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The award-winning artist from Skywalker Sound made his Star Wars debut as a re-recording mixer on Episode I.

By Lucas Seastrom

By 1999, sound artist Gary Rydstrom had worked at Skywalker Sound for 16 years. He’d won seven Academy Awards for his work on Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Jurassic Park (1993), Titanic (1997), and Saving Private Ryan (1999). He was on the cutting edge of Lucasfilm’s pioneering work in digital sound technology. But he still hadn’t worked on a Star Wars movie.

“I will point out that I worked on Spaceballs [1987], so that kind of counts,” Rydstrom notes with a laugh. He’d joined the company in 1983, only months after the completion of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. His work on the Mel Brooks parody Spaceballs and the theme park attraction Star Tours would be as close as he’d get before Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999) came along. “That was the first real honest-to-God Star Wars film that I got to work on.”…

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Here’s the latest from: StarWars.Com

Today’s creative director of ILM’s Sydney studio talks Jar Jar Binks, digital armies, and working with George Lucas on the project of a lifetime.

By Lucas Seastrom

Fairly late in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999), as the heroes plan their concerted attack on the Trade Federation army occupying Naboo, Jar Jar Binks and Boss Nass have a brief moment together. They walk through a forest, the shorter and squatter Boss Nass’ arm wrapped around Jar Jar’s taller and lankier shoulders. The onetime Gungan outcast is now in rising favor with his people’s leader, and Jar Jar enjoys brushing off Boss Nass’ adulations with mock-humility. It is only when Nass tells Jar Jar that he is to be made a general that Jar Jar breaks character and faints with surprise.

The moment is portrayed in one shot as the camera pans from right to left. The characters’ equal sense of playfulness and pomposity is fun and believable, communicated in large part by their body language and distinct inflections of speech. It’s a type of scene that could be in any kind of movie. What makes this scene different from most others up to that point in time, however, is that both Jar Jar Binks and Boss Nass are computer-animated by the artists at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), with voice performances by Ahmed Best and Brian Blessed, respectively….

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