling concerns that would previously been taken care of in photochemical laboratories.
“The lab aspect is not something that ILM would consider a core business component, but since this project has been breaking a lot of barriers, both from the acquisition and now on the delivery side, we didn’t have anyplace to go to,” says Meyers. “So in order to pull this off ,we basically built it. Our thinking was that if we build this, demonstrate it, and people see the results with Episode II, that it would hopefully pave the way to a complete digital path for making pictures.”
Tests of delivering an HD image onto film stock for projection have been underway for years, but the theatrical release of the teaser trailer marked a crucial benchmark for the production. It was the first time that the digital images of Episode II would be put to film in full resolution.
“When we came up to the trailer stage, we put together the whole digital delivery, which replaced the traditional lab process of color-timing and interpositive and internegative printing steps. We recorded a printing negative to film that would be the equivalent of what directors and producers usually only have one or maybe two copies of — an answer print. That is what we made multiple copies of, so everything was the first generation print from film.”
Working from such a pure source will ensure a consistency to image quality not found through traditional means. “The advantage of this digital arena is that we can make one master that reflects the film that we’ve made and then make thousands and thousands of exact copies of that,” says Producer Rick McCallum. “All we’re trying to do is give the audience an opportunity to see and hear the film the way we made it.”
“This is a real-time digital lab that includes the color-timing components, manipulation components, and far more capabilities than would be available in a normal lab,” says Meyers. “The teaser trailer was the first time when we had a real-time, full resolution RGB component system all the way to the film recorder. The film recorders don’t run real-time, but the process of creating the master files that get recorded to the film recorder is real-time. It’s interactive too, so that any changes that need to be made can be done right there. The ability to see your final material projected with the changes real-time is also brand new.”
Meyers has been involved in breakthroughs in both the pre- and post-production ends of the spectrum, watching as old methods gave way to the new. “Both the front and the back end of this whole process have been incredibly exciting and challenging to me,” says Meyers. “I think having the opportunity to put the digital acquisition into production photography is just amazing. It’s great to now have that flexibility; if George Lucas or one of the effects supervisors asks for something, to be able to say, ‘no problem, we can do that now’ is great. It’s amazing to know that it’s here now, you can do it, and that we’re doing it.”
Designing Personality: An Interview with Jay Shuster
March 22, 2001 – Jay Shuster was brought aboard the Episode I Art Department for what was supposed to be a temporary stint as a storyboard artist. Based on the strength of his design skills, Design Director Doug Chiang made him a permanent member of the team. After a break following The Phantom Menace’s completion, Shuster returned to the third floor of Skywalker Ranch’s Main House, as a member of the Episode II Art Department.
“Doug has assembled a group that is really synchronized,” says Shuster. “I believe it was his desire to keep the Episode I group intact because of that harmony. It was a guarantee, of sorts, that I was coming back.”
“Jay is a very refreshing talent that I originally brought aboard to storyboard the Podrace in Episode I,” says Chiang. “He has a very strong ability to render mechanical shapes and environments. He has a feel and a flair for mechanical objects. Once the storyboards started to slow down I gave him more designs and he’s now become one of the key vehicle and hard surface designers.”
Returning back to the world of concept design, Shuster’s first assignment played to his strengths — designing hardware and architecture with a sense of personality and character.
“The first thing on Episode II, Doug said, ‘start working on this,'” recounts Shuster. The “this” in question, though still veiled in Episode II secrecy, is a weapon of sorts that helps decide a critical battle, the first generation of a tool to be seen later on in the series. “It follows the formula for a lot of the prequel trilogy,” says the artist. “Take something pre-conceived in the existing trilogy and de-generate it.”
As with the entire Art Department, Shuster diligently produces multiple iterations of each design, putting a great deal of detail into work that will potentially be rejected. “We learn to keep our emotional ties to the work at a minimum ,” explains Shuster. “At times you wonder why a design isn’t being used as it was intended from the beginning. You eventually realize the kinetic nature of George [Lucas]’s and within that realm you can still satisfy your desire for great art and design. My whole experience here has been great. Doug likes my designs and George is is very open to what we have to say in our drawings.”After his designs have been approved, they are then handed over to one of the talented concept model-makers who recreates the design as a small but detailed plastic model.
“It’s great to be able to interact with the modeler as they’re building it, to see it evolve” says Shuster.The 3-D modeling process adds another layer of personality on top of what I designed into the object. The design will, almost always, gain a little extra alien or other-worldly appeal when translated through different eyes. Seing it in the final cut, on the screen, is what I look forward to.”
For Episode II, among his designs that Shuster will see on the big screen are a number of architectural ones.
“Episode I was so action packed, we rarely had to opportunity to stop and look around at the amazing environments and sets,” says Shuster. “In Episode II, we get a chance to peer into and get involved with the lives of their characters and their personal dwellings and spaces. I’ve always loved architecture. As a kid, it was one of my first aspirations in the realm of design.”
From his architectural sketches came models that were then translated into full-size set pieces by Gavin Bocquet’s crew, or digital extensions to be composited into blue and green-screen footage by Industrial Light & Magic.
“I enjoyed working on Padmé’s bachelorette pad on Coruscant,” says Shuster, picking out a favorite design. “There are Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired forms throughout. There are majestic spaces and sweeping archways. You’ll see a lot of sky, filtered sunlight and the dense cityscape beyond. The designs also tell us about Padmé’s lifestyle. We interpret who the character is through the space they live in, and the various articles with which they surround themselves.”
To lend authenticity to a character’s surroundings, Shuster crafts backstories in his head to ensure his designs have personality. “It’s similar to the design of the Podrace vehicles, graphics and color schemes in respect to creating a persona for the characters that raced them. I was imagining what this alien was thinking when they designed this Podracer. My hopes are that this movie is a bit grittier, perhaps, showing a more human side to the characters and environments that the audience can relate to.”
July 01, 2002 – “You wouldn’t want my life to get boring, would you?”
Anthony Daniels has become a fixture in the Star Wars universe. He’s back for Episode II in an expanded role. In the fall of 2000, Star Wars Insider spoke to the actor about the challenges of bringing the droid to life once more in Episode II.
So, you’re puppeteering C-3PO in Episode II. What can you tell us about that experience? (Editor’s note: The C-3PO puppet did not appear in the final cut of Episode II.)
In Australia I was immensely helped with the puppet by Don Bies, who did R2-D2 again. Don and the team of Trevor Tighe, Justin Dix, Zeynep “Zed” Selcuk , Martin Crowther and Matt Sloan were just the most tremendous support group. I would rehearse with them and a big mirror, and Zed would tell me what looked good, because there is no time to rehearse on the set. You’d better know what you’re doing by the time you arrive [on set]. It’s very lickety split, there’s no time to mess about. So part of my homework was to rehearse … It’s like rehearsing anything. Rehearsing is hard work because you keep doing it over and over again, and it gets boring, frankly.
With the puppet it’s very physically hard. Anna Bies [Don’s wife] made me a harness like a Steadycam harness, and I wore this thing on my front. It was terrifyingly heavy. I’m not a weightlifter, I’m aware what it’s doing to my spine, and in fact I kind of redesigned it so the weight goes down onto my hips, which then goes straight down into your legs. I went to the gym every morning, and in this beautiful hotel in Australia I would be in the gym at 6 a.m. or 5:30 a.m. By the time I arrived at the studio, I’d be exhausted. I had to lie down. That was kind of stupid, really. But it’s the only way. Because you’re going to hurt yourself otherwise, or you’re going to fall over. Also, one day my mind drifted and I suddenly felt everything fall, and like the Tower of Pisa, I nearly fell sideways. Once it would go, there’d be no stopping it.
The support team there was immensely good. We re-jigged as many things as we could to make it a bit more lifelike. You’ll see what I mean. It gave me the chance to experiment with how to get expression from my body, my face, my head, through him. I will say that the bits I have watched of myself doing it–well, I don’t take a tape home and drool over myself in the evenings–but for technical reasons it’s very useful to know what it looked like, as I can’t tell. There’s no point in having a monitor over there, or a mirror … If we were doing it on a long-term basis, probably I would have a monitor, but it’s just easier to kind of try it out. It’s not like I’m playing King Lear. There are some interesting scenes, and that I like too.
How much of the performance of C-3PO do you think is voice, how much is physical, how much is the two together?
That’s quite a good question. The one thing you’ve possibly missed out is a kind of weird magic that sort of happened on the first day that I stood in the desert in 1976. That C-3PO saw to this himself. He’s an entity that has something to do with me, something to do with George, with the suit, the voice, the environment … It’s a little like one of those movies where there is a puppet that takes over, particularly in those movies the puppet gets hold of shears or a knife and kills everybody. I don’t think C-3PO’s got quite that far yet, but there is a kind of magic that happens with him.
It’s definitely a combination of voice and movement, because he doesn’t move all the time. That would become tiresome. I’m quite selective in movements. You really have to remember less is more, because a small movement after a period of rest can speak volumes. Also he’s a very distracting character in the gold, or in any format because he’s visually interesting.
We are all used to looking at humans. I used to tell Mark Hamill not to bother acting, because in the middle of a scene all I had to do was just turn my head and it would immediately draw the audience’s eye because it’s a glittering shape. Your eye will be pulled toward it like a jackdaw to a piece of jewelry. Fortunately, he ignored that suggestion and acted anyway. But it is a combination. It’s a whole mannerism, and the mannerism is locked into the voice and the movement.
Are we going to see some new facets of the character in Episode II?
You’re going to see new stuff, yes. I added in one line. I just turned a sentence around to give the character somewhere to have come from. I mean, he’s not going anywhere, as we already know where he’s been. Possibly I’ve added a wry touch. A touch of wry, yeah.
You did some Episode II filming on location?
I went to Tunisia. The odd thing was, I was in Morocco last year and got out of the car in the desert and had this real spine tingle because the air, the light, the sunshine, the smell was so reminiscent of Tunisia all those years ago. I wasn’t in the same place, but, it being desert sun, it was weird … slightly unreal.
Was it odd to walk onto a Star Wars set and find that the crew had Australian accents?
Very, very strange. And the first time it hit me … almost with a kind of sadness. I was suddenly the Grand Old Man, as the phrase goes, of Star Wars, because there’s only George and myself, I think, who have gone this far. I think there’s one person at Lucasfilm who’s worked there longer than me. [Lucy Autrey Wilson in Lucas Licensing and Ben Burtt at Lucasfilm are the other two who have been involved as long as Daniels and George Lucas himself.] It’s a strange feeling. Curiously, looking now at Episode II and understanding the story, and seeing where it will link up and knowing where it will lead, there is a kind of preparatory sadness in me at the ending. Now, we’re talking 2002, 2005 when it comes out, but I can already grieve for the end of the thing, if that doesn’t sound too weird. Because one can see a life cycle. And life cycles begin and they end and they start again. This one, I think probably, that will be the end of it. That’ll be fine, because by then I’ll be the Grand Old Man of the Star Wars thing! But it is strange to meet people playing roles that have been touched by other people, to meet Ewan McGregor as Alec Guinness. He’s just terrific.
Do you see any of Guinness in Ewan McGregor?
I think he’s his own person. I think in this one it became clear to me that Ewan has decided to make the part his own. He gets to do fun things as well. What a nice guy.
Have you done much with Hayden Christensen yet?
I think the greatest buzz people are going to get is from Hayden. I don’t know where he came from, what he was doing before, but he’s just terrific.
It’s interesting watching him at work, because having just seen pictures and read a bit you reserve your judgment. Then seeing him in action is quite amazing.
He’s just perfect. You get quite resentful of that kind of talent. You just think, “Why aren’t I like that? Why don’t I look like that?” We met for the first time at the opening party and I think we got on pretty well. He’s a real pleasure to be with. You know, “professional” is an understood word. The cast was just so professional. Very professional atmosphere. The crew … it was like being in a family.
I found all sorts of excuses not to leave, to be honest. I was having a good time. I couldn’t eat too much of the food as I was trying to keep my weight down, but it was exceptional. We were all very well treated, and we all seemed to be having fun. [The filming] seemed to be working and the sets seemed to work. There weren’t too many dramas. Everything looked good. I think people have confidence that the audience is going to like this film. And people get to do things. Natalie gets to do things, and Hayden and Ewan.
People have said George Lucas seems relaxed on Episode II, more than he was on The Phantom Menace.
Sure. He’s having fun, you know. He’s got Rick McCallum producing. Rick is probably one of the greatest things to happen to Lucasfilm because, what can I say … he’s got an attitude. He’s got a real attitude. He’s got together this team that’s been through trials of fire to get here, because they’ve all done The Young Indiana Jones together and they’ve done the last movie.
That’s why it works–why there is this strange feeling in Australia that it is a team, that has been joined by the Australians, who have a great natural attitude to just getting on with the job. I think that’s why it’s noticeable. This is a great team built up over the course of time and trials, and it works very well. Rick’s very good at what he does. He’s the tough man … but he cleverly makes sure that people have a good time when they’re there. Hence I didn’t want to leave. I think his mean streak comes out with his driving of buggies, golf carts.
The technology of these films has changed so much in the 25 years.
At the time of the first Star Wars, I’d never been in a movie, so I was amazed that the only person who saw the movie was the guy with his eye to the [camera] eyepiece, who would nod if it was good. Now, with permission, one stands behind George, looking at this three-foot plasma screen, watching the movie. [George] is very patient, because I would like a private area to do that. But I think he’s concentrating so much … there are so many distractions on a set.
You must have had ups and downs between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace, where you thought “Is this all I’m ever going to do?”
Oh yeah, there was a time I thought I should just stop. And then I thought, well, the income I get from various things is very welcome, but really my fondness for the character of C-3PO is what has kept me attached for 25 years. I just like him. He’s weird. A bit strange.
By now, audiences around the world look at Yoda a little differently. His extremely kinetic and crowd-pleasing battle moves became the must-see cinematic moment of the season, and the little Jedi Master made magazine covers in dozens of languages. Animation Director Rob Coleman has spoken at length about the artistry, acting craft and technical wizardry that went into making a completely digital Yoda a reality, but there was much more to his workload than just Yoda.
“We did about 70 minutes of animation on the movie,” says Coleman. “That’s 10 minutes more than we did on Episode I.” That animation was spread over dozens of characters, aliens, creatures, machines, droids, clones, Jedi, and stunt duplicates, representing a full cast for the animation unit.
The animation on Episode II began in January of 2001. With the shorter schedule and increased volume and complexity of shots, Coleman upped the size of his team from 45 animators for The Phantom Menace to 60 for Attack of the Clones. Serving under Coleman were two animation supervisors, Chris Armstrong and Hal Hickel. Even though Episode II was entirely digital, Coleman used the traditional benchmark of “feet per week” to record their workload requirements. “We had six feet per week, which is 96 frames per animator per week, to get this movie done.”
As happened with Episode I, a supporting character quickly grew to become an animator-favorite, due to his design and the strength of the vocal performance. Watto held that favored position for Episode I. For Episode II, it was another alien vendor-type: the diner proprietor, Dexter Jettster.
“For both Watto and Dexter, they had fabulous voice actors,” notes Coleman. “Animators always key in on that first. They hear the voice and they get excited because they can imagine the possibilities of what the characters might do and what facial expressions they might have.”
Actor Ronald Falk provided the voice of Dexter on-set during principal photography in Australia. He also stood-in for Dexter during shooting, delivering dialogue and providing an eyeline and performance reference to help fuel Ewan McGregor’s imagination for the takes when he’d be absent, and McGregor would be acting to thin-air. Unlike Ahmed Best, who would wear elaborate wardrobe to approximate the finished Jar Jar during shooting, Falk wore non-descript everyday street clothes, though a painted Dex maquette was present for reference purposes.
Coleman carefully observed the shooting that day, and the interaction between Falk and McGregor. “Ewan obviously had a connection with this actor right away, because there was an energy in that room when they were doing that scene that I really wanted to bring into the animation. I showed those rehearsals to the animators, and right away they were off and running.”
Coleman stresses to his animators the need to get inside the heads of the characters, and to provide visible glimpses of thought process and history in their CG faces. Dexter’s wide and expressive countenance, his body language, and the rich voice say a lot about where he comes from, without really saying any facts.
“We talk about where this character has been five minutes, an hour, a week or a year before we come into that diner,” Coleman says, explaining the process. “From reading the script, it’s very clear that Obi-Wan and Dexter are old friends who have not seen each other for a long time. When you turn over a sequence to a bunch of animators, that’s the first thing you talk about. We have two old friends who have a lot of history together, who don’t need to go over all that history, but the audience needs to feel right away that these are old chums.”
The huge hug that Dexter gives Obi-Wan is the largest clue to their history, and required extensive work from Coleman’s animators. To properly depict the crush of fabric as Dex’s massive hands envelop Obi-Wan, Ewan McGregor’s body was entirely replaced by a computer-generated duplicate. Only McGregor’s head remained, attached to a CG body dressed in digital Jedi robes.
“I’m always working with George [Lucas] to capture moments when we can connect the animation, with the live action, because we believe that sells it to the audience,” explains Coleman. “We’re telling the story, but we’re also fighting your subconscious. We’re trying to make sure your subconscious isn’t saying, ‘not real, couldn’t happen…’ and this was one of those moments where we could really make this work.”
Aside from the hug, there were other, more subtle indicators. “There’s also the smiles between them, the interchange, the poking fun. Dex kind of teases Obi-Wan and the fact that he’s had to go to the Jedi analysis droids who couldn’t help him out. It’s a lovely interchange between them.”
The animation unit has two main methods when animating the body motion of a humanoid character. Motion capture involves using real, human performers wearing tracking markers on strategic points on their body. They are then recorded performing the necessary motions, and the markers provide data that the animators can then apply to a digital model, duplicating the motions. The other method is more akin to traditional hand-drawn animation, called key-frame animation. In this approach, the animator determines the major positions the character will undergo in a shot, and the computer will move the model to fit those positions. Each method has its own strengths — motion capture saves a lot of guesswork, but cannot always duplicate the more extreme or dangerous moves required. Key-frame animation is more work intensive, being built from scratch, but allows a greater range of motion and more flexibility.
Dexter was key-frame animated using SoftImage to move the character around, and proprietary software for subtle facial details. “The fun bit about Dexter is that big airbag in his neck that we were able to inflate and deflate. We use in-house software called Caricature, or Cari, to handle that. All the character work you see uses Cari for the facial work, what I call the soft tissue work,” says Coleman.
“We were always trying to figure out what he should be doing with those four arms,” he notes. “There’s that shot where we come around to his backside, and you see the other arm is hiking up his pants because they’re sliding down. That came about because we were trying to figure out what do with all these other arms.” Showing that little improvised move to Lucas met with approval, and it made the final, though not before the crucial “wedgie vs. droopy pants” debate was settled.
Kaminoans & Geonosians
Inhabiting the stilt-like structures of Tipoca City are serene and gentle aliens responsible for creating one of the most destructive military forces in galactic history. How does one get inside the head of a Kaminoan?
“We talked about where they were centered emotionally,” recounts Coleman. “From the script to the scene, there’s an ambivalence in whether these are good people or bad people. I wanted the animators to be thinking about that, so these characters were amoral but they weren’t necessarily bad.”
George Lucas used the phrase “creatures of love and light” when describing the Kaminoans to actress Rena Owen, the voice of Taun We. That gentleness was mixed with a harsh sterility in their surroundings. “They were in control of their environment,” notes Coleman. “We wanted to give them a different kind of movement in contrast to Obi-Wan. They moved very slowly and there was a fluid movement to their hands and to their arms so they looked very otherworldly, adding in arm flourishes and hand flourishes, somewhat like Tai Chi, so that when a characters stops and walks, there’s an extra sort of follow-through.”
While on set, Rob Coleman helped coach the actors playing the Kaminoans. “I remember specifically working with Rena Owen (Taun We) and talking to her about taking long, graceful strides. The timing and pacing of her actions helped Ewan McGregor know exactly how fast he should be walking. He changed his pace to match the Kaminoans, so it was important for her to do that.”
Also graceful is the flow of their delicate clothing, which was realized through computer-generated cloth simulation that further helped ground the Kaminoans in reality. “Their clothing is different from most of the other characters in the film — very thin, very silky, very diaphanous. You actually see it blow in the wind and you see it move and shake. If those didn’t look real then the audience would be pulled out of the scene. The clothing team did a fabulous job on them.”
The Kaminoan’s reality was further strengthened by their understated facial performances and lip-sync. While noisome, gregarious characters like Watto and Dexter have a broad range of performance, the delicate Taun We required more subtle nuances. Though Rena Owen and Anthony Phelan’s voice performance did provide important cues, it was the animators themselves that served as reference models when animating the characters.
A standard tool of any animator is a small mirror to study his or her own features in action. Some even go as far as to video record themselves doing a given action, and then digitize that performance, keeping it as a handy reference when animating.
“Taun We was probably one of the most challenging characters for the team to wrap our heads around,” reveals Coleman, “Because you have this extremely long neck, this tiny little mouth, and this voice, and for me if the voice doesn’t feel like it’s coming out the character, then the audience isn’t going to make any connection. We went back and forth specifically on this sequence. Ben Burtt and his team of sound folks at Skywalker Ranch played with Rena Owen’s voice. Her voice is actually quite deeper than Taun We’s — it has been pitch-phased up, and I think it’s successful now coming out of this character.”
With Episode I under the collective belts of the animation team, they are able to concentrate on such nuances. “We’re certainly thinking about breathing, pauses, and eye-movement much more than we were in Episode I,” explains Coleman. “A lot of Episode I, to be truthful now, was freaking out over how everything was going to get done and worrying about technical issues. I was actually able to get into the acting and performance and movement of these characters much more in this film.”
Getting inside the heads of the Geonosians isn’t much of a task, since Rob Coleman describes that, “there’s not much going in there.” Still, there is a defining characteristic that becomes a foundation in performance: cowardice.
“Especially the workers, the non-winged ones,” elaborates Coleman. “They’re cowards and they’re motivated by food and work; that’s about it. When we first meet them in that sleeping chamber, the ones who are attacking do so mostly because they’ve just fallen into the fray, and the rest of them are all running away.”
Providing inspiration for the scattering insectoids were real world creepy cousins: cockroaches and termites. Designs developed by the Art Department strongly established this concept, with strangely flowing organic architecture that looks more secreted than constructed. These shapes led to difficulties when tackling the crowd scenes, since the randomly curved surface of the Geonosian execution arena were much more troublesome than the clearly delineated rows of Episode I’s Podrace arena.
The technical directors properly grounded the Geonosians in their arena rows, and the animators developed a library of actions to be repeated by the background bugs. “The crowd crew is working on specific actions — jumping, cheering, flying, walking, running, looking at their neighbor, and pointing. These libraries are then sent to the technical directors who use particle systems to place all of these characters on these undulating, very organic backgrounds, tacking them into that world.”
The insectoid droid builders share a design pedigree with Episode I’s battle droids. The elongated snout of the Geonosian is meant to suggest that they created the gawky combat droids in their image. The battle droids of Episode I were motion-captured, though, whereas the Geonosians were key-frame animated.
“We figured that they were made in the image of their maker but didn’t move like the maker,” Coleman notes. “The battle droids are more humanoid and walked more upright than the Geonosians who are more bug-like. The Geonosians have a thorax and a tail section on them, and they also have a double-jointed leg. The battle droids have a regular human upper leg, knee and the lower leg, so they couldn’t actually walk the same way.”
When the full-scale Jedi battle erupts in the arena, the Geonosians display their true colors. “Even the winged warriors scatter once the Jedi show up. There were very few brave ones. I think George sort of said five percent of them would actually fight, and 95 would flee. That gave us that nice sequence when the Jedi arrive and you get all the flying Geonosians taking off, and the scurrying ones disappearing down all the holes.”
Poggle the Lesser & Arena Creatures
Standing apart from the single-minded simpletons is the leader of the Geonosians, Poggle the Lesser, who features a unique design with its own unique challenges. “Poggle falls into the same kind of classification that all of George’s leaders of species share, where they don’t really look like the species that they’re part of — Boss Nass of the Gungans would be my other example,” jokes Coleman.
The size of Poggle’s role waxed and waned throughout production, at one point almost having all of his dialogue cut entirely. Poggle’s alien speech was a big question mark for the animation crew for months. It wasn’t until a month and a half prior to final deadline that the Geonosian War Room scene was added, and Poggle was given some important lines to deliver.
“I didn’t hear that voice until about six weeks prior to the end of the show,” specifies Coleman. “Ben Burtt had developed that right at the very end. Up until that time, we had been using backwards English to animate for Poggle. I did have a huge concern over lip sync, but George wasn’t worried. Luckily, I got the sound in time, and we went in and synced everything up.”
Poggle was key-frame animated, with physics simulation incorporated for the shake of his beard-like growths, bug-shaped lapel pins, and bracelets.
The trio of ravenous arena creatures may be a hero’s nightmare, but they’re also an animator’s dream. “They were clamoring to get them,” smiles Coleman. “Saying things like, ‘Please give me this scene. I really know how to handle that one!'”
Sue Campbell was the lead animator of the sequence, working with a number of animators for five months in making the arena scenes come to life. “Big creatures are always difficult because you’ve got to find the right balance of how quickly does George want them to move, and how quickly could they really move if they were that big and massive,” says Coleman.
All three creatures had some sort of real world counterpart to offer inspiration. The anatomy of the acklay was reminiscent of a crab, while the reek has bison and bull roots. “The nexu, or the bad kitty as we called her, was the difficult one, because she’s half-crocodile, half-cougar. She was the one all the animators wanted.”
Similar physics simulation that rendered the motion of clothing was employed to create muscle and flesh jiggle, particularly on the acklay and the reek. Such simulation was also necessary for the chain that Anakin wraps around the reek’s horn. It fell to the technical directors to add in such essential elements as interactive light and dust hits.
Fans of classic fantasy films may have spotted a familiar frame during the arena battle. “I’m in this business because of Ray Harryhausen’s work,” says Coleman. “When I could find a moment to pay on homage to Ray, I went for it. When it came time to do the fight between Obi-Wan and the acklay, and the acklay rears up, it just seemed to sing out to me the scene from Mysterious Island when the big crab is fighting the guys on the beach.” With Lucas’ approval, Coleman recreated a similar shot, though with the frame-direction reversed, as a tribute to Harryhausen’s masterful pioneering efforts in combining creatures and live action, a tradition that proudly continues at ILM.
Droids & Clones
The animation unit didn’t only handle organic characters. They were tasked with animating all manner of droids and machines, bringing the computer-generated mechanisms to artificial life.
The two most famous examples of droids are R2-D2 and C-3PO. For most of the film, they are shot practically — a remote control Artoo-Detoo and actor Anthony Daniels in the Threepio suit. There were a number of shots, however, where it was necessary to render them as digital characters.
The computer-generated Artoo was handled entirely by a single animator, Billy Brooks, who was part of the ILM’s “Rebel Unit,” an independent team that uses consumer-level Macintosh computers. Coleman oversaw his work on a few Artoo shots, most notably when Artoo is climbing some stairs on Naboo and when he’s flying about the droid factory. “They wanted to get my input on timing and weight and such,” he explains. “It worked out great. We even fooled George in a couple of shots; he thought it was a real Artoo and it ended up being CG Artoo.”
With Threepio, a CG duplicate was required when the droid had to perform an action far beyond the range of Anthony Daniels’ suit-hampered mobility. “George likes to cut arms and heads off,” laughs Coleman, remarking on a common injury suffered by characters in the films. “He said it’s an ongoing sub-theme in his movie, Threepio getting mutilated and put back together again.”
Since it would be far too dangerous to throw Anthony Daniels around a conveyer belt, or impractical to decapitate an actor, the CG stand-in was employed. But even an act as simple as sitting down required a digital assist. “Because of the logistics of the suit, Anthony can never sit down,” explains Coleman. “When Threepio walks onto the Naboo ship just before they take off with Anakin and Padmé, he’s all digital when he sits down. Also, there’s a scene in the big arena sequence at the end when he sits back up again. Anthony could never do that. He wore a black body suit on the bottom, and he was wearing the upper torso of the suit. He was lifted up with the help of a bar in his back, and we added in digital legs.”
In addition to the lovable droid duo, Coleman’s animators unleashed a new kind of combative automaton, the Separatists’ super battle droid. Though the burly machines were devoid of personality, the animators established a range of motion that denotes a sense of character. “It’s a machine that will keep coming at you and shooting at you much like a Terminator would. There’s a right way and a wrong way to move a super battle droid,” says Coleman. “We spent time figuring out how it walked, how it ran, how it shot and how it reacted when it was fired at.”
Coleman decided early on that the super battle droids would be key-frame animated, a departure from the motion-captured regular battle droids seen in Episode I. The reasoning behind this was to set them apart from the opposing forces. “I wanted them to look different than the clones. I always wanted to get opposing actions. In Episode I, the droids were mostly motion-captured and the Gungans were predominantly key-frame animated. I always try to get a different feel to the characters, so the audience gets a different feel in the movement,” he explains.
Added to animation team’s considerable workload were such non-characters as the machinery found in the droid factory and some of the vehicles in the Clone War battle. “The rule of thumb used to be if it had a mouth and eyes I would handle it,” says Coleman. “But then, that didn’t happen to work out for the battle droids in The Phantom Menace. Then I said, well if it has a head then I’ll supervise it. That sort of went to the wayside as well, when we got into the droid factory.”
As Coleman explains, animating non-living machinery benefits from the scrutiny and skills of animator who is well versed in understanding movement and weight. “How long does it take for a leg to come down and crush the ground? How long does it take for a welder-head to weld something and then zip out of the way? Animators, from years of working on characters, have the sensibility and talents to answer those questions.” Animation Supervisor Hal Hickel ended up overseeing the animation of the entire droid factory sequence.
The Clone War battle featured dangerous machinery of a different type: the lumbering vehicles that predate the famous AT-AT walkers seen in Episode V. “We felt that Phil Tippett and his team on Empire had really set the bar with the Battle of Hoth. We know that Attack of the Clones comes before that, so we wanted our clone walkers to be reminiscent in terms of the motion that we saw in Empire, but also be different.” Animator Scott Benza carefully examined the stop motion techniques used on the AT-AT models, applying that knowledge to the six-legged AT-TE walkers of Episode II. “One of my animators, Tom St. Amand, actually worked on the walkers in Empire, so it was a nice continuity between the original trilogy and this trilogy.”
“I had the opportunity of meeting someone from the 501st, the fan group that creates these great stormtrooper costumes, in New York before Episode II came out,” says Coleman. “They were asking who we got to be the clone troopers, and when could they see a suit of armor as part of a museum display. I was sworn to secrecy, so I just said, ‘well, they’re not the guys you think they’d be.'”
Coleman’s caginess was due to the fact that there was not a single suit of clone trooper armor built for Episode II. Every single combat-ready clone seen in the movie was computer-generated. “Even the shots where there’s a clone trooper standing in the dark behind Obi-Wan and Anakin inside the Republic gunships. That’s a digital clone that has been motion captured and animated and put in there,” reveals Coleman.
To verse themselves in the body language of clone troopers, the animators carefully examined footage of the stormtroopers of the original trilogy. “Although they were soldiers, they weren’t exactly the most trained soldiers in the world,” discovered Coleman. “They weren’t exactly the snap-to-attention type of soldiers. They were almost casual. I wanted to distill for myself what was the type of action and movement that these guys could do and would do in the film.”
Jeff Light, Motion Capture Supervisor, also studied every shot of stormtroopers in the original trilogy. “He came up with a short-hand for us for the kind of movement that we wanted. Then, we subjected various animators to becoming clone troopers and captured their movement and applied them to the digital model,” says Coleman.
The clone troopers were predominantly motion captured. For scenes too dangerous to subject a motion capture performer to, the clones were instead key frame animated. “Motion capture made sense since we knew there were human beings inside a suit,” says Coleman. “That data is then sent over to the animation res-model of the clone trooper, and then that gets funneled off to a variety of different paint-scheme clone troopers. There were four different colored commanders, and a variety of other white ones that were all scuffed in different ways. There are a number of different paint versions but they’re clones so they’re supposed to be exactly the same model.”
For a closer look at the amazing work of the ILM animators, be sure to check out the documentary “From Puppets to Pixels: Digital Characters in Episode II,” found only as supplemental material in the Attack of the Clones DVD set.
August 1, 2000 – The use of digital cameras to shoot Episode II has been a time-saver on numerous parts of the production. Gone is the wait for film to be processed in order to view dailies. As a result, the production has been moving along at a brisk pace.
“Literally, the day we finish shooting a set, we can take it down,” says Production Designer Gavin Bocquet. “Because we’re shooting with a digital camera, there’s no real need for rushes. Everybody’s seeing the final reproduction precisely on a very sophisticated monitor. On the day of shooting they’re seeing actually what you see, rather than having to wait until the next day to see the rushes or the transfer from the film to tapes three days later. You get clearance on the set almost the day you finish it.”
The sets that crews have worked long hours to create, and that have been up and ready for three months, are struck down in mere hours to make room for new sets to be built. “So literally, the next day, the guys are in there with sledgehammers taking it down, which obviously can be a bit distressing from our point of view, but it’s inevitable. With the quick turnaround we’re having to do here, if everybody’s happy with what they’ve got, it comes down.”
After about five weeks of shooting, the production has reached its halfway point in Australia. “Which means we’re taking down the first wave of sets that we’ve built and quickly erecting the second wave,” says Bocquet. “Same sort of principle as last time, because of the amount of set work we have to do. On the first one we had about 54 studio sets of various sizes. I think this time we’re already have a total of 68.”
Episode II’s production schedule calls for a two-and-a-half month stint at Fox Studios Australia, followed by shooting in Tunisia and Italy. This is notably different from Episode I. “In Episode I we had planned a four week trip to Tunisia and Italy in the middle of the shoot, which gave us time to make those set changes back at the studio,” explains Bocquet. “We shot at Leavesdon for six weeks, went away for four, came back for four. Because we’re in Australia it’s not really possible to go to Tunisia and Italy and come back again, just because of the distances.”
Although his time is mostly consumed by overseeing the construction of the remaining sets, Bocquet is thinking ahead to Tunisia. “We’ve got five weeks more shooting here,” says Bocquet, “but I actually leave in two-and-a-half weeks with Peter Walpole, the set decorator, heading off back to Italy then Tunisia to get those ends ready. So another reason why my time is a bit busy here is because I’m trying to get all the information ready for the last two weeks of shooting here without us.”
In the compressed timeframe and the increased pace, the possibilities of missed shots is a reality. If there has to be additional shooting, and the set has been torn down, digital technology can come to the rescue. “There may well be pick-ups and things that we’ll have to do later. This time around, they’re comprehensively photographing the lit sets with a stills photographer,” says Bocquet. “They may well be able, for some pick-ups, to actually take a still and drop them into the background. That used to be done a lot in the old black and white days of filmmaking. The sets were photographed and if they had close-ups or inserts to do, they would just have a slightly soft still frame behind them, which was a blown-up photograph. That’s a very economic way of producing something. Obviously, in today’s day and age it’s simpler to do with this sort of digital technology.”
From Ad Art to Episode II – An Interview with Marc Gabbana
January 15, 2001 – When concept illustrator Marc Gabbana signed on for Episode II, he knew that a lot of people would potentially see his artwork. Little did he realize that his tight black and white marker illustrations would be the first piece of Episode II concept art to be seen by the public when it appeared on The Official Star Wars Website’s Episode II section.
“It’s so funny,” says Gabbana. “I followed some of the discussions on the net of people trying to figure out what it was. The big news that day was that Hayden Christensen was cast. People were talking about that. Then someone said, ‘Enough about that… what are those things on the Episode II web page?’ The speculation around anything Star Wars related is phenomenal.”
Even Gabbana had to look closely to identify some of the cryptic images incorporated into the page design. “When I saw the site for the first time, I had to do a double-take. I didn’t recognize it at first, because I had done those drawings months before. It was one of the early concepts, too.”
Though Gabbana remains tight-lipped about what exactly is shown in the website illustration, he did find the numerous theories about it amusing. “One guy wrote online that it’s probably some piece of throw-away art that they’re just giving us to throw us off. Another guy was the funniest. He said, ‘no, I know what it is.’ A friend of his friend’s dad whose son was in Vietnam with another friend now works at ILM or something, and they told him what it is. It’s amusing. These guys talk with absolute authority.”
Gabbana came in on the tail end of Episode I’s production, providing storyboard and production art. “I didn’t have much to do as far as concepts go, because everything was already designed. But on Episode II, I got in from the inception, and my responsibilities are far greater. I got to design many more things, which is good.”
Gabbana, whose background includes a lot of advertising art, finds concept illustration liberating. “It teaches you to be a lot more spontaneous, and if an idea sparks another, you just do another drawing. Production paintings are really the icing on the cake after all the design had been done. Star Wars designs have always been so strong and so distinct, that you don’t need to go through generations and generations of ideas before you hit it the final one.”
“Marc is a great talent, because he excels in the same way that Jay Shuster and Ed Natividad do,” says Design Director Doug Chiang. “He’s naturally a really wonderful artist, and he can draw all manner of shapes and environments. The underlying strength of the Art Department is that they all have a natural ability to draw, and an instinct for their subject matter, be it creatures or mechanical shapes or environments. It’s something you can’t really teach in some ways. You have to see it in your portfolio.”
Gabbana describes a strong level of trust between himself and Chiang, as well as the rest of the Art Department. This is quite important since, unlike most of the department, Gabbana does not work out of Skywalker Ranch. Instead, he works in a studio out of his house in his native Canada and telecommutes to the Lucasfilm headquarters.
“I’m in Windsor, Ontario, right across the river from Detroit,” says Gabbana. “It wouldn’t make sense for me to move out there. I’ve got my girlfriend here. I’ve got my life here.”
With courier services and e-mail, Gabbana kept in constant touch with Chiang and his fellow illustrators at the Ranch. “It’s very collaborative. I would send some drawings to Doug and then he would make certain revisions verbally. I would just send him a new batch, and go off on a tangent that I perhaps would not have thought of,” he says.
“I think Doug appreciates it too because I’m not influenced by what the other artists are doing in house,” adds Gabbana. “That’s kind of a mixed blessing too, because sometimes I want to see what’s going on. Doug e-mails me the relevant images for given scenes, but I’m not able to see what Jay or Ed are doing day-to-day. But that’s okay; I think this way I’m able to send fresh ideas, and not have it influenced by anybody in house.”
Before his illustration career took off, Gabbana studied architecture, a field his father wanted him to follow. “After a year I decided it wasn’t quite for me, so I transferred,” he says. He notes, with irony, that the training still applies. “I’m now a Star Wars architect. I’m very happy with that.”
Gabbana next studied illustration at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit. “That’s where everybody went,” he says with a smile — both Natividad and Chiang studied there as well. After graduation in 1990, he stayed in Windsor to launch a career in advertising. “I did freelance work for a bunch of companies in the States and always kept up my own portfolio. The movie industry was something I’ve always wanted to do.”
In 1995, Gabbana met Doug Chiang at ILM, and showed him his portfolio. “Later, I heard of an opening on Episode I, so I just called him up and got hired direct on the spot,” says the artist.
“Everyone who works in the Art Department has it: a spark that went off when they were kids, ” says Gabbana. “That’s what happened to me when I was 11, in 1977, when Star Wars came out. What impressed me the most was Ralph McQuarrie’s work. The fact that you could make these fancy fantasy paintings, and someone pays you for it. I thought, Wow… this could be a job?”
A fateful freelance assignment brought Gabbana in touch with his inspiration. “Ralph McQuarrie was doing some freelance work for Galoob Toys, and so was I at the time. The Galoob art director got me in contact with him and introduced me to him. We struck up a friendship. It was great.”
Of his work and designs, Gabbana is eagerly awaiting the return of Coruscant on the big screen in 2002. “I did a lot of those big scenes. Hopefully I’ll be able to design some of the matte paintings. Even though I won’t personally be doing the finished matte painting myself, at least I’d like to get a chance to do some really tight color comps.”
October 19, 2000 — Episode II is now firmly in the post-production stage, as the digital footage shot in Australia, Tunisia, Spain and England is being edited together to form a rough cut of the film. During this process, Supervising Sound Editor Matthew Wood is hard at work gathering what will become the unique sounds heard in the new Star Wars movie.
“I’m actually going out and recording new sound effects,” explains Wood. “I’m taking the recording gear we used on the set and I’m going out into the field and recording various interesting sounds to apply to the film.”
Wood started this task while in Australia with the main production. “I was over in Australia for a couple a months. I was recording various sounds out there, after reading the script. Right now, I’m building up a library of organic, interesting, unique sounds. I’ve got a fairly big library that I’ve been accumulating over the past ten years that I can always dip into, but I want to try to go with a lot more new fresh sounds in this film.”
The local fauna of Australia provided Wood with an important ingredient in his sound recipe. “There was a trip that I took down to Melbourne while I was there,” he recounts. “I went to Phillip Island, and there were a bunch of penguins that migrate to this one spot down on the very south-eastern part of Australia. I was able to go out there and record. A lot of these penguins have really interesting sounding calls – they have three or four different calls. They just come up to shore around six o’clock at night, and they burrow in their nests. There’re hundreds of them. I was able to get rather distinct calls, because they call out to each other.”
The vociferous penguins are currently slated to lend their voices to a new alien species in Episode II.
October 24, 2000 — Assembling a movie from over a hundred hours of footage is a daunting task, but such is the role of Ben Burtt, editor for Episode II. As a typical example of this distillation process, Burtt is currently cutting together what will probably end up being a five-minute action scene. “It’s huge,” explains Burtt. “There’s over seven hours of footage shot for it. I have to go through all that was shot in different ways, angles, and performances. I have to become intimately familiar with that material so I can say, ‘Oh yeah, I remember that Obi-Wan says his line faster in this take’, or ‘He says it with irony in this take, and he says it frightened in another take’ or whatever it might be. It’s just a tremendous amount of material to go through.”
Episode II is currently in post-production, a process that typically takes 20 months for a Star Wars movie. Gone is the 200-plus person production crew, and now a bank of powerful computer workstations handle the results of the 14-week shoot. “It’s all focused down to this room,” explains Burtt, of his editing room. Aside from new computers upgraded for Episode II, the editing rooms received much needed decorations: classic movie posters. “We wanted some inspiration so we got some new ones,” smiles Burtt. “Westerns, pirate movies and Captain Marvel.”
Every day director George Lucas and Burtt sit at an AVID workstation, scrutinizing the footage gathered in Sydney and abroad, slowly molding the film to its finished version. “I was able to assemble maybe 60 to 70 percent of what was shot over there in Australia, without George’s input,” explains Burtt, of his initial “assembly cut,” a rough no-frills presentation of the basic story. “I showed that to him. Now, we go back to make his first cut of the film, inching our way through the film, starting with the first frame, and working in story order. So each day, we try to make some progress. We may get a minute done; we may get three minutes done. It’s fairly slow going. It’s a lot of footage and a lot of decisions to be made.”
Lucas’ own film-roots lie heavily in editing, back when trim-bins, physical splicers, and endless reels of footage were the norm. Now, with Episode II existing entirely in the digital realm, this process is heavily streamlined, with carefully inventoried shots stored in a database, just a keystroke away. “I can find things quicker,” explains Burtt. “If it was physical film, something that we do now in minutes would have taken hours.”
The digital format also allows incredible flexibility in the construction of shots. Directors are no longer bound to what was captured on location. “George is directing in the editing room,” says Burtt. “He may rewrite something or re-conceive a scene. It’s also the first time that he’s had a chance to review his footage and reflect on it. Now, he can sit back and forget that stress of directing on-set, and instead evaluate and critique what he’s got. Not only do you have every shot to pass judgment on, but also every pixel within every shot. There’s nothing to stop you from moving things around, changing lighting, or altering sets, splitting characters up and rearranging things. That’s what’s happening now. It’s his usual process, which is to take apart what he’s done, and experiment with what he’s got.
“Really what happens here is that we’re creating layers of the movie,” explains Burtt. Director and editor work closely to cut the live action, which Burtt likens to the “foreground” of the movie. From there, the live action footage moves over to the Animatics Department. “They put in the mid-ground and the background,” explains Burtt. The Animatics Department puts in low-resolution temporary effects under Lucas’ supervision. “They do the first pass of the visual effects within a scene,” says Burtt. “They’re getting a tremendous amount of work to do, putting in all the backgrounds and the CG characters that are missing to work out a lot of the visuals that George wants.”
Once the imagery is supplied by Animatics, Burtt recuts the scene or layers of that scene based on the growing collage. This painstaking process continues, scene by scene, until the finished cut of film starts to take shape. “At some point,” says Burtt, “we can watch the whole movie from beginning to end, and that will reflect all kinds of story changes perhaps within the entire film, and the process will repeat again. We’ll recut the foreground, the animatics teams will redo the midground and backgrounds. And later down the road, a given scene will finally get settled on. It can then be turned over to ILM for them to create the effects and complete whatever other post-production processes are required for each scene to be fully finished.”
In the hurried pace of a Star Wars movie, the audience never seems to have enough time to explore the motives and attributes of the saga’s villains. They fittingly take a backseat to the heroes of the story. But in the Expanded Universe of novels, comics and games, villainy can grab more of the spotlight, with entire chapters — or even stories — dedicated to their cause. Here are some of the most popular bad guys of the Expanded Universe.
Ysanne Isard
Young Ysanne Isard followed in the footsteps of her father, Armand, who was director of Imperial Intelligence. Despite such highly placed parentage, she excelled on her own merits, proving a capable student and remarkable field agent. In fact, it’s testament to her skills that she was able to surprise her father by engineering his downfall.
Prior to the first Death Star’s completion, Rebel agents were able to steal a datapack containing coordinates for Despayre, the barren world that was the battle station’s cradle. She was dispatched to gather that data, but failed. Rather than be punished, Ysanne instead turned the tables on her father, who had assigned her that mission. She claimed that her father had allowed the data to fall into Rebel hands in the first place. The elder Isard was summarily executed, and Ysanne became director of Imperial Intelligence.
From this position, and from her icy, cruel and vengeful personality, Ysanne earned the nickname “Iceheart.” Though she was beautiful — with a striking face with one blue and one red eye — her chilling demeanor was anything but inviting.
At Isard’s suggestion, Palpatine allowed her to construct a terrifying prison complex that would also serve as a brainwashing facility. The Lusankya was actually a functional Super Star Destroyer secretly constructed beneath the towering skylines of Coruscant. In here, prisoners toiled under the illusion of being trapped on some barren rock-world, never aware of the bustling cityscapes surrounding them.
After the Emperor’s death at Endor, Isard allied herself with Grand Vizier Sate Pestage, the Emperor’s advisor who assumed command. The ever-scheming Isard allowed Pestage to be captured by the New Republic at Brentaal. The Ruling Circle of Imperial officials came to power next, but it was only a matter of time before Isard had them slain as well, seizing control of the Empire for herself.
Isard’s rule was hardly absolute. From all corners of the galaxy, a parade of would-be successors, warlords and charlatans all claimed ownership of the Empire’s corpse. But Isard had one key asset that they did not: Coruscant. She knew it would soon be a target to the ever-growing New Republic.
Knowing she’d be hard pressed to defend the Imperial capital world, Isard left an insidious gift to the New Republic invaders. Her scientists engineered the Krytos virus, a fatal virus that targeted non-human species. She unleashed the deadly pathogen into the planet’s water supply, leaving the Republic to deal with the chaos that ensued.
Isard fled Coruscant, tearing a huge portion of the cityscape apart as she blasted away aboard the Lusankya. She headed to Thyferra, home of the bacta cartel, and seized the world and its life-saving assets. Rogue Squadron engaged Isard in a conflict that became known as the Bacta War, and she was eventually defeated. The New Republic captured the Lusankya, though Isard had managed to scatter most of the prisoners. She herself escaped the battle.
While Isard recovered from her defeat, she watched as Grand Admiral Thrawn attempted to conquer the New Republic. After his failure, she approached her old hated foes, Rogue Squadron, to enlist their help in stopping an Imperial warlord. Prince Admiral Krennel had allied himself with a clone of Ysanne Isard. It was this clone that had hidden the Lusankya prisoners; Rogue Squadron agreed to help Isard if they could secure the release of the prisoners to New Republic custody.
Isard agreed. A New Republic taskforce attacked Krennel’s Ciutric Hegemony and managed to free the prisoners. Isard still found a chance to betray the New Republic, as she tried to retake her beloved Lusankya. Her betrayal was predicted by Iella Wessiri, who shot Isard dead.
Grand Admiral Thrawn
A consummate strategist, Grand Admiral Thrawn likened combat to art, and was an aficionado of both. He could cite inspirations, analyze motives and determine outcomes before his opponents had even consciously began formulating a move.
Thrawn’s greatest weapon was his mind. This was long ago recognized by his people, the Chiss, who banished Mitth’raw’nuruodo for his dangerous ideas. The Chiss of Csilla are a disciplined species, advanced enough to build a sizable fleet and an empire over two dozen worlds. Thrawn’s tactics were controversial in their boldness, and his activities within the Chiss Expansionary Defense Fleet drew many a concerned, glowing red eye.
The rest of the galaxy made first contact with the Chiss when a taskforce dispatched by Supreme Chancellor Palpatine stumbled upon Thrawn’s fleet. The young blue-skinned commander was able to decimate the intruders despite inferior weapons and numbers.
The taskforce’s commander, Kinman Doriana, asked Thrawn for a parley. The two conversed, and Doriana was able to appeal to Thrawn’s cool sense of logic and order. He outlined his mission — to destroy the incoming Outbound Flight vessel — to Thrawn, spelling out the threat that this vessel filled with Jedi Masters posed to the Chiss people. Thrawn completed the mission that Doriana failed and destroyed the Outbound Flight project.
Returning to Csilla, Thrawn was reprimanded for his hostilities. Though he explained that his actions were part of a pre-emptive strike to protect Csilla and the Chiss, the ruling houses could not wrap their minds around such radical concepts. Thrawn was placed under close observation. In time, his activities caused him to be altogether banished from the Chiss.
The Chiss’s loss became Palpatine’s gain. Agents of the new Emperor discovered Thrawn on a barren jungle world and took him into their ranks. Despite a strong policy against non-human officers in the Imperial Navy, Thrawn ascended the Imperial ranks.
Before long, Thrawn attained command of an Imperial Star Destroyer, the Vengeance. When he transferred to the Admonitor, he was given the thankless task of mapping huge areas of the Unknown Regions. When in the depths of the galaxy’s backwater, Thrawn re-established contact with the Chiss, who in the interim had been besieged by all manner of encroaching threats. Thrawn, who had once been banished for his bold leadership, was now being lauded for it. Many Chiss longed for his return, and Thrawn secretly established a base of operations on the distant world of Nirauan.
Returning to the Empire proper, Thrawn’s star continued to rise unabated. He achieved the rank of Vice Admiral, and earned Vader’s respect and access to his secret Noghri army. After helping dispose of the traitorous Grand Admiral Zaarin, Thrawn ascended to that rank himself.
After the Battle of Hoth, Thrawn returned to Outer Rim mapping duty. His ascent to Grand Admiral went without notice by Alliance Intelligence, thus his existence remained a secret. After the fall of Palpatine at Endor, Thrawn returned to Nirauan. He did not return to the Empire until four years after Palpatine’s defeat.
Thrawn contacted Captain Gilad Pellaeon, and returned to the Imperial fleet. He then began a systematic campaign of retaking worlds in a bid to recapture Coruscant. His genius manifested itself best in constructing strategies from mere fragments of information. Thrawn was able to locate one of Palpatine’s fabled storehouses, and there, found the technology necessary to begin growing a clone army. He found vessels for this army by discovering the long lost Katana Fleet. He recruited the maddened dark Jedi Joruus C’baoth and used his Force talents to better coordinate his scattered strikes. Thrawn also began to secure secret caches of cloned agents throughout the galaxy, ready to answer his call.
Thrawn’s greatest oversight was the compelling leadership of Leia Organa Solo. Leia identified and befriended Thrawn’s secret Noghri attackers. On their polluted homeworld, Leia was able to prove that the Empire had long exploited the Noghri’s sense of honor. She showed how it was the Empire who was poisoning their world, not saving it. Incensed, the Noghri turned against their Imperial benefactors. At the height of the Battle of Bilbringi, Thrawn’s faithful Noghri bodyguard Rukh killed the Grand Admiral with an assassin’s blade.
The Imperial forces scattered, reformed, and scattered again in the ensuing power vacuum. Ten years later, word of Thrawn’s miraculous return began to spread. In truth, it was not Thrawn at all, but Imperial conspirators using Thrawn’s name and identity. Thrawn did, though, have some sort of plan to return. During this time, Luke Skywalker and Mara Jade made a chilling discovery on Nirauan: an incubating clone of Thrawn himself. The clone was killed before it ever drew breath, and the attempt to resurrect Thrawn’s legacy was quashed.
Exar Kun
Before Vader, before Maul, before Sidious… there was a Dark Lord of the Sith that cast a shadow of terror and destruction across the galaxy. The ancient forces of the Republic and the Jedi banded together to stop the torrent of the dark side, and bring an end to Exar Kun’s rule.
He began as a simple student, studying under the revered Jedi Master Vodo-Siosk Baas. Like the dark apprentices that would follow throughout history, a basic impatience undermined all of Kun’s training. His pride did not have the boundaries that his instruction did. Eager to ascend beyond his Jedi abilities, Kun abandoned his master and journeyed to the strife-torn world of Onderon. There, he encountered the spirit of Freedon Nadd, an ancient Sith who gave him further instruction.
Through Nadd’s disembodied commands, Kun voyaged to the Sith mausoleum world of Korriban. There, ancient Sith spirits tried Kun’s resolve. His body was crushed in a cave-in of tons of rocks, and Kun could not call upon the Force to help himself. Yet, the dark side offered what the Force couldn’t. By giving into his fear and rage, Kun was able to heal himself and clear the obstacles. He emerged from the caverns transformed, fueled by the dark side of the Force.
Following examples of ancient Sith Lords that preceded him, Kun came to the long forgotten Sith temples of Yavin 4. In Sith tradition, he took on an apprentice, the fallen Jedi Ulic Qel-Droma, and the two unleashed a scourge that would forever scar a galaxy. In the ages before Darth Bane’s restrictions, Kun and Qel-Droma were able to recruit more Jedi into their ranks. Many young Jedi turned against their masters and slew them. Kun himself extinguished the life of Master Baas in the halls of Coruscant’s Senate chambers. It was a dark time indeed.
Kun was fixated in unleashing pure, unbridled power through ancient Sith means. He practiced Sith magic and alchemy, crafting horrific creatures on the moon of Yavin 4. He brandished a Sith lightsaber with twin blades that increased the potent weapon’s lethality. His followers triggered ancient technologies that detonated the stars of the Cron Cluster, wiping out entire worlds and searing the surface of Ossus.
Finally, a joint Republic and Jedi taskforce came to Yavin 4 to capture Exar Kun. He knew he could not survive the attack, so he summoned his dark side energies and trapped his consciousness into the temples his Massassi warriors had built for him.
For four millennia, Kun’s disembodied spirit slumbered. The presence of a dozen Force-sensitives stirred his consciousness. It was now several years after the Battle of Endor, and Jedi Master Luke Skywalker had begun training Jedi at an academy on Yavin 4. Exar Kun’s spirit sought to corrupt Skywalker’s students and bring about a dark side reign again. He controlled Luke’s most powerful student, Kyp Durron, but in the end, Luke’s students united and were able to finally dispel Kun’s spirit.
Admiral Daala
Though lacking the strategic grace of other Imperial commanders, Admiral Daala nonetheless posed a real and dangerous threat to the young New Republic in the months following the resurrected Emperor’s campaign of terror.
Daala’s rank is an anomaly in the predominantly male Imperial military. Despite her promising successes as a student and later, young officer, she was constantly passed over for promotion on the basis of gender alone. Graduating from the Imperial Academy, Daala’s career was foundering. In frustration, she crafted a false computer identity and entered contests of strategy against battle-hardened veterans. She bested some of Carida’s best instructors in these virtual engagements.
Moff Tarkin of the Outer Rim Territories took notice of young Daala’s determination and skill. He uncovered her true identity, and began to school her as his personal military protégé. It was Tarkin’s influence that allowed Daala to ascend to the rank of Admiral, and he placed her in command of a quartet of Imperial Star Destroyers patrolling the Outer Rim Territories.
Tarkin entrusted the protection of a top-secret military think-tank installation to Daala. Maw Installation, as it was called, was a weapons research facility like no other, sunken into a stable patch of space amidst the churning black holes of the Maw Cluster. In this remote base, some of the Empire’s brightest scientific minds created designs for new Imperial weaponry, including the first in a series of Death Stars.
Daala was given express orders to never abandon her post, to stay at Maw Installation, and to maintain communication silence until Tarkin returned. Tarkin never returned, having died in the explosion that consumed the Death Star.
For over a decade Daala and her task force stood watch over Maw Installation. As it was Tarkin’s most closely guarded secret, no other Imperials ever knew of it. The concentration of treacherous black holes made accidental discovery of the base an impossibility. For 11 years Daala’s fighting forces atrophied.
The sudden arrival of an Imperial shuttle was a shock to everyone at the station. It carried fugitives from the nearby Kessel prison complex: Han Solo, Chewbacca and Kyp Durron. From this group, Daala received a much needed update on the state of the galaxy. The trio broke free of the installation, and managed to capture one of the most powerful test-phase weapons platforms, the Sun Crusher. Daala, seeking revenge and a chance to finally make an impression, emerged from the Maw Cluster with her task force, eager to wage war with the New Republic.
The decade of inactivity had its price. Though Daala was schooled in many strategic theories, her practical inexperience hampered her efforts. Using ten-year old tactics at a battle on Mon Calamari, Daala was easily thwarted by Admiral Ackbar. Before long, her task force of four destroyers was reduced to her flagship, the Gorgon. Bested, she joined the squabbling Imperial warlords holed up in the Deep Core Worlds.
Seeing the inefficiencies of the Emperor’s heirs in person again gave fuel to Daala’s fiery temper. In disgust, she murdered most of the warlords, and consolidated command over the remaining Imperial military. With Gilad Pellaeon at her side, Daala took command of the Super Star Destroyer Knight Hammer and engaged in an ill-advised strike against Luke Skywalker’s Jedi academy on Yavin 4.
The battle ended poorly for Daala, with the Knight Hammer falling victim to sabotage. Broken, Daala abandoned her command to Pellaeon and then fled to the remote world of Pedducis Chorios. She settled into civilian life, leading a group of settlers on the distant world.
A year later, the inhumane tactics of Moff Getelles brought Daala out of retirement. When she learned that Getelles had used an outbreak of the Death Seed plague to gain control of the Meridian sector, Daala threw in her lot with the forces that opposed him.
Once the dust of that conflict had settled, Daala was not content to return to retired civilian life. She again journeyed to the Deep Core, amassing troops and war vessels in a bid to again challenge the New Republic.
She attempted such a strike just prior to the Corellian insurrection. Her forces were repulsed by General Garm Bel Iblis. At great cost, Daala escaped the battle, and she has not been seen since.
Lumiya
The months following the Battle of Hoth were especially trying for the heroes of the Rebellion. With morale crushed following the abandonment of Echo Base and the capture of Han Solo, the Rebels faced the unthinkable possibility that Luke Skywalker had killed a fellow Rebel pilot.
Following the Alliance relocation to a temporary outpost on Arbra, Luke struck up a close friendship with fellow Rogue Squadron member Shira Brie. She was bright, talented and beautiful, and their friendship evolved into something closer. Rogue Squadron was then pressed into service striking at a secret Imperial armada, infiltrating the fleet aboard captured and modified TIE fighters.
The TIEs were outfitted with transponders that allowed the Rogues to identify each other amidst the enemy ships. During the thick of battle, Skywalker’s transponder malfunctioned. He was unable to determine which of the surrounding starfighters were in fact his allies. Forgoing technology as he had done during the Battle of Yavin, Luke instead relied upon the Force. He used his instincts to pick his targets, and fired at advancing enemy craft. One of the vessels that Luke shot out of the skies was Shira Brie’s.
Returning to Arbra, Skywalker did not find a hero’s welcome. His rank and service were suspended until Alliance analysts could determine just what had happened. Shaken, Luke began to question his faith in the Force. Skywalker, accompanied by the Wookiee Chewbacca, left Arbra to conduct their own investigation. They journeyed to Shalyvane, supposed homeworld of Shira Brie. There, they learned the truth of this enigmatic woman.
Shira Elan Colla Brie was born on Coruscant, and spent her life serving as a key agent of the Empire. It was Darth Vader who handpicked Brie for accelerated training in Imperial Intelligence. Her mind was enhanced through mnemonic drug training, her body hardened through expertise of exotic martial arts. Proving herself a capable agent, Brie was dispatched by Vader to infiltrate the Rebel Alliance.
One of her primary goals was to discredit Luke Skywalker. Vader hoped that his son, finding no quarter within the Alliance ranks, would eventually wander back to him. Brie almost succeeded when Luke destroyed her fighter, but Skywalker was able to prove his innocence, and reveal Brie’s past.
Shira did not die in the TIE fighter incident. Her crippled body was gathered by Vader’s agents, and she recuperated within secret chambers aboard the Super Star Destroyer Executor. Vader watched closely as Brie’s body was rebuilt and enhanced through mechanical implants. Fueled by rage and an already promising strength in the Force, Brie emerged from the bacta tanks a changed woman. She had given in to hatred, and was renamed the Dark Lady Lumiya. Impressed with his pupil’s development, Vader began to hone her Force abilities.
Vader knew that no secret could be kept from his master, the Emperor. He presented Palpatine with Lumiya as a gift — as a new Emperor’s Hand. Palpatine accepted, and Vader continued her training. Lumiya was sequestered on the ancient Sith world of Ziost when the Battle of Endor forever changed the Empire. It was on this frigid world that she crafted her unique weapon — a lightwhip built of Kaiburr crystal shards and Mandalorian iron.
Lumiya then emerged as the cyborg chief of security for the slaving guild on the planet Herdessa. She attempted to arrest a visiting Princess Leia Organa, but was thwarted by a revolution against the guild. Though Lumiya sustained a blaster wound, she survived the battle to swear vengeance on the Alliance.
She then surfaced on the planet Kinooine, with her collection of Imperial forces allied with fearsome Nagai invaders. On Kinooine, Luke Skywalker and Lumiya were finally reunited, and the two engaged in a spectacular duel. At first, Lumiya bested Luke, as well as brutally wounding his allies Dani and Kiro. In their second battle, Skywalker managed to defeat Lumiya, shattering her armor, and revealing her to be Shira Brie.
In the nebulous and shifting alliances that plagued the Imperial fragments during the Nagai invasion, Lumiya attached her Imperial resources — which included three Star Destroyers, two frigates and four corvettes — to the alien fleet belonging to the Tofs. When the Tof incursion was eventually repulsed, Lumiya disappeared from the galaxy. Her current whereabouts are unknown, but she did leave behind a legacy of at least two pupils — a young man named Flint and a treacherous Royal Guard named Carnor Jax.
Brakiss
The tragic words of Obi-Wan Kenobi long haunted Luke Skywalker when he took it upon himself to train a new generation of Jedi Knights. That such a powerful and gifted Jedi Knight as Obi-Wan could fail and produce an abomination such as Darth Vader was a terrifying notion. It was many years before Skywalker felt comfortable enough to take on students. His success is undeniable, but along the path to rebuilding the order, there are tragic examples of those who have fallen from the light.
Thus is the case with Brakiss. Discovered as an infant during the Imperial occupation of Msst, the Force-sensitive child was taken into the custody of the Empire’s Inquisitors. He failed to qualify for service as one of the Emperor’s select agents, but the Inquisitors forged him to be a weapon for their own using.
During his sheltered upbringing, the galaxy turned itself inside out. The Empire was toppled, first with the death of Palpatine and the scuttling of the fleet at Endor, and then with the eventual reclamation of Coruscant and establishment of the New Republic. After the collapse of the resurrected Emperor’s campaign to snuff out the Republic, the few surviving members of the Inquisitorius learned of Luke Skywalker’s Jedi academy on Yavin 4.
Brakiss’ masters forged a plausible background for him, and sent him to the Academy, so that their dark pupil could unsettle the new Jedi order from within. Skywalker accepted Brakiss, and saw through his falsified history. He knew full well of Brakiss’ agenda, but he saw great potential and the good in Brakiss’ heart. Skywalker sought to turn him from the dark side.
Brakiss underwent a pivotal Jedi trial under Skywalker’s tutelege. Brakiss confronted the darkness within and his spirit was broken by what he encountered. Shamed, he fled the academy. The fugitive Jedi encountered another fallen student of Skywalker’s, an angry youth named Dolph. Brakiss joined Dolph’s campaign of terror against the New Republic. Based on the droid-manufacturing moon of Telti, Brakiss oversaw the secret installation of countless bombs into droids destined throughout the galaxy. Several of these droids detonated in the heart of the New Republic Senate.
Consumed by guilt over the tragedy, Brakiss fled while the New Republic brought Dolph to justice. Brakiss attempted to reestablish ties with Imperial warlords in the heart of the Galactic Core. Again, the galaxy underwent seismic political changes, as the New Republic and the Imperial Remnant signed an historic peace accord.
Despite the cease in hostilities, there were those in the Core who refused to let the violence die. These struggling warlords reformed under the banner of the Second Imperium, with the Shadow Academy as the centerpiece. It was to be a training ground for a new generation of Dark Jedi, led by Brakiss. Drawing their ranks from disillusioned Force-sensitives and Dathomirian Nightsisters, the Shadow Academy struck at Luke Skywalker’s Jedi order.
The young Jedi Knights Jacen and Jaina Solo tangled with the Shadow Academy on numerous occasions. The Shadow Academy was ultimately defeated, and Brakiss died in the conflict.
Prince Xizor
Prince Xizor was the Underlord of the most powerful criminal organization in the galaxy. He was one of the most influential beings in the entire Empire, third to Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith. An elegant being, Xizor was highly public, but his associations with Black Sun were only whispered, and never ever spoken in accusatory tones.
An ambitious criminal mastermind, Xizor schemed to topple Darth Vader from his favored position beside Palpatine. Xizor hated Vader, though the Dark Lord never suspected the true reason why. About a decade before the Battle of Hoth, Vader had established a biological weapons laboratory on the Falleen homeworld. After an accident, the city adjacent to the lab had to be razed by orbital bombardment to stop further contamination. Vader’s actions killed 200,000 Falleen, including Xizor’s entire family — his mother, father, brother, two sisters and three uncles. Xizor was not on the planet at the time. Rather than strike out in unprepared vengeance, Xizor carefully erased all records of the family tragedy, forever deleting evidence of his hatred for Vader.
Xizor was a smooth-skinned Falleen male with green skin, and deep lavender eyes. He wore his black hair in a topknot ponytail, and wore a smaller ponytail at the base of his skull. He often wore long robes of luxurious fabric. When aroused, his skin turned a orange-scarlet, part of a complex mating response holdover from Xizor’s reptilian heritage. Xizor’s alien background also allowed him limited amphibious ability, as he was able to breathe water for 12 hours.
Although his body was muscular, exotic and similar to a 30-year old humanoid in appearance, he was over a century old. He conditioned his physique with myostim units that exercised individual muscles. Xizor also trained in martial arts, and was an expert marksman from training on his personal firing range.
Xizor wrapped himself in the trappings of luxury. His wealth exceeded that of many planets. In his immense palatial estate on Coruscant he would relax, plot and run his vast criminal and corporate empires. His palace neighbored that of Lord Vader, and when the Dark Lord would emerge from his home, Xizor would have him watched constantly. In orbit over Coruscant, Xizor maintained an opulent skyhook resort called the Falleen’s Fist. Xizor also owned part of the Manarai, the famous luxury restaurant overlooking Imperial Center’s Monument Park.
To relax, Xizor would sit in his conform-lounger, or trim the branches of his 600-year old miniature firethorn tree. It would provide him blessed distraction from the everyday vagaries of running both Black Sun and Xizor Transport Systems.
He did not rule alone, however. Although he was head of this criminal family, below him he had several “Vigos” or lieutenants that oversaw operations in specific territories. Xizor surrounded himself with the best of employees. His most prized assistant — and possession — was the human replica droid Guri.
Prior to Jabba the Hutt’s ascent to the head of the Desilijic clan, Xizor meddled into the internal politics of the Hutt heirarchy. The Besadii clan and the Desilijic clan were in heated competition for control of lucrative slaving and spice contracts. In that competition, the head of the Besadii clan, Aruk the Hutt, was poisoned by Jabba the Hutt. Durga the Hutt began an intense investigation to find the cause of his parent’s death. Xizor set his eye on getting the powerful Hutt into his debt, so he had his agent Green purposely befuddle Durga’s investigators with false leads and dead-ends. Flustered, Durga came to Xizor, asking for help.
Xizor’s agents were easily able to put the blame on Jabba the Hutt. Xizor had Guri ensure that no harm came to Jabba, though, since he was a valued contact. With Durga in his debt, Xizor pressured him to become a Black Sun Vigo, thus allowing Black Sun a foothold into the Hutt criminal empire. This juggling of allies and enemies was a trademark Xizor strategy.
During the Hoth campaign, Xizor was in the Emperor’s throne room on Coruscant when the Supreme Ruler contacted Lord Vader. The two dark-side imbued beings spoke of “the son of Skywalker.” Xizor pieced together that Luke Skywalker was Vader’s son, and learned of Vader’s plan to seduce Skywalker to the dark side of the Force. Rather than have Vader succeed, Xizor plotted to have Skywalker killed.
Xizor’s schemes were often multifaceted and complex. For instance, once learning of Ororo Transportation’s efforts to undermine Xizor Transport System’s control of shipping in the Bajic sector, Xizor told Vader of a Rebel fleet massing in the Vergesso system. In truth, the ships belonged to Ororo, and in an effort to impress the Emperor, Vader took his taskforce to destroy the ships. Xizor had duped Vader and Palpatine, and had achieved his objective of wiping out a business rival, and tying up a personal rival in a mission that allowed Xizor to continue his hunt for Skywalker.
Another plot involving Xizor was the release of the Death Star plans to the Rebels. Xizor did not make the acquisition of said plans simple, however. Many Bothans died in capturing the freighter Suprosa, which carried the plans. Xizor could not lose — if the plans lured the Alliance into the Empire’s trap, the Emperor would laud Xizor for a scheme well executed. If the Alliance was able to pull victory from the second Death Star, Xizor would still succeed as an ally of the victorious Rebels, since it was he who allowed the plans to be discovered.
The Falleen had learned to stave off passion in favor of cold, methodical plotting. Xizor was cool and cunning. He savored the presence of humanoid females he deemed attractive. He had a string of mistresses; he never stayed more than a few months with any one female. He would depart, often leaving immense and extravagant gifts of parting — an entire palatial estate for one. For one with such a hedonistic and varied private life, Xizor grew tired. The powerful pheremones he exuded made the presence of women far too easy to attract. He longed for an equal to conquer.
That opportunity presented itself when Xizor learned that Leia Organa was seeking contact with Black Sun. Xizor relished the irony — in an effort to track down the repeated attempts on Luke’s life, Leia came to the one who called for his assassination. Xizor became obsessed with Leia, hoping to add her to the long list of female conquests.
Xizor arranged Leia’s transport to his citadel. There, he attempted to seduce Leia. With the powerful pheremones he produced, Leia almost fell to carnal passion. The two embraced, exchanging passionate kisses — but Leia rebuffed Xizor’s advances, making her point felt with a swift knee to the Falleen’s groin. Xizor, enraged, imprisoned Leia.
Skywalker, Lando Calrissian, and Dash Rendar infiltrated Xizor’s palace to rescue Leia. Xizor’s arrogance precluded any admission from his part that his security systems could be breached. With such denial, the Rebel infiltraters were able to make progress in the palace. It wasn’t until Leia escaped capture and temporarily disabled Guri that Xizor finally took notice.
High in the palace, Xizor was face-to-face with Luke Skywalker. In a standoff, Luke produced a thermal detonator. Rather than risk a bluff, Xizor let the group leave untouched. Calrissian dealt a powerful blow to the Black Sun criminal empire as he dropped another detonator down a service chute. Unable to recover it, Xizor ordered a general evacuation of the palace.
In the confusion, the Rebels escaped the palace. Xizor boarded his advanced combat vessel, the Virago, and escaped to the skyhook. High in orbit over Coruscant, a deadly space battle erupted, as Xizor’s forces tried to stop the fleeing Rebels. Xizor’s forces ran straight into Vader’s returning task force. Blinded by his rage, Xizor stupidly announced Skywalker’s presence into an open comlink.
The transmission was intercepted by Vader. Vader offered Xizor an ultimatum: call off his attack in two minutes and surrender, or suffer the price of not taking Vader’s advice and staying away from Skywalker. Xizor remained silent, and his skyhook was destroyed by the Executor.
The Rebels escaped, and Xizor died aboard the Falleen’s Fist. The remnants of Black Sun fell into the control of Moff Fliry Vorru. Guri escaped the destruction of Xizor’s trappings. Unknown to nearly everyone — possibly Xizor himself — was that he had a surviving relative who was offplanet during the Falleen disaster that wiped out his family. Xizor’s niece Savan survived, and sought to take control of Black Sun after his death.
Nom Anor
Spearheading the Yuuzhan Vong invasion of the galaxy was a silver-tongued and black-hearted executor known as Nom Anor. Though that was his true name, it was only one of several he bore during his advance mission to infiltrate a galaxy of infidels.
This highly skilled member of the Intendent caste has bioengineering talents that rival the skilled Shapers of his people. He has crafted organic tools of cloak and dagger, and created an insidious virus with which he afflicted Mara Jade Skywalker. Even when stripped of weaponry, Nom Anor is not unarmed — his eye socket conceals a plaeryin bol capable of spitting deadly venom.
Anor worked both as a subtle manipulator and a political firebrand, disrupting the politics of local systems and stirring up trouble for the New Republic and the new Jedi order. Anor pulled the strings behind Xandel Carivus, a key member of the Imperial Interim Council that replaced the Empire after the death of Palpatine’s clone. His behind-the-scenes actions helped hasten the eventual downfall of the fragmented Empire.
Nom Anor disappeared for years, resurfacing on the planet Rhommamool as the leader of the Red Knights of Life extremist group. His heated rhetoric against droids, technology and the Jedi amassed a sizable following, straining the delicate peace between Rhommamool and sister planet Osarian. As the crisis escalated on the twin worlds, Nom Anor again vanished, faking his own death.
His advance mission was over. Shortly after the Rhommamool incident, the Yuuzhan Vong invasion began in force. This principal incursion, spearheaded mostly by members of the intendent caste, was deemed a failure, and Anor’s status was tainted by association. The next Yuuzhan Vong wave consisted of the warrior caste.
Anor forged tenuous alliances in an effort to smooth differences between him and the warrior caste, who were predisposed to distrust the intendent. Anor hatched a scheme to use a defector to defeat the Jedi, but this eventually failed. Anor was able to recover by bringing the Hutts into the Yuuzhan Vong fold as allies. Knowing full well the Hutts were untrustworthy, Anor used them to sew disinformation into the New Republic ranks.
Anor was finally able to redeem himself in Warmaster Tsavong Lah’s eyes by devastating and conquering the world of Duro. It was a hollow victory, as the Warmaster did not promote Anor, and the intendent now finds himself competing with Vergere, Tsavong Lah’s unlikely alien underling and advisor.
Still, Anor is shrewd and crafty. His knowledge of the infidels will continue to prove valuable to the Yuuzhan Vong effort, as it eclipses even the Republic’s Core Worlds. Anor no doubt is saving a vital piece of information that will win him a valued position beside Tsavong Lah, and spell even more suffering to the heroes of the New Republic.
Episode II Art and Architecture:
An Interview with Kurt Kaufman
November 16, 2000 — When not helping envision the new concepts of Episode II, Concept Artist Kurt Kaufman tries to find time to illustrate for himself, for relaxation. “I’m usually just too burned out to do that. But when I’m not working here, I do traditional and computer illustration, professionally and recreationally, to keep my skills up. Landscapes, vehicles, architecture.”
His subject matter is not surprising, since this is also what Kaufman worked on in Episode II. “If there’s a focus to the work I do, then I’d say it’s mostly architecture,” he says, “and a lot of background and scenic shots. Very little of what I do is establishing the initial look. Mostly I extrapolate on looks that have already been established by some of the other designers. But I’m doing a lot more concept design on this film than I did on Episode I.”
Kaufman studied transportation design while at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. The move to Los Angeles exposed him to the world of film. “My dad was a car designer at Ford,” explains Kaufman, “and I thought I would probably do car design or product design of some kind. But when I was in school I got disillusioned with real world design, and became intrigued with the film industry. Of course Star Wars was very inspiring, but when I saw it, it never really occurred to me that I could actually work on something like that. That was such a world apart from where I was. But when I was in school Alien and Blade Runner came out. Those movies really inspired me, and I started thinking seriously about working in the film and entertainment industries.”
After graduating from Art Center, Kaufman worked in LA as a freelance designer and illustrator for about five years. He eventually landed a job in northern California, working at Industrial Light & Magic, where he met Doug Chiang in the ILM Art Department, along with a crew of other very talented artists including Iain McCaig. Later, when Chiang was organizing the Art Department for Episode I, Kaufman was brought on board.
“Kurt is one of those great team members who can bring a lot in from his experience,” says Chiang. “He’s an industrial designer, so he complements the team really well because he can fully flesh out environments and vehicles. He approaches it from a very practical design point of view, and brings to it aspects of reality. The designs look like they can work. It’s one thing to have people who can draw things really well, but it’s another to have people who can really figure it out and make it look like they can function.”
For Episode I, Kaufman joined the team later in the game, and much of the concept phase was already completed. His contributions, however, were important for the Animatics Department. “Mostly what I did on Episode I was filling in blank areas behind the live plates that had been shot. There was a lot of architecture as well, predominantly Theed, Coruscant and Tatooine.”
When The Phantom Menace moved into post-production, Kaufman moved to the ILM matte department to work on finished shots. “A sequence I worked on that comes to mind is the sequence where Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon and Jar Jar are in a Gungan submarine. It comes up out of the water and it’s the first time you see Theed,” says Kaufman. “Matte painting is all done digitally now; it’s a combination of digital painting and assembling other elements. These shots had some beautiful miniature models in them. It’s a major team effort at that point.”
For Episode II, Kaufman was brought aboard much earlier, and worked on both concept designs and storyboards for the major action sequences. “I prefer doing concept design.” says Kaufman, “For me, it’s a lot harder and more demanding, but it’s also more rewarding. I like being involved in the whole process, though. Hopefully after the Art Department is done, I’ll get to go down to ILM and work in the matte department again. Following through on the final art is really rewarding as well.”
Kaufman’s transportation design background served him well for Episode II, in the design of a Naboo bus that will be seen in the film. ” I try to work in my car influences, but it’s difficult because it’s not the real world, plus I’m trying to predict what George Lucas is going to like and what Doug is going to like. But definitely my automotive design education has helped me get to this point.”
Another scene Kaufman’s particularly looking forward to takes place in a shadowy abandoned district on Coruscant. “I did a concept for that scene, so it’s mainly mine with some of Marc Gabbana’s influence.”
Collaboration is key in the Art Department, and Kaufman has worked closely with Jay Shuster, Ed Natividad, Marc Gabbana and Doug Chiang. “Doug is the one I get most input and direction from, and some of the work is shared. A lot of what the other artists do influences a lot of what I do. And, of course, in many ways it’s all derived from George’s original vision.”
Kaufman’s own style has grown in his time with the Art Department, which he credits to the caliber of artists he worked with on a daily basis. “It’s much more disciplined here. There’s less focus on technique, and more focus on design and composition. ” he says. “Some of my work in the past was comparitively loose and sketchy. My work has come a long way because I’m working with people who are really motivating, inspiring and some of the best in the business. Working here at the Ranch on Star Wars with this crew has definitely been a high point in my career.”
Return of the Jedi opened six years to the day after A New Hope on May 25, 1983, and brought with it Lucasfilm’s new theater sound quality assurance system: THX. Audiences at special THX-certified theaters were able to experience the acoustic qualities of the film as the filmmaker intended, due to a stringent set of technical requirements and special equipment outlined by the certification. These enhanced frequency and treble response, giving the audience a fully immersive aural experience of the saga’s final chapter. Jedi audiences were also the first to witness the now classic “Deep-Note” THX trailer, which has become a fixture of the theatrical experience at many venues.
Like Star Wars and Empire, Jedi brought all sorts of promotional materials to U.S. theater lobbies, including posters, displays, concession premiums, and programs. By the next time a Star Wars movie saw wide release, most of the varied poster formats and all of the lobby cards had fallen out of circulation.
Tickets
With Star Wars hype reaching a crescendo in the summer of ’83 and with Jedi seeming a surefire hit before it was even released, benefit organizations, radio promotions, sweepstakes contests and more were all staged ahead of the film to ramp up excitement (and donations). More Jedi preview screening tickets exist on the collectors market today than any other from the classic trilogy, exhibiting a wide range of styles. There are formally-printed cast-and-crew tickets on rag paper with foil-embossed logos, slick cardstock invites for benefit organizations, standard-issue paper stubs with the film title and venue, and some of the first computer-printed examples that are still used today.
Posters
Jedi was the last Star Wars film to offer such a wide selection of poster sizes to theater exhibitors — inserts, half-sheets, one-sheets, 30x40s, two-sheets, and standees. Theatergoers who had attended films back in December 1982 may have been lucky to spot one of the rare Revenge of the Jedi theatrical teaser posters beneath the “Coming Soon” marquee — these were quickly sought after by hardcore collectors in the first weeks of 1983, then by the masses after mid-February, when newspapers announced the film title had been changed to Return of the Jedi. Though many lucky recipients may have hoped to retire on the eventual sale of their coveted Revenge poster, no retirement-worthy transactions have been reported to date.
For the film’s actual release, the Style “A”, or “raised lightsaber” poster was used to herald the Jedi’s return. Looking back, its spare composition seems unusual for a Star Wars release poster, since the posters released prior to and since have been predominantly montage. Actually, the raised lightsaber image was borrowed from the first Star Wars poster, isolated and elaborated on to evoke the spirit of the entire trilogy.
The classic artwork montage poster did finally make an appearance later that summer, masterfully composed by Kazu Sano. Interestingly, this was the first Star Wars montage not to include the droids within the composition. The omission would be repeated with the prequel trilogy’s final poster submission for Revenge of the Sith.
Lobby Cards
The U.S. lobby cards issued for Return of the Jedi were the last seen for any Star Wars film released domestically, since they fell out of use by the mid-’80s. The assortment of Jedi cards was similar to that used for Star Wars and Empire, with a few changes mixed in. The standard bordered and borderless 8″x10″ minis were still present, as were the 11″x14″ standards. However, the portrait cards had been upsized to 16″x20″, bringing the total count of cards cut in that size to 11 (eight portrait cards and three scene cards). In addition to two large 20″x30″ scene cards, there was one inclusion that has long baffled collectors — a single 17″x30″ card showcasing Ralph McQuarrie’s exploding sail barge artwork. Why a single, undersized card featuring artwork (also unusual) was selected for inclusion among the lobbies is unknown, although one can’t deny the appeal of one of McQuarrie’s masterful paintings blown up to scene card size.
Licensee Displays
Coca-Cola again ran a cup and pitcher promotion similar to that used for Star Wars and Empire, which offered a free Jedi cup or pitcher with the purchase of a large Coke and/or popcorn. Plastic cups and popcorn buckets would again sport Star Wars graphics when the Special Editions were released 14 years later.
Coke decided to join forces with Kenner for Jedi’s 1985 re-release, with a paper cup promotion that contained game pieces to win a variety of Kenner prizes. The posters and counter displays for this promotion are of special interest to collectors, since the prizes depicted include the now hotly sought-after Power of the Force action figure collection as well as the rare Huffy Speeder Bike ride-on toy. The cool dogfight-in-space graphics don’t hurt the display’s desirability either.
Program
Like The Empire Strikes Back, a similarly-sized program book was printed for Return of the Jedi, including rare behind-the-scenes images and interviews. These programs were also sold on newsstands, taking the film’s marketing message directly to the streets.
T-shirts
Some savvy theater owners found that if a moviegoer’s ticket was slapped onto a t-shirt, then it could become a walking advertisement for the film in the weeks following its “redemption” at the box office. This particular example was used for a premiere staged in Denver, although its possible these tees could have been used at select theaters nationwide.
When Return of the Jedi debuts in May 1983, President Reagan starts his own “Star Wars” initiative, while Valley Girls take over the malls with their own language. Take a look back at what life was like in 1983. The original Jedi will only be available as a bonus disc packaged with the 2004 Special Edition of Episode V when the Star Wars trilogy is released as individual movie DVDs on September 12 for a limited time. Click here for more information.
Highlights of 1983:
President Ronald Reagan proposes to develop technology to intercept enemy missiles called Strategic Defense Initiative — nicknamed “Star Wars.”
An estimated 100 million people watch the controversial TV movie “The Day After” which depicts the aftereffects of nuclear war.
McDonald’s introduces the Chicken McNugget.
Swatch offer their first watches.
“MAS*H” ends after 10 years on CBS TV, the first longest running TV series ever. Over 125 million Americans tune in to watch the final episode.
TV shows debut: “Mama’s Family,” “The A-Team,” “Fraggle Rock,” “He-Man,” “Love Connection,” “Scarecrow and Mrs. King.” Mini-series: “V” and “The Thorn Birds.”
Atari releases Star Wars, a vector graphics-based game based on the popular film franchise. Nintendo releases Mario Bros.
Sally Ride becomes first American woman in space on the Space Shuttle Challenger.
Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program launched in U.S.
Microsoft Word is first released.
Tom Brokaw becomes lead anchor for “NBC Nightly News.”
President Ronald Reagan signs a bill creating a federal holiday on the third Monday of every January to honor American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.
USSR leader Yuri Andropov invites Maine schoolgirl Samantha Smith to visit the Soviet Union after he reads her letter in which she expresses fears about nuclear war.
Celebrity deaths include Tennessee Williams and Gloria Swanson.
Cost of a movie ticket was $3.15, while gas was $1.16 a gallon. . A first class stamp is .20.
Top grossing films: Return of the Jedi, Tootsie, Trading Places, WarGames, Superman III, Flashdance, Octopussy, 48 Hours, Mr. Mom, National Lampoon’s Vacation, Jaws 3-D, and Risky Business.
Other movies released: Valley Girl, Scarface, Silkwood, Twilight Zone: The Movie, Yentl, The Right Stuff, The Outsiders, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, Educating Rita, Eddie and the Cruisers, The Dead Zone, The Big Chill, and A Christmas Story.
Vanessa Lynn Williams becomes the first African-American to be crowned Miss America.
Terms of Endearment wins Best Picture and James L. Brooks wins for Best Director, while British film Gandhi wins 8 Oscars, at the Academy Awards.
Run DMC releases their debut single “It’s Like That”/”Sucker M.C.’s.”
A-ha, Dinosaur Jr., Megadeth, Phish, Red Hot Chili Peppers form while the Misfits, Thin Lizzy, the Carpenters, the Who and Bauhaus break up.
Hit songs:
“Hungry Like the Wolf” – Duran Duran
“Hold Me Now” – The Thompson Twins
“Mr. Roboto” — Styx
“99 Red Balloons” – Nena
“Blister in the Sun” – Violent Femmes
“Africa” – Toto
“Beat It” – Michael Jackson
“Blue Monday” – New Order
“Buffalo Soldier” – Bob Marley and the Wailers
“Burning Up” – Madonna
“China Girl” – David Bowie
“Cruel Summer” – Bananarama
“Down Under” – Men at Work
“Gimme All Your Lovin’” – ZZ Top
“Family Man” – Hall & Oates
“I’ll Tumble 4 Ya” – Culture Club
“New Year’s Day” – U2
“Photograph” – Def Leppard
“Relax” – Frankie Goes to Hollywood
“True” – Spandau Ballet
The New Jedi Order, an epic tale of an alien invasion into the Star Wars galaxy, is now a year old. What began with an explosive hardcover novel in October of 1999, Vector Prime by R.A. Salvatore, has recently been expanded by a duology of paperbacks, Agents of Chaos. Author James Luceno answers some questions about his addition to the ever-growing saga.
Your two novels, Hero’s Trial and Jedi Eclipse, comprising Agents of Chaos, are the first books in Del Rey’s New Jedi Order series to focus on Han Solo. After all the controversy surrounding the death of Han’s partner, Chewbacca, did you have mixed feelings about accepting the assignment?
None at all. I jumped at the chance, because Chewbacca’s death allowed me to take Han through something more than a rousing adventure. The Star Wars films concern themselves with heroic journeys, and I tried to bring some of that sensibility to Hero’s Trial. Ultimately Han returns to the land of the living, but he is forever changed.
How is the Han Solo of your books different from the Han we know and love from the original movies?
Obviously he is grief stricken during Hero’s Trial. But he also has a wife, three kids, and a lot more miles under his belt. He’s living a somewhat cush life — though Leia has clearly been the principal bread winner — and he has become a legend in his own time. Fortunately, life in the Expanded Universe hasn’t allowed anyone to rest on his or her laurels, so Han has at least been able to keep his blaster hand strong. Even so, I figure that he has days when he misses having to embark on a risky spice run just to square with the Hutt. And he probably daydreams about past exploits while he’s fine-tuning the Falcon’s drives. You know things have changed when you can suddenly purchase whatever hardware you need, instead of having to rely on suspect after-market parts.
One thing in particular that struck me in your books is the relationship between Han and Leia. That quick-witted, back-and-forth banter is there again, but it’s taken on a darker, more adult coloring . . . even as Han seems to be sheltering in the habits of his younger, less responsible days.
Grief can test the limits of even the strongest relationships, and grief can affect people in very unexpected ways. Grief can sometimes immobilize the toughest, or afford surprising spiritual strength to people who might have appeared overly dependent. In terms of Han and Leia, I didn’t want to treat their estrangement as anything less than real. But Han’s recidivism is a sham, as well as a conceit. Deep down he knows there is no escape along that route. But even Han is not above deceiving himself.
Chewbacca’s death has sent shock waves through Han’s life. He blames Anakin, for one thing. His loss has distanced him from his other children, and even from Leia. What was it about the friendship of this human and Wookiee that made it so central to both their lives?
Deep, enduring relationships often spring from shared experiences, and Han and Chewbacca certainly had more than their fill. During their long years of adventuring they came to appreciate each other’s strengths and weaknesses; they watched each other grow — even though Chewbacca was, what, 200 years old when he met Han? Their loyalty to each other was boundless, and they certainly loved each other. But that love wasn’t complicated by passion. They could disagree, argue, hurl insults at each other, without having to worry about long-term repercussions. They knew each other as well as each of them knew the Falcon, which, in a sense, was their scion. Though he never said this, Han might have blamed the Falcon for Chewie’s death, as much as he blamed Anakin.
You co-authored the Robotech series with your sometime writing partner, the late Brian Daley. Did those books help prepare you for working in the Star Wars universe?
Robotech disciplined me for tackling epic stories. It trained me to absorb details about hundreds of characters, countless ships, a score of alien lifeforms. And like Star Wars, Robotech was a franchise that spilled over into comic books and role-playing games; so I quickly came to appreciate the importance of continuity — which I believe is essential for sustaining that “willing suspension of disbelief.” The universe has to be made real; and it’s the writer’s job to keep everything consistent and internally logical. You have to adhere to the guidelines.
Robotech also gave me insight into fandom. There are legions of readers who know more than I will ever know about Robotech or Star Wars, and it’s a sometimes daunting task to write for them, as well as for the casual reader. I’m being paid to contribute to the vision, but let’s face facts: Unless the creator of the franchise is doing the writing, it’s all a kind of fanfiction, isn’t it? But I have to add that The New Jedi Order is a whole other species. Considering that each book is only going to tell a piece of the story, we’re asking for a good deal of trust from the fans. Instead of inviting everyone to sit down to a huge repast, we’re asking that they content themselves with single bites — differently spiced and hopefully savory. If all goes according to plan, four years from now everyone will be able to sit back, blissfully sated. But until that time, readers have to accept that what may seem a dangling plotpoint is setup for a recurring theme. To some extent, the series mirrors what George Lucas is doing with the prequel films — save for the fact that we know how that one concludes.
Brian, of course, wrote some wonderful Star Wars books himself. Did you feel him looking over your shoulder at any time as you worked on Agents of Chaos?
More like berating me for failing to pump up the battle scenes or come up with funnier lines of dialogue. And there are places in both novels where I wish he’d yelled a bit louder. Aside from being sometime collaborators, we were best friends for 25 years. Without putting too fine a point on it, we shared a kind of Han/Chewie friendship that took us on adventures all over the world — Nepal, Thailand, Central and South America …. Brian was the first author to write a Star Wars tie-in, and considering that his trilogy dealt with the early adventures of Han Solo, it was a sweet-and-sour irony to be commissioned to write about Han, in the wake of his partner’s death.
Let me turn to a new character. Tell us about Droma, the Ryn whom Han takes on as a partner. Is he going to be a regular?
I modeled the Ryn on the Rrom people, that is, the so-called gypsies. It was tricky coming up with someone who could complement Han without being a simple replacement for Chewbacca, thereby cheapening Chewie’s death. Also, we wanted Droma to complement Han in a different way; not so much in the maintenance bays, as someone who could guide Han through his grief and dislocation. As a guide of that sort, Droma’s place in the scheme of things is not necessarily a permanent one. All involved in The New Jedi Order weren’t certain how readers were going to react to Droma, so his path in the story arc is not fixed.
Are the Yuuzhan Vong evil . . . or are they simply alien?
Jedi Eclipse This is one of the principal points of The New Jedi Order, and one that will be explored until the very end. One of the cultures we looked at when fashioning the Yuuzhan Vong were the Aztecs. When the Spanish arrived in present-day Mexico, they immediately decided that the indigenous cultures were evil, and they planted crosses atop every Aztec temple they razed during their march on Tenochtitlan — crosses that eventually grew into the very churches and cathedrals in which the Christianized Maya and other groups now worship. Yes, the Aztec were ferocious warriors, ruthless empire builders, and disciples of human sacrifice — but all in service to their sense of the cosmos. Do those cultural traits brand them as evil? Were the Aztec more or less evil than the Europeans, who, like the Yuuzhan Vong, essentially forced Christianity on the cultures of the Americas?
Will you be writing any more Star Wars books?
I’ve been commissioned to write a prequel to The Phantom Menace (due out Summer 2001) — a novel of political intrigue that will delve into the fall of Supreme Chancellor Valorum — as engineered by Senator Palpatine. It’s like being entrusted to write about what was going on in the Garden before the serpent decided to chat up Eve.
What about Robotech? Those novels remain quite popular, and fans routinely write to Del Rey asking for more.
I feel that Brian and I brought the Robotech cycle to completion — though, granted, not everyone agrees with the manner in which we wrapped the saga. For a time it looked as if Robotech’s creator, Carl Macek, in partnership with the folks behind “Babylon 5,” were going to resurrect the story as a television series, called “Robotech 3000.” But I’m not certain where things stand just now.
Do you have any advice for the fans out there who dream of writing Star Wars novels of their own some day?
The current prerequisite is that one have a reputation in science fiction, or, better yet, fantasy. You need to be able to work fast, and work well. But more than that, you have to be willing to let yourself be subsumed by the Star Wars universe, and not attempt to make the characters your own. Han, Luke, Leia, and the rest, all have distinctive voices, and you need to have an ear for those voices, as well as a facility for writing swashbuckling action scenes, lightsaber duels, and full-scale battles. In terms of developing stories, it’s best to consider the elements that work so well in the films: mythic characters and situations, narrow escapes, unexpected reversals, drama, derring-do, romance, humor, hi-tech alternating with primitive … A lot of voices contribute to Star Wars novels, so you have to be adaptable, a team player, willing to jettison even what you might consider to be a great scene if it simply doesn’t work well within the framework.
Are you working on any new writing projects?
I’ve just completed a memoir that details a solo trip I took to Guatemala to deliver some of Brian Daley’s ashes to a remote archeological site we had always talked about hiking into. The site is called Calakmul, and, as the quetzal flies, it is about 150 miles from the extraordinary Maya site of Tikal — otherwise known as Yavin 4.
Every Line Counts – An Interview with Concept Artist Kun Chang
The Art Department that envisioned many of the designs of Episode I was not wholly located at Skywalker Ranch. There was a second team of concept artists across the Atlantic, working in England under Production Designer Gavin Bocquet. One of these artists was Kun Chang.
Separated by an ocean but connected by modern communications technology, the two teams worked together to craft the fantastic far away worlds. “We were always very impressed with the things that came from America,” says Kun. “When I started, I actually had a different drawing style. But Gavin gave me a drawing by Doug Chiang and said ‘Can you do this?’ In the end my drawing style became similar to the U.S. Art Department.”
Born in Denmark, Chang has lived in England, Germany and San Francisco. His schooling has included the Royal College of Arts in London and the California College of Arts and Crafts. He has worked in advertising and graphic design. His path into the motion picture industry wasn’t as obvious as some might think.
“My father was a nuclear scientist and he wanted me to become a nuclear scientist, of course,” explains Kun. “When I was about 15 I met a friend from Germany and he was a big fan of Star Wars. It really changed his life. He said he wanted to do films and everything and I just thought ‘Yeah, that sounds fun.'”
“I saw the second one first, The Empire Strikes Back,” says Chang. “My father took me to see it in a completely empty Danish cinema which was huge and I was really blown away. I think I saw the first one on video actually, but the second one made a huge impression on me. At that point I hadn’t really thought I was going to do cinema or anything because I thought I was going to be an engineer. But people used to see me drawing and they would always say, ‘Well you know what you want to do, don’t you?'”
Even though he had been working as a concept artist and illustrators on films for a while, including such movies as The Fifth Element, Chang’s involvement in Episode I came about almost by accident.
“I had a documentary that I wanted to direct and I went to England to see if I could get it done,” recounts Kun. “As part of that I went into the Royal College because my old teacher asked me to come in and show my work from the last year so the students could see what I had done. I wasn’t really that keen on working on another film, but I showed my portfolio and Tony Wright was there and he was teaching them. We went for lunch and then I said ‘Ah, there’s one film I would love to work on, that would be Star Wars.’ My teacher just said, ‘Well, actually,Tony is working on Star Wars. Are you still interested?'”
Chang had actually heard rumors that a new film was in the works, and that it was coming to England. Just in case, he had started some preparations to his portfolio. “I made sure my final project for my degree at the Royal College of Art was a science fiction project,” says Chang.
After revealing his interest in the project, Kun got Gavin Bocquet’s phone number from Tony Wright, another UK concept artist on Episode I. “I called him up and Gavin was very positive and everything.” Time passed, and more of Kun’s past acquaintances from The Fifth Element were beaming about landing positions on The Phantom Menace.
“I was like ‘Ah great, I haven’t got the job,” sighs Chang. “And then when I had given up the hope and I was about to start all kinds of other things I got a call from California one evening and it was Gavin saying I got it. It was a big surprise.”
Once work started, Kun was given a degree of flexibility in his designs that let him explore numerous approaches to a subject. “I was given a lot of freedom and I really enjoyed that. Gavin would give me like a list of things that had to be designed and he would just expect like five, six drawings of each. He would just send them over to America and then they would come back with the ‘OK’ stamps or not at all.”
“We were all working on the Podracers when I first started. There were some people who came in for a couple of weeks and they were just apprentices and they were doing kit-bashing. So, it was very free for everyone to join in then and make something,” Kun recounts. The enthusiasm did occasionally spill over into a form of rivalry between the two Art Departments. “Every time we sent something off we thought, ‘this is better than anything we’ve seen from those guys in America,'” jokes Chang. “And then over time there would come a pack back from America that was like really stunning and we’d just go ‘Wow!'”
Chang’s drawings helped develop several Podracer designs. His sketches made their way to Elan Mak’s and Wan Sandage’s racers. He also had some input in Anakin’s Podracer design.
Occasionally changes have to be made when a two-dimensional sketch is transformed into a three-dimensional sculpture. “When I did a full-scale model of Anakin’s Podracer in foamboard, we discovered that the way the handlebars were designed, his hands would cover his face. We changed that, so that’s why the handles swing outwards towards the top,” says Chang.
At times, the distance between the Art Departments did hamper communications. “I spent two weeks designing handguns for the Gungans only to be told they don’t use guns,” recalls Kun.
With new direction, Kun began developing the more exotic Gungan weaponry – the atlatls and cestas used to hurl balls of plasmic energy. Early in the design stage, the Gungan would use these weapons to create the energy balls much like a glassblower would.
When the decision was made craft the interior of the Royal Starship in England, Chang was part of the design team that tackled that particular challenge. “I got the job of doing all the initial models and to come up with the interior designs. I spent a lot of time doing models as well as drawings.”
“The American Art Department designed the exterior of the Queen’s ship, and we’d design the interior, except the cockpit. Gavin gave me like all the models of the ship to work off of. It was really hard because I just had an empty shape, and I knew George Lucas had done a really rough drawing where he had put a little kind of circle, and that was where Padmé was going to be. And that was where the handmaidens were going to be, and so on,” describes Kun.
The Queen’s ship underwent some early changes. “There was originally a reception room which was supposed to be at the back of the ship where it’s kind of round,” says Chang. “There was supposed to be a window so you could look into space. However, there was no corresponding window when you see the spaceship from the outside. From the outside it’s all metal and chrome. So it was decided to take the window away.”
Aside from the various interior rooms of the ship, Chang also designed the slotted T-14 hyperdrive generator that is the cause of such consternation for our heroes. With a design quite different from the utilitarian nature of previously seen starship innards, the T-14 could almost pass as a wall-hanging, so artistically elaborate is its surface.
Many of Chang’s designs were of so-called “action props,” gadgets and devices actually held and used by the actors. Chang helped ensure that a Jedi Knight was always well equipped. His sketches include Jedi utility belts, breather masks, and holoprojectors.
“One idea for the breathers that everyone loved – but ultimately wasn’t used – was that Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon were going to pick up a kind of jellyfish and place it over their faces which would enable them to breathe underwater,” reveals Kun.
The Jedi props — the holoprojector particularly — had to have a certain elegance to them, to be associated with such a noble order. “I think that was kind of hard,” admits Chang. “I saw everything that was Jedi-like as being tiny and more jewel-like. Kind of like a Chinese artifact or something. Not clunky like everything else is in Star Wars. The few items that a Jedi walks around with would be beautiful items.”
While chance played a role on his joining Episode I, another accident cut Kun Chang’s work short. A herniated disk caused him to leave the production early. Still, he managed to make many important contributions to The Phantom Menace. Now recovered, he continues to work on other film projects. His favorite memories from the Star Wars experience come from seeing something imagined come to life and be realized in three-dimensions.
“It was a real rush to walk into the final set and see every little detail of the drawing translated into reality,” says Kun. “Even little doodles which I hadn’t really given much thought had been turned into handles or screws — seeing something like that really makes you aware of how every line counts once it has been accepted. That was really amazing.”
In 1977, the phrase “I’ll just wait for the DVD” was not the common recourse it is today, when fans can wait a few months for a film to make its way to the home video market. Back then, home entertainment systems and videocassette players were few and far between, and television movie premieres were often broadcast years after a film’s theatrical debut. So, to catch the latest movies, people went to the theater.
While the exercise of theater-going has changed little over the last three decades — buying tickets, waiting to buy popcorn, finding a good seat, etc. — the theatrical experience itself has changed significantly. Moviegoers now often have a choice of several films, with the added option of digital or traditional projection. In 1977, most small-town theaters offered only a single screen, and a digital presentation was still decades away from the projectionist’s booth. Audience members were also not guaranteed a clear view of the screen from a stadium-style seat, smoking was still allowed, and monaural sound was slowly being replaced by stereo and the new Dolby technology of the day.
It was this old-world, analog setting that greeted the early Star Wars audiences of 1977, whose first stop on their way to that faraway galaxy was often the theater lobby. Unlike today, where posters, banners, standees, and other promotions from any number of movies compete for attention within a theater megaplex, a single film was often the star attraction at venues of the past, and the lobby was the first place to exploit it.
Movie tickets, programs, posters, concession premiums, retailer tie-ins, t-shirts and more all had the effect of collectively dazzling patrons as they entered, adding to the “event” experience of the film they were about to see. What follows is a collection of items that old-school movie-goers might have seen while catching Star Wars at their local U.S. theater back in 1977, or in the subsequent re-releases that ran through 1982.
Handbills
Handbills, or flyers, were often given away at local businesses, college campuses, and theaters themselves to ramp up excitement for movies either coming soon or already playing. For Star Wars, three different handbills were printed — one that simply said “Star Wars”, another with the “A long time ago…” slogan, and finally a third with the word-intensive “An Entertainment Odyssey to the Edge of your Imagination and Beyond. Far Beyond.”
Tickets
While admission tickets to see Star Wars were probably the first tangibles most moviegoers received from their theatrical experience of the film, few, it seems, were actually saved. Of course, most theater tickets back in 1977 were generic, with no venue or film information printed on the stub — as a result, fans and collectors saw little reason to keep them. Some big city theaters and benefit organizations managed to print up nicer tickets with the Star Wars title on them, giving some examples (such as cast and crew screenings) an enhanced appeal among collectors.
Posters
While today’s theaters will often display movie graphics in the form of a one-sheet (27″x40″) poster or larger banner, back in the ’70s and early ’80s there were several formats theater managers could choose from. Star Wars posters could be displayed in the classic one-sheet size (actually 41″ tall back then), or insert (14″x36″), half-sheet (22″x28″), 30″x40″, or two-sheet (40″x60″) sizes. The two-sheet was also available printed on thick cardstock with an easel, called a standee.
Poster artwork itself was different in 1977. While most of today’s posters are photo-montages composed in the computer with several hands in the design, most posters 30 years ago were beautifully illustrated, with much of the composition left up to a single artist. Star Wars and its various re-releases represented the best of this tradition, with posters such as Tom Jung’s classic Style “A” one-sheet (and re-styled half-sheet) and the retro-inspired White/Struzan “Circus Poster” of 1978. Though not illustrated, the silver mylar “Coming to Your Galaxy this Summer” advance and “Happy Birthday” anniversary posters were also stunners, and have taken on mythic status among collectors. (Collectors note: The famous Style “C” artwork one-sheet by Tom Chantrell was actually distributed exclusively to international venues, although a few “mystery” domestic issues have recently surfaced).
As an interesting side note, many theaters early on were using the commercial Hildebrandt poster printed by licensee Factors Etc. in their lobbies, since distribution of the famous Tom Jung one-sheet bearing similar artwork was allegedly slow to reach them.
Theatrical Banner
Most fans who caught Star Wars in its original theatrical run probably don’t remember seeing a large nine-foot silk-screened banner draped from the lobby ceiling, since few were ever distributed. Little documentation exists to reveal the exact numbers produced for the infamous, cartoon-like nylon banner with gold fringe, but their scarcity make them hotly sought-after among today’s collectors.
Lobby cards, which traditionally depicted photographed scenes from the movie in any number of different sizes, were a lobby fixture dating back to the earliest days of cinema. Sadly, they fell out of favor when single-screen cinemas began giving way to megaplexes in the U.S., and were largely phased out by the mid-1980s.
But in 1977, lobby cards were still in full swing — and for Star Wars, interestingly, lobbies were apparently the primary means of advertising the movie at the theater level in its first weeks of release. Photos of theaters showing Star Wars during May and June of ’77 reveal that lobby cards were often the only form of advertising displayed, with no posters in sight (even the famous footage captured at the Chinese Theatre footprint ceremony held on August 3 shows no posters — only lobby cards).
For Star Wars, there was an endless array of images and sizes produced in lobby card form. There were eight mini lobbies (8″x10″), eight standard (11″x14″), four jumbo (16″x20″), and two scene cards (20″x30″). There were also six portrait cards of the core cast (12″x17″), although these are often found printed together on a single uncut sheet. (Collectors note: The earliest mini and standard lobbies were designated with the number “77-21-0″, while subsequent printings exhibited the same code without the “0″.There were also cards printed with no number codes at all. Also, early printings of the jumbo card depicting Luke and Leia in the Death Star chasm included the soundstage’s floor in the shot just below the heroes. For this reason, most of these jumbo cards are found with the lower edge trimmed by the printer to preserve the scene’s intended illusion of a perilous height).
Some Star Wars licensees tried to reach their target consumers directly at the theater level, touting sweepstakes, rebates, or premiums to generate interest in their products.
In 1977, Toyota ran a sweepstakes which awarded a grand prize customized Star Wars Celica to one lucky winner, a promotion that was advertised both in car showrooms and in movie theaters. Posters and counter displays were sent to theater owners, graced with rare artwork by noted rock-and-roll illustrator John Van Hamersveld. The fate of the stellar auto has since receded into the realm of collector lore.
Kenner finally took its Star Wars merchandising message to theaters in 1979 with a free handout booklet full of coupons and rebate offers — a promotion even called out on the 1979 re-release one-sheet. They followed with a similar promotion for the film’s 1981 re-release, this time installing an attractive countertop display in theaters asking kids to send in their movie ticket stubs for a $1 rebate. Not a bad deal when one considers the cost of a movie ticket in 1981 was about $3.
Coca-Cola offered a concession stand premium in 1982 for Star Wars’ final solo re-release to theaters. With the purchase of a Coke, patrons could get a free 20 or 32oz plastic cup, and for the ambitious, a 50oz pitcher filled with popcorn. Interestingly, the cups and pitcher featured graphics from both Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, since both were appearing in re-release that year.
Programs
Among the very first Star Wars collectibles available was the movie program, which could be purchased directly from the theater lobby. Unusual for its horizontal format, the first printing was an immediate sell-out, since initial orders did not anticipate the strong level of enthusiasm for the film. (Collectors note: The first printing of the theater program can be distinguished from later printings by its slick cover — later printings have a textured “pebbletone” cover and pink interior pages). Lucky attendees of early preview and benefit screenings took home the relatively scarce credit sheet, which was a slick foldout brochure listing the film’s cast and crew.
T-shirts and Buttons
Twentieth Century Fox issued t-shirts and buttons bearing the “May the Force Be With You” slogan to some theaters for employees to wear. While the t-shirts are quite rare, the buttons are still relatively easy to find, as many theaters ordered hundreds to give away to moviegoers.
Life in 1977
When Star Wars hit theaters in May 1977, punk music pushed out disco and Burt Reynolds became the poster boy for outracing the boys in blue. Take a look back at what life was like in 1977 in preparation for the DVD release of the original theatrical edition of Star Wars! The original Star Wars will be available as a bonus disc packaged with the 2004 Special Edition of A New Hope when the Star Wars trilogy is released as individual movie DVDs on September 12. Click here for more information.
Highlights of 1977:
President Jimmy Carter is inaugurated as the 39th President of the United States; pardons Vietnam War draft evaders in the same year.
Elvis Presley is found dead at his home in Graceland at the age of 42.
The bands the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Talking Heads and Motorhead release their debut albums. The bands the B-52′s, Black Flag, INXS, Whitesnake, Def Leppard and X form.
Stevie Wonder wins the Album of the Year Grammy Award for Songs in the Key of Life.
The television shows “Three’s Company,” “Fantasy Island,” “Eight is Enough,” “CHiPs,” “The Love Boat,” “Soap” and “Lou Grant” debut.
ABC broadcasts the TV miniseries “Roots” — setting ratings records.
Comedian Bill Murray becomes new cast member of “Saturday Night Live.”
A private plane crash kills three band members of Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Celebrity deaths include Anaïs Nin, Freddie Prinze, Joan Crawford, Groucho Marx, Bing Crosby, and Charlie Chaplin.
The first Apple II computer debuts.
The New York City Blackout of 1977 lasts for 25 hours, resulting in mass looting.
United States Senate Hearing on CIA mind-control research program Project MKULTRA begins.
David Berkowitz, otherwise known as the serial killer the Son of Sam, is captured after one year of murders in New York City.
Cost of a movie ticket is $2.23, while gas is .62 a gallon. A first class stamp is .13.
New York Yankees win the World Series with help from Reggie Jackson who hits 3 home runs and earns the nickname “Mr. October.”
Top-grossing films: Star Wars, Saturday Night Fever, Smokey and the Bandit, King Kong, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and A Star is Born.
Other films released: Annie Hall, Eraserhead, Oh, God! , Orca, Pete’s Dragon, The Goodbye Girl, The Rescuers, The Spy Who Loved Me, Pumping Iron and Carrie.
Annie Hall wins Oscar for Best Picture, and Woody Allen wins for Best Director.
Atari develops the Game Brain — the first Atari system to use cartridges. Cinematronics releases Space Wars, the first vector-graphics arcade game. Mattel releases Missile Attack, the first handheld LED display electronic game.
Hit songs:
“Heroes” – David Bowie
“We Are the Champions” – Queen
“Watching the Detectives” – Elvis Costello
“Carry on My Wayward Son” – Kansas
“Go Your Own Way” – Fleetwood Mac
“God Save the Queen” – Sex Pistols
“Margaritaville” – Jimmy Buffett
“Nobody Does It Better” – Carly Simon
“Sheena Is A Punk Rocker” – The Ramones
“You Light Up My Life” – Debby Boone
“Dancing Queen” – ABBA
“Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band” – Meco
As one of the three Industrial Light & Magic visual effects supervisors who worked on Episode I, Scott Squires had to deal with the creation of virtual realities on a daily basis. But the challenges of visual effects have changed a lot since the computer revolution reached cruising speed at the beginning of the 1990’s.
Now able to manipulate photons like atoms to create an entire universe and its inhabitants, the visual effects wizards at Industrial Light & Magic use computers to accomplish an always-increasing number of tasks that were traditionally handled not only by model builders, but also set builders and practical effects specialists.
“Our first step is to scan the film into the computer so that the whole shot is digitized,” says Squires. “Then everything is done digitally from that point.” For visual effects veterans, this is a great leap from the way effects work was accomplished before computers took over. For instance, the traditional procedure used to combine several different elements in the same frame is called “optical compositing,” and involves the projection of a series of already-shot visual elements that are re-photographed, in sequence, on unexposed areas of a previously partially-exposed strip of film. Optical technicians first photograph a background using mattes, which are opaque silhouettes used to block out certain areas of the film. Then the technicians “fill in the gaps” by photographing the rest of the elements, placing each of them in the proper blank space left by the mattes during the first step of photography. But if the asteroid added to the star field background during step two needs to be partially covered by a spacecraft, then the asteroid will be photographed with a matte in the shape of the spacecraft on top of it, in order to leave the blank space that will be occupied by the ship in step three – and so on. When this delicate process is completed, when all the layers have been added, the result is one frame of film. Twenty-three more of these will be required to create the illusion of one second of movement on the screen.
Visual effects used to be created in such ways, because optical compositing was simply the most effective process at the time. All the space battles in the classic Star Wars Trilogy, among other scenes, were painstakingly done using optical compositing techniques. In some cases, particularly in Return of the Jedi, the procedure involved putting together up to forty layers of visual elements combined on a background, for just one frame of film. Now that the digital revolution is in full bloom, the technology allows visual effects creators to combine different elements within the memory of a computer, without ever touching a piece of film. And though the digital age gives filmmakers access to a broader range of effects than what had been possible before, the work remains just as complex as it has always been. Better doesn’t necessarily mean easier, especially in the world of visual effects.
Whether the computer is used to combine two live-action elements photographed separately or a live-action shot with a computer-generated object, the process of digital compositing remains generally the same as it was with optical compositing, with each new layer being added onto the previous ones. Except, of course, that everything is accomplished within the computer. More importantly, the output also remains the same: one frame at a time. “After the digital work it goes back out of the computer: we put out little frames every day – this is called a “wedge” – just so we can check the color and the look on film,” says Squires. Still, today’s visual effects wizards have more power, and can do more in less time than was required in the past. Gone are the days of white-gloved optical artists manipulating strips of film in a dust-free environment. But enhanced power comes with enhanced challenges.
“I guess the biggest challenge was the volume of complex shots,” Squires says. “Our team alone had to deal with 561 shots in less than a year.” Dennis Muren and John Knoll were handed out different volumes of shots, based on the complexity of the work involved. So Muren’s team had to produce 310 shots, while Knoll’s team tackled an impressive 1072 shots. In Muren’s case, the number of shots was kept at a minimum because he needed to produce scenes that were completely computer-generated: the underwater sequence and the ground battle. And since an outside, daylight scene is the most difficult environment to create digitally, the ground battle alone represented quite a challenge.
“For my team, this meant twelve to fifteen final shots each week,” continues Squires, “compared to the average output of about 5 VFX shots a week on a major motion picture. And we needed to keep the quality level up, of course. So part of the challenge on this movie was to find creative and clever solutions to problems. To speed up things, we needed to find a balance between digital and practical effects. So for certain sequences, we would shoot physical models, and then digitally enhance the footage. At other times, we might use a digital matte painting instead of having the computer render a new background for each frame. And so on. We even used salt, poured from fourteen feet up in the air, as the basic visual element for the Theed waterfalls.”
However, as Squires points out, digital technology has reached a point where another type of challenge arises: “We also need to know when to say, okay, let’s stop here,” he continues. “One of the great things about this technology is that you can control everything to the Nth degree, but a lot of times you have to take a step back and realize that the element you’re working on might end up onscreen for two seconds. And sometimes, it won’t matter whether a particular piece of hair goes this way or that way. You just have to look at it realistically and make sure that your last few months on the project are spent finishing the film, and not making half the movie more perfect than it needs to be. Basically, we bring each shot up to the level George Lucas wants and needs. Then it’s time to move on the next shot.”
As traditional visual effects artists have discovered long ago, it is not always wise to do everything to make an effect absolutely perfect simply because the technology allows its users to do so. Most of the time, an element doesn’t need to be perfect in real life to look perfect on the screen. It’s a question of balance, and in that, digital technology hasn’t lightened the burden. It may in fact have made it a bit heavier. But the wizards of ILM rose to meet the new challenges of visual effects, and stand ready to repeat the feat on Episode II. The ‘magic’ in Industrial Light & Magic doesn’t only appear in the final product on the screen : It is part of the whole process.
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