British Science Festival: 40 Years of Star Wars
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British Science Festival: 40 Years of Star Wars
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British Science Festival: 40 Years of Star Wars
- 4. Optical and Photochemical Processes Digital Hardware and Software
- 6. Compositing • Compositing is combining separate visual elements into a single image. – This is usually to create the illusion that all the elements are part of the same scene Star Wars - Empire Strikes Back (1978)
- 7. Georges Méliès A Trip to the Moon (1902)
- 8. Multiple Exposures + = • Two images are exposed on to the same piece of film • Equivalent to adding images together • Can be done in camera Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)
- 9. Bipack x = • Light is shone through pieces of film packed together in a post-production process • Equivalent to multiplying images together.
- 10. The Matte Bipack Multiple Exposure Star Wars - Empire Strikes Back (1978)
- 11. Matte Painting and Set Extensions Star Wars - Empire Strikes Back (1978)
- 12. Matte Painting and Set Extensions Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) Black Narcissus (1947)
- 13. The Travelling Matte and Keying • Required to mask moving shapes • Commonly produced using chromo keying The Thief of Bagdad (1940)
- 14. Keying with Film x Blue Filter Film = Exposed onto high contrast black and white film to desaturate A negative of the matte can also be produced
- 16. The Dykstraflex by John Dykstra
- 17. Shot SB-19 Return of the Jedi • 63 Separate Elements • 170 Rolls of Film
Editor's Notes
- I'm going to picking up from where Mat left off to examine the position of visual effects technology from the inventive genius required to create believable cinematic fiction through the use of modeling and the available early visual effects technology, to move on to look at how this developed across the transition from the first Star Wars trilogy and through to the ongoing developments occurring across the second. Start this journey with a look at 1997s re-release of The Star Wars Trilogy Box Set
- According to Glintenkamp, ‘In 1983, the year of the original release of Return of the Jedi, George Lucas and ILM had pushed the limits of what could be accomplished with the photo-chemically based visual effects techniques of the time.’ (Glintenkamp, 2011: 70) It was the developments in available technologies that encouraged Lucas to return to the series and make good some of the technical issues faced by a lack of money, time and available technology as Lucas himself states here.
- The release of The Star Wars: Special Edition, digitally remastered, box set made it possible for Lucas Film in Lucas’ own words to “fix some of the visual effects that, at the time, the technology just wasn’t up to doing.”
- It wasn’t until Industrial Light & Magic’s creation of believable dinosaurs for Jurassic Park in 1993 that it was possible to craft Star Wars in the way that Lucas had originally intended. Through the use of digital technology it was rendered possible to create a number of previously impossible feats for the creation of digitally simulated organisms, which included; Behavioral movement that are believable for our conception of what a dinosaur might actually move like (other scientific discoveries are being made here all the time) The creation of muscle and texturing that adds to the realism of the representation Development of technology that can replicate skin movement artificially Offered the possibility to composite computer graphic creations with live action film, in a believable way that doesn’t look cartoon like.
- Long gone is the mechanically constructed rubber shark of Jaws
- The shark is dead, dinosaurs are back!
- In all seriousness though, this ability to create all of those problematic, expensive to get right in model, creatures, characters and locations, suddenly became possible with the advances in digital technology, as McCallum states, you now have the possibility to “do whatever you want.” This heralded in a wave of new developments, many of which were experimented with in the digital regeneration of The Star Wars Special Edition in 1997.
- However, while the possibilities for the future seemed to have suddenly become endless, there were some immediate problems, particularly for Lucas and ILM. In the desire to remake The Star Wars Trilogy in the way Lucas had originally visualised and intended, were the added problems of working with new film stock and the difficulty of matching this with the now aged and grainy stock that the new footage was being intercut with. To do this they had to add both grain to match the original film, but also to match the feel of the twenty year old camera that it had been filmed on. To this end ILM had to fix the problem of matching not only the appearance of the film itself, but in maintaining the appearance of The Star Wars films that generations of fans had come to love. And you don’t mess with your fan base if you want to stay in business.
- To this end Lucas set his sights on CGI character creation and here you have Hans Solo with Jabba the Hutt. This necessitated a new approach to the use of the composite technique through the use of the digitally crafted Jabba who was then inserted into the original footage, this opened up new possibilities for the compositioning of live action alongside computer generated imagery in a realistic and believable way, that an audience is going to buy – quite literally.
- CGI offered up a constantly shifting field and exciting possibilities to those working with the format. Lucas was also able to create seamlessly rich depths of field in the crafting of new worlds, as is the case here with Mos Eisley through the enhanced use blue screen, cgi, miniatures and digital matte painting.
- In the case of Coruscant, Lucas was afforded the possibility offered up through wide shots of the city, that had not been possible with the existing technologies of the time. “In the CG world, the real physics of the construction materials is gone.” which opens up opportunities for fantastic fantasy creation. The limits of the model world are removed. The city’s representation had been key to Lucas’ vision for the future of Star Wars and as such these developments made it possible for his own return to the series. In the revision of Lucas’ vision, the reinsertion of such increasingly complex shots added to the enhancement of the Special Edition which served to pique the interest of the fans for future extensions of the narrative arc.
- But more importantly for Lucas, this allowed the ILM team to test out the capabilities of these new digital technologies and their capacity for the rendering of the next two trilogies of the Star Wars nine film series.
- Before filming for Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999) had begun, Uesugi, a Digital Matte Artist working on the Special Edition, claims that Lucas was already thinking about how ILM’s capacity for the forthcoming films might be developed.
- So, the 1997 Star Wars Special Edition as a rerelease prelude to the second of the three trilogies worked its creative Industrial Light and Magic.
- So going into the development of Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999), the use of enhance blue screen offered the possibility of moving anything, anywhere, any time on screen. In filmmaking terms other worlds quite literally become your oyster. In the case of The Phantom Menace, the use of animatics – as animated storyboards – made it possible to previsualise scenes in order to ensure their integrity in advance
- With the development of in excess of 2000 shots, 1900 of those were either completely created using visual effects or had a substantial part of those shots enhanced through the use of visual effects. This is massive. And Star Wars was the first film of its type to make such prolific use of this as a tool for filmmaking.
- Originally Star Wars, and Science Fiction films more generally were built and designed around the available technology, however in today’s filmmaking the design comes first and the technical teams need to figure out how to create particular visual effects as the needs of the production demand (and you will be hearing about this in operation shortly)
- Change this slide In the case of the pod racer sequences, there was the difficulty of how to shoot high speed travel that had to be fixed. At 500mph, the visual effects team had to get inventive, as live action would have looked jerky, if shot with helicopters, so they ruled that out. John Knoll highlights how there was some use of miniatures for close environments such as the caves, but elsewhere the terrain was created using computer generation. The did this by projecting photographs onto simple geometry so that camera movement could be created. So when flying past the terrain would look completely real.
- A further advance in computer generated digital technologyl that Star Wars offered was in the creation of Jar Jar Binks through ILM’s Caricature system. As possibly the first principle character to act and interact with live characters in such a dynamic and believable way, Jar Jar extended the levels of digital creativity and offered up huge potential for the future of digital technology. Phantom Menace contained over 800 character animation shots, with Jar Jar by far being the most developed of these in terms of character realisation. The physical and vocal performance of Ahmed Best informed the role of Jar Jar and Best would act alongside co-stars, rather than leave them to perform alone, with Jar Jar’s character to be inserted later, having made use of the Caricature system to animate his facial expressions and to generate lip synch positions. This assisted in the generation of meaningful interactions and reactions between the characters. Best was later removed and with Jar Jar the digital character taking Best’s place in the finished product. This blend of live action with computer generated environments was essential for the audience to suspend belief and to invest in the digital character. Of course not everyone liked Jar Jar’s addition, but in terms of advances in digital film technology, the creation of a digitally animated character within a lead role was both exemplary and ground breaking.
- Transfer this slide: However, while CG advances had made possible the development of entirely digital animated characters, it was not until Episode II: Attack of the Clones that Yoda received the full CG treatment. This was because Yoda would need to be adept and mobile for the closing fight with Darth Sidious The reason for holding back on the creation of Yoda as a CG character was largely as result of the love fans had for the character in the first trilogy. As Visual Effect Supervisor, John Knoll, states, “The goal was to try to make Yoda look like you remember him looking in Empire Strikes Back, not what he actually looked like.” However, perhaps the largest advance made by Attack of the Clones is in its position as the first full length, large scale motion picture to be shot on high definition digital video, rather than film.
- Character development took on another level in Episode III: Revenge of the Sith with the character of General Grievous. As a character with no mouth or eyebrows, usual expressive functions were denied and as such that emotion had to be enacted via body movement and reactive gesture. This represented a real challenge in terms of believable characterisation, yet once more the ILM team pulled it off through their emphasis on the convulsive action of his cough. In this case the acting comes through the animation itself, unlike Jar Jar which was based upon Best’s performance.
- In addition to the challenges, Much of the filming for Episode III: Revenge of the Sith continued to make use of live action filmed in high definition against blue screen to create completely 3D environments. Through the emphasis upon digital, the generation of large crowd scenes has also been made possible through the evolution of simulation. The creation of the digital mass and the creation of rules for reaction and action meant that the need for masses of extras were no longer necessary for large crowd scenes, whereby the advent of digital has resulted in both cost cutting and the cutting short of many a budding acting career.
- However what is perhaps most interesting is how this digital development and innovation is on-going, as Digital Matte artist, Paul Huston states, “it was like one day at a time for Star Wars. It’s kind of a continuum because this is technology – things change almost daily, and it gets you so that you kind of expect change… It’s attempting to get an interesting looking image just using whatever kind of methods that you have to make it happen in an efficient way. It’s lighting, it’s pacing, camera move, color, form, texture – the tools have changed incredibly.” However, it’s the on-going developments within science and technology that make these changes possible within the film industry.
- ‘People are drawn to Star Wars, and much of this can be attributed to George Lucas’ ability to create timelessly appealing characters and a fascinating universe that is familiar despite its unique fictional premise.’ Davis & Pakowski, 99.
- What I’d like to do now is hand you over to Eugenie who is going to talk to you about how this works in terms of the VFX breakdown.