When George Lucas came up with the idea of Star Wars in the mid-1970s, setting an adventure
of this scope in outer space had never been done before.
So how did he get the film to look so good when there were no visual effects companies
up to the challenge at the time?
He started his own.
Industrial Light and Magic was formed to handle the special effects in Star Wars, and they're
still revolutionizing the industry with their work.
Let's peek behind the scenes at what Star Wars movies look like before they work their
magic.
A New Hope
The original trilogy is known for its use of practical effects, but in truth those films
relied on visual trickery just as much as their successors.
Sprawling GCI backgrounds were not an option when the first Star Wars movie was being made,
so the effects artists at ILM came up with some ingenious alternatives.
Matte glass paintings were painstakingly created by hand and then added to scenes later, but
a different technique was needed to bring the movie's many spaceships to life.
Former ILM man John Dykstra told Den of Geek:
"Back in the days of Star Wars, we kind of walked into an empty warehouse and sat on
the floor and went, 'How are we going to do this?
The producers, Gary Kurtz of Fox and George Lucas, took an incredible risk by listening
to what myself and my collaborators had to say with regard to how to do this, because
we were inventing this stuff from scratch."
When it came to Han Solo's Millennium Falcon, Dykstra decided to create a model and film
it in front of a blue screen using an early computer-controlled camera, which allowed
his team to add all of the outer space details in post.
The Empire Strikes Back
Dykstra and his team won an Oscar for their revolutionary work on Star Wars, but Lucas
chose not to bring Dykstra along when he moved his base of operations to San Francisco.
It was here that ILM got to work on the next movie, but despite the success of the first
film, budget restraints were still a problem when it came to making The Empire Strikes
Back.
As VFX supervisor Richard Edlund later pointed out:
"Computer graphics were extremely expensive, very slow and the resolution was always a
problem."
Luckily for Edlund and Lucas, the team they'd assembled proved more than capable of delivering
results within their means.
The film's cinematographer Mark Virgo compared this era in cinematic history to the lunar
program, referring to the period as an amazing cooperative of artists, imagination, optics,
engineering, and home-brewed software.
Return of the Jedi
By the time 1983's Return of the Jedi went into production, the ILM crew had found their
groove.
Master of puppets Phil Tippett was brought in to head up the creature shop that ultimately
created the Ewoks, and the rest of the effects work was divided between Richard Edlund, Ken
Ralston, and Dennis Muren.
Among the jobs that fell to Muren was the speeder bike chase, one of the hardest sequences
in the film with 100 total effects shots.
Muren explained:
"Because the bikes were going to be blue screen, the backgrounds didn't require that many different
shots to do, because we could use them over and over again [...] I got the idea to do
it with a Steadicam.
I called Garrett Brown up, who invented it, and he flew out from back east and we did
a test out in Samuel Taylor Park out here, with him just walking along with the camera,
shooting one frame a second.
And the thing worked."
Muller and Brown spent several days out in the woods, just filming trees from different
angles, then matched the footage up when they went back to the studio to film the actors
in front of blue screens.
The Phantom Menace
George Lucas' long-awaited return to the Star Wars universe didn't fail financially, but
it let down a number of fans, who were quick to turn on new CGI character Jar Jar Binks.
Despite the overwhelmingly negative reaction to the character, Ahmed Best - the man who
played the Gungan - is proud of the fact that he broke new ground with Jar Jar.
He explained:
"One of the biggest reasons I took it was because of the challenge of it, it hadn't
been done before.
There was no Andy Serkis and Gollum, no Navi from Avatar.
[…] I was working with George to pioneer this new character form of acting and storytelling."
Unlike Best, the actor who played Darth Maul only has fond memories of The Phantom Menace,
his first experience on a movie set.
Martial artist and actor Ray Park was initially only brought in to film some test footage,
but Lucas liked his work so much that he decided to cast him as the Sith Lord.
Park's primary fighting style is wushu, but he also practiced gymnastics and ballet in
preparation for his big fight scene with Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn.
Once the choreography was worked out, the scene was filmed in front a custom-built blue
set and handed off to ILM, just one of the many sequences they were required to complete.
Attack of the Clones
The ongoing advances in CGI meant that Lucas could set stories in parts of his galaxy that
were previously inaccessible, which he took full advantage of in Attack of the Clones.
He explained:
"That was the fun part of writing the project, I wasn't limited.
Whatever my imagination could come up with I would just put down on the page and say,
'We'll worry about this later.'"
Animation director Rob Coleman was initially under the impression that some of the cityscapes
and backgrounds Lucas required for Episode II were going to have some practical elements,
but he soon learned this wasn't the case.
Of the 2000 effects shots in Attack of the Clones, around half include completely computer-generated
characters.
A team of 60 animators worked alongside 340 ILM artists and technicians to render some
of the well-known Star Wars faces in CGI, including a certain little green Jedi master.
Rob Coleman explained:
"The biggest technical challenge for me was animating Yoda.
That was due to Frank Oz having created that character in The Empire Strikes Back as a
puppet.
This time, Yoda [...] is much more active and prominent.
He actually runs and has a lightsaber battle."
Yoda's duel with Count Dooku was one of the film's big visual effects set pieces, but
it required some human input from Christopher Lee, who was one of the many cast members
forced to work with blue screens for long periods of time.
Revenge of the Sith
According to Ian McDiarmid, who played Sheev Palpatine, the use of green screen was really
ramped up for the third and final film in Lucas' prequel trilogy, which had the most
effects shots yet.
He told The Telegraph:
"So much of the filming took place in front of a green screen.
I used to feel great sympathy for Ewan and Hayden because they had so much fighting to
do and quite often had to fight imagined enemies.
[...] George often hadn't decided on details of the film, so Ewan and Hayden didn't know
whether they were filming an ironic moment or whether they were about to die."
Episode III also introduced us to General Grievous, the lightsaber-wielding cyborg who
held the title of Supreme Commander of the Droid Army during the Clone Wars.
Upon receiving the design for the character, animation director Rob Coleman knew ILM were
going to have a tough job breathing life into this one.
He explained:
"Since his movement was so restricted, we decided to have him talk with his hands, because,
although there is a grill pattern where his mouth would be, there are no articulating
bits for his mouth.
No lip-sync or facial expressions.
No brow to move.
No indication of what he is feeling or thinking."
Grievous wasn't the only villain without eyebrows in this movie.
It's in Episode III that we get to see Anakin Skywalker become Darth Vader after he's badly
burned in a battle with Obi-Wan, a scene which had its own effects challenges.
Hayden Christensen wasn't originally going to be the person in the iconic suit, but in
the end he convinced Lucas to let him play the part.
"I begged and pleaded and they were nice enough to build a Darth Vader suit that actually
fit me."
The Force Awakens
After working with J.J.
Abrams on his Star Trek reboot, visual effects supervisor Roger Guyett rejoined the director
going into The Force Awakens, and the pair's partnership proved as fruitful as ever.
Episode Seven made over two billion dollars globally, while Guyett and his team were nominated
for an Academy Award for their work, much of which incorporated practical effects.
In particular, real models were often used for the little BB-8 droid.
Guyett told Art of VFX.
"From the beginning we knew we wanted BB-8 to be as practical as possible, so that the
actors could interact with him, and of course J.J.
could direct him on set."
Removing the puppeteers from shots later on proved tricky, but Guyett had nothing but
praise for them.
Despite all the effort that went into making BB-8 real, there were still a number of scenes
in which the character had to be rendered digitally out of necessity—around a third
of all shots, in fact.
"Obviously some of the characters just couldn't be done physically, and those occasions, J.J.
was more than happy to push the digital technology of fully digital actors."
For all the practical work, Guyett estimates that The Force Awakens contains around 2,100
effects shots.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
The first Star Wars spinoff went in a new direction in terms of both narrative and style,
and most critics were impressed with the result.
One of the major talking points was the digital resurrection of Peter Cushing as Grand Moff
Tarkin, whose character was portrayed by Guy Henry via motion capture.
VFX supervisor John Knoll was able to track down a cast of Cushing's face made for the
1984 movie Top Secret, which gave them a huge head start when it came to recreating the
late actor's likeness.
The process took a whopping 18 months to complete and was done with the permission of Cushing's
estate.
Of course, Tarkin wasn't the only CG character in Rogue One.
To create the droid K-2SO, the filmmakers fitted Alan Tudyk with a motion capture suit
and then digitally added the robot's body later.
To get Tudyk's face at the appropriate level for the towering robot, they took two different
approaches.
In some scenes, Tudyk wore stilts while he interacted with the other actors.
If the shot was too dangerous to use stilts, he wore backpack with a paper cutout of K-2's
head positioned several feet above his own.
Now that's dedication.
"There's no way to respect this, you know?"
The Last Jedi
J.J.
Abrams spoke at length about using as many practical effects as possible in The Force
Awakens in order to re-create the feeling of the original trilogy, and his successor
Rian Johnson adopted the same attitude when he took the reins for The Last Jedi.
Neal Scanlan returned to head up the creature shop, and this time, they were tasked with
creating a new breed of animal called a vulptex, a fox-like inhabitant of the planet Crait.
Scanlan told Entertainment Weekly:
"The idea is that these wonderful sort of feral creatures had lived on this planet and
had consumed the planet's surface, and as such had become crystalline."
To get an idea of how such a creature might move, they fitted a small dog with a suit
adorned with drinking straws.
The next step was creating an animatronic puppet that the cast could interact with in
scenes, but much like the BB-8 build, it wasn't possible to use it 100 percent of the time.
Static models complete with 25,000 individual crystals were built for the benefit of the
VFX team, who were able to scan them and render the creatures however Johnson wanted.
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