We rode Hyperspace Mountain 7 times and lived to tell about it!
You good, Andi?
Yeah just give me a second…
She’s good
This week, on The Star Wars Show!
Andi sits down with special effects legend Phil Tippet
Anthony and Andi takes a trip to Hyperspace Mountain
And much, much more.
Now from the Lucasfilm Headquarters, it’s the Star Wars Show!
Hey I’m Anthony Carboni And I’m Andi Gutierrez, and this is the
Star Wars Show, the only show that manufactures its own whimsy.
Weee!
It’s a wittle Empire Pew pew pew pew!
I’m gonna kill your family with adorableness!
That’s terrible!
Now the news.
Say, Andi, do you like Video Games?
Yes, yes I do.
Do you also like Star Wars Celebration?
Very much so, yes.
Well then you’re going to love the video games coming to Star Wars Celebration this
year!
Oh?
Indeed!
EA, the creators of Star Wars Battlefront, Star Wars The Old Republic, and Star Wars
Galaxy of Heroes will be there to showcase their latest games.
Plus, Star Wars mobile games like, Star Wars: Force Collection, Star Wars: Pinball, and
Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes will all be playable on the show floor.
But what if I’m not inside the convention center?
Ahahaha!
Don’t worry Andi!
The developers of Star Wars: The Old Republic are throwing an off-site cantina event, where
you can meet the designers and enjoy talks with the developers.
For more information check out Star Wars.com The New York Times bestselling series, Jedi
Academy just revealed the cover for the fifth entry in the series, “The Force Oversleeps.”
which I do pretty much everyday.
The book is written and illustrated by Jarrett J. Krosoczka, and in a beautiful bit of synergy,
you can read a Q&A with Jarret (after the episode is over) on Star Wars.com
Anthony Carboni.
You just finished doing the news this week, what are we going to do next?
I’m going to Disneyland!
With you as well!
In this pre recorded segment
We’re at Disneyland in Anaheim, California!
It is Season of the Force, ooh can you feel it all around, Andi?
It feels so good!
We’re about to ride Hyperspace Mountain, take a regular Space Mountain and Star Wars
it.
We got Brent here, he is the creative director for Season of the Force.
What a great thing to be.
It’s a lot of fun Tell us a little bit about how Hyperspace
Mountain differs from the traditional Space Mountain experience. Hyperspace Mountain is everything you love
about the classic Space Mountain But with Hyperspace Mountain it’s also a
Star Wars adventure so we have that great John Williams music
Ba bade bum bad a bum You’re hearing the other pilots, you’re
seeing Star Destroyers and X-Wings and TIE Fighters.
It really puts you in the middle of the action.
What kind of technical things did you have to do to kind of put everything into this
ride that’s already been there for 40 years?
So as you were going through there, we put projection effects so that we could actually
bring the visuals to life and we added some brand new special effects you might have noticed.
There are lasers actually whizzing by you to bring you right into the middle of the
action.
Those were intense.
I actually did not expect those.
Tell us a little bit about the soundtrack because you recorded an all new soundtrack
of classic Star Wars music.
We actually recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra in Abbey Road just like the original
soundtracks.
That’s amazing.
And we actually re-recorded so that it matches every turn, dip and drop inside the mountain.
Yeah the synchronization is really spot on.
That comes from riding it hundreds of times to make sure it’s absolutely perfect.
Tough life.
I know its really rough.
It goes through entire story beats of this battle.
Can you talk about how it ties into Blue Squadron and this whole battle that is going on?
We actually worked with Pablo Hidalgo who I’ve seen on the Star Wars Show a couple
times.
Never heard of him.
You really are in the Battle of Jakku.
You’re a part of Blue Squadron and what starts off as a little reconnaissance mission,
turns into a big Imperial trap and you find yourself in the middle of this battle.
So Star Wars Land is obviously in development but its still a ways off.
What can fans expect in Disneyland right now?
Well we are always celebrating the latest and greatest in the Star Wars galaxy here
at Disneyland.
In fact, we recently announced that with Star Wars The Last Jedi, we’re going to be having
a new adventure coming to Star Tours.
So yeah, you’ll be able to visit planets from that film as well.
That’s awesome, well Brent thank you so much.
If you guys have not made it to Season of the Force yet, you have got to get here.
It’s amazing.
If you give Brent’s name at the gate and tell them you saw it on The Star Wars Show
you get to ride Hyperspace Mountain 7 times in a row like we did.
You’re here most days’ right?
I’ll try.
Just give his name at the gate.
The captain says you are a friend.
I will not kill you.
Hey guys, I just want to let you know that I’m geeking out a little right now.
We have an absolute legend joining us this week, VFX pioneer and ,multiple Oscar winner,
ILM Creature Shop veteran, founder of Tippet Studios, Phil Tippet.
Thank you so much for joining us, it is an honor.
So I want to start off talking about your influences a little bit.
I heard you saw Harryhausen’s the 7 Voyages of Sinbad when you were 7 and you kind of
had it already made up in your mind what you wanted to do with your life.
Yeah I had no idea what I was looking at at the time.
Then, there were no trade journals or anything like that so it was very difficult to get
information about what that was.
It was a friend of Ray Harryhausen’s, Forest J Ackerman and his magazine called “Famous
Monsters of Film Land” published enough to go, they didn’t use a movie camera.
Did you start tinkering around with stop motion when you fairly young?
Yeah I saved up enough money to buy an 8mm single frame camera and just started experimenting
when I was like 12, 14 something like that.
So your specialty is really creature design and animation.
What you’ve done with Star Wars was…I mean stuff of legend.
Like the Rancor.
What was it like developing that character and model?
George kind of cast a wide net and needed a monster for Jabba’s Palace.
I came up with this maquette of this thing and George said, I found him.
Simple as that.
That was amazingly simple.
All the decisions were really simple and you puppeteered him as well?
Initially George wanted the Rancor to be a man in a suit but it just didn’t look any
good and we were running out of time.
Dennis came up with this idea of making a hand puppet out of it and shooting it high
speed so towards the end of production we shot all of that stuff.
Now, you worked on the Dejarik table in the original Star Wars but you came back to animate
it again for the Force Awakens, correct?
Sort of, they wanted the chess set but the puppets had disintegrated by that time.
They’re made out of material that just turns into like graham crackers.
So we went to the archive and used this process called Photogrammetry where you shoot the
objects with a camera high medium and low and in the computer do the reconstruction
work and printed out the objects at the proper scale and the molds were made and stop motion
armatures were made but the process to reconstruct it took months.
What sort of new developments in the effects field are exciting to you?
Virtual reality kind of the flavor of the day and there’s a lot of really interesting
things but for me the significance of it is nobody knows nothing.
So that’s really great territory to play in.
Do you kind of find yourself looking for the Wild West in what you do?
No, the Wild West finds you.
I’m here with Gary Tomkins, senior art director.
We’re about to step into the main Masasi base on Yavin IV, the Rebel hangar set.
Probably have been working on this for 15 weeks on and off and I’ve been here virtually
every day.
We started with plywood and then began textures on the wall and the painters came along, the
greens department, the props, the set decorating, We’ve got the X-Wings in and it just gets
more and more exciting.
I know because I looked, there’s no blueprints for this.
So how did you go about creating this?
We lovingly and methodically went through the entire Lucasfilm archives and pulled out
every single image we could.
Even down to working out the amount of bands and I can’t help but notice these status
boards from the original.
Yeah we wanted to be as faithful as we possibly could.
Its important for the tradition and the history.
Its been a long process but when the doors open and the extras came in dressed as rebel
troops, suddenly you feel wow, this is Star Wars.
This is something special.
It became real.
Last week we wanted to know what the best Star Wars Toy was and more than a few of you
could not decide.
Charlie Hicks couldn’t pick his favorite Boba, while Clone Wars got some love from
Lobo Nox 1313 Paul showed off his original AT-AT, and Glenn
showed off the lone survivor of his mothers infamous 1985 toy purge, Jedi Luke.
He really was the last Jedi.
This week, in honor of our guest Phil Tippet, we want to know what your favorite special
effect from Star Wars is and that should be very easy because there are so few to choose
from.
Send it to us using the hashtag Star Wars FX and we’ll feature our favorites next
week.
Which one are you thinking?
Stop motion tauntauns or the rancor puppet.
Its all so good.
Lightsabers are the effect that changed my life though.
But they’re real.
In my heart.
And also in this office.
We have real lightsabers in this office Thanks for watching and may the force be with
you.
We have no further information about the real lightsabers that exist.
Nope, I don’t.
I said I had it and that’s how I know.
LIAR LIES.
DECEPTION.
Are we no longer friends?