An Expanded Universe

By: Mike Rajotte

For many movie mavens, STAR WARS represents the ultimate in science-fiction cinema. At the time of its summer 1977 release, the film showcased some of the most wonderous special effects ever to trip through an optical printer, visuals which subsequently earned Academy Awards. The end result displayed the most important technical achievement in filmmaking since the traveling matte. Whatever your personal feelings about this space opera, the film refined motion-control cinematography to the point where it became both a creative and extremely efficent approach to the effects process.

So, 20 years later, what's wrong with STAR WARS? Plenty, according to director George Lucas, who initially envisioned the film as a springboard for a series of nine films divided into three separate trilogies. The filmmaker has always been pained by the technical flaws in STAR WARS and its two sequels, and reportedly poured more than $10 million into restoring and updating the original trilogy's landmark miniature and optical effects to the current digital standard. Remarkably, the $10 million price tag of the three new Special Editions is almost equal to that of the entire negative cost of STAR WARS itself (in 1977 dollars).

Lucas wanted the new effects to appear as if they had been generated during the era of the original STAR WARS, despite the fact that Jabba and the other CG creatures populating Mos Eisley were technologically impossible to achieve. In the Special Edition's most audacious moment: the restoration a deleted scene depicting a meeting between smuggler Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and his gargantuan employer, Jabba the Hutt. While Jabba appeared in the sequel Return Of The Jedi (1983) as a giant slug-like puppet created by the ILM Creature Shop, the original Jabba featured in the 1977 sequence was a portly Scotsman clad in a furry vest. While planning the Special Edition, Lucas realized that the only way to add the extraterrestrial equivalent of Sidney Greenstreet into the shots was via digital technology.

Fortunately, animator Steve "Spaz" Williams (Jurassic Park, The Mask) and CG supervisor Joe Letteri (Jurassic Park, Casper) were available to join forces on the complex task. Their first conference with Lucas led to some interesting mutations of the Jabba concept established in JEDI. Recollects Letteri, "George wanted to put Jabba on a floating anti-gravity couch, because that's how we saw him in Jedi, but there were two problems with that: first, Harrison Ford was talking to this guy who was shorter than him, so Ford's eyelines were looking down; secondly, having Jabba just sort of floating around was not that interesting, so we thought, 'What if we put him on the ground?'"

Remarkably, Williams and Letteri tackled the five Jabba shots at the end of 1994, prior to the ILM software group's development of the Caricature animation program. Caricature had enabled animators on Dragonheart to work with fully shaded models in real time, resulting in excellent lipsynch animation. For the STAR WARS Special Edition, however, Williams was still working with less-factile technology used on Jurassic Park and Casper.

While Williams modeled and animated Jabba, Letteri was responsible for the scene's look and lighting design. "We tend to work like a director and cinematographer," Lettei says. "My job was a bit different than that of a traditional director of photography in that I had to figure out what the inside of Jabba's mouth and his tongue looked like, and how much drool there should be on his chin. I used the original Jabba's textures for reference; the CG model was constructed differently, so we had a Viewpaint artist paint it by hand. I also did a fair ammount of repainting myself, and I adapted the shaders I had designed for Jurassic's T-Rex for Jabba's Skin and surface textures. I also used some new eye techniques I'd designed for Casper to give Jabba eye's like a cat's or a serpent's. That varied from the original, but I wanted something a little more organic than those glass eyes. George just said, "Go for it!" He liked the eyes."

Lucas did make one last minute addition to the sequence that helped unify the trilogy: as Jabba rejoins his henchmen, the familiar figure of bounty hunter Boba Fett follows the overlord out. With this scene, Lucas managed to unite the villains of both The Empire Strikes Back, and Jedi in the original film. A further host of challenges emerged from the fact that in the original sequence, Harrison Ford had walked behind the actor playing Jabba. In order for Han to tread behind the new Jabba, he had to step on his tail. "It's either over him or on him," Letteri grins, "so we decided, 'Well, let's make Han step on him!' George wanted to keep the action the way it was and Han was the only character who could have gotten away with it." Williams alterd Ford's movements to accommodate the insouciant action. "Spaz didn't just track Ford up in the frame behind Jabba," Letteri explains. "He had to do a little bit of animation, because a step up involves a lot of body movement, so he cut up all of the pieces and put them back together with the right attitude." At times, the CG Jabba head was situated off to the side or lower than the head of the original actor, so parts of the actor would occasionally bleed through. Letteri recalls, "Since this was a traveling shot, we wound up having to reconstruct the whole background behind him. A lot of it had to be removed, because everything kept tracking with it."

To convincingly "light" CG characters like Jabba so that they blended into the original photography, Letteri and his team struggled to reconstruct the lighting conditions of the original shots. These new "background plates," which were never designed to incorporate effects of any kind, were techincally a far cry from the eight-perf Vista Vision plates ILM generally prefers. In fact, the original negative from the Jabba sequence had disappeared; all that existed was a 15-year old interpositive. Moreover, very little reference material still existed. "We dug up the camera reports, which gave us the lens and the f-stop, but that's about all," Letteri laments. "Normally, I'll break down the light, then figure out where the key, fill and the bounce sources are to try and and mimic the main sources of light. But we had no idea how the shot was lit. We figured out that they had used Space Lights and silver up on top. The set had a bright concrete floor and bright walls, so light was bouncing all over the place." Of course, the re-creation of diffuse lighting in the realm computer graphics is an extremely difficult undertaking. "Most of the lighting models we use are point lights, like arcs or spots," Letteri adds, "so we ultimately shaded a lot of hard sources into each other to produce a soft effect. We had to match the lighting in the plate because Harrison Ford was standing right next to Jabba; their lighting had to be identical. Fortunaetly, most of the shots had just one setup, but that last long tracking shot where Han steps on Jabba's tail was 1,100 frames, and we actually had to go through three setups for the three different points in the action."

Meanwhile, while Letteri and his team work on the Jabba sequence, visual effects supervisor John Knoll sets about redoing the final space battle which often brought the original film's analog techniques into conflict with the current CG technology. For example, the miniatures looked much different in reality than on celluliod. "It's amazing how much color distortion there was from the original optical bluescreen composite process," Knoll observes. "Everything that came out of the render closely matched the look of the actual models, but not how they appeared in the final composite. In 1977, after photographing the ships against bluescreen, ILM made black-and-white color separations of the red, green and blue information. They then used the blue record to make the matte, and more or less threw it away. After recombining the separations, they replaced the blue separation with a mixture of the green and blue separations; otherwise, a blue fringe would appear around the space-ships." Before animating any of the spaceships dueling over the Death Star, Knoll consulted with Dennis Muren and studied the original film to determine exactly how the X-wings maneuvered, and whether TIE fighters skidded as they turn corners. Although most of Knoll's 27 new space-battle shots were done almost entirely via CG, scrupulous adherence to the original length of each shot enabled them to be cut into the sequence.

One of the more extensive changes involved melding two shots that formed a prelude to the Rebels' attack on the Death Star. In the original film, after several X-wings roared overhead towards the metallica planet, a reverse angle reveals the entire armada approaching the camera. "The replacement shot, at the start, is composed almost exactly like the second cut, and it ends up being composed almost exactly like the first cut," Knoll says. "Now, the shot starts on the expanded armada, and then follows an X-wing around to see where the fleet is headed. The only aspect that's actually from the original film is the fourth moon of Yavin in the background, which is Ralph McQuarrie's original matte painting." While the marriage of those two shots into a single pan is one of the Special Edition's greatest stylistic departures from the original film, the new shot is exactly as long as the original shots combined. "We never get that close to an X-wing anywhere in the movie, and most of the shots involved much simpler pans and tilts," Knoll says. "By my reckoning, that one shot is the least successful at blending in the rest of the footage, because it's so different. But it was worth taking that jump." I personally think the new effects for the Special Edition helped clarify the storytelling during a sequence later on which a X-wing picks up a TIE fighter on his tail, and then tried to outmaneuver the enemy craft. "The shots from the original film are very static," Knoll submits. "The TIE fighter is directly behind the X-wing, and they are slowly rolling in sync. The X-wing pilot exclaims, "He's on me tight, I can't shake him!" So I replaced that whole series of shots - four or five of them in a row - with a lot more swerving and maneuvering and real tight turns. The new shots make it clear that the TIE fighter doesn't have a good shot yet. Now, it's a much more exciting moment in the film.

In retooling EMPIRE, the "fifth" episode of the saga, Lucas exercised the right of executive privliege and chose not to consult director Irvin Kershner on the changes that he had planned for the film. "He hasn't had any input," Lucas admits from his command center at the Lucasfilm Ranch. "But I told him what's happening, and I am going to show him the film when we get down to the point where we have footage to show. Of the Three films, EMPIRE is the one that has the fewest changes. Some [of the alterations] were things Irvin had suggested back when the film was made, when I had been forced to say, 'Kersh, we just didn't have the time or money to do all that.' But I think he'll agree when he sees it that the changes have improved the picture quite a bit." ILM's Dennis Muren oversaw the revamping of many shots for the Special Edition of STAR WARS and made most of the initial decisions on what scenes should be redone on EMPIRE. One of Muren's biggest problems was with the battle on the ice planet Hoth which was shot on location in Norway, which was between the Rebel Alliance Snowspeeders and the Imperial ATAT Walkers. While this battle represented the apex of photochemical compositing for its day, the original scene was plagued by the limitations of optical compositing and white-on-white matting: black matte lines appeared around some objects, while other elements seemed semi-transparent.

When Muren decied that more than 80 percent of the artic assault should be redone, Lucas went ballistic. "I said, That's ridiculous! I thought that scene was great," Lucas states emphatically, very much in the moment. "I said, 'There were some bad mattes, but we don't have to redo the whole thing, do we?' and Dennis said, 'You should look at it.' After I looked at it, I said, 'Well, I don't want to spend all this money redoing mattes, but you're right, it looks pretty bad and I think we should really fix it up.' "When EMPIRE was made, no one had ever done white-on-white matting before, and we were very successful at it, but we've come a long way in the last 10 years. And with digital matting, we can make it even better. So now we've redone almost every shot in that whole snow battle, and I dont think people will notice any difference. I call that particular sequence our 'psychological restoration.' People will look at that and say, 'They didn't do anything to it,' but then I'll say, 'Want to see something? I'll show you the original master and you will be embarrassed to death at how bad it is!' We spent a lot of money just to redo all the mattes, but I think Jersh will be pleased when he sees it."

Heading up ILM's EMPIRE and JEDI touch-up team was visual effects supervisor Dave Carson, who, given his role as a modelmaker on the original production, relished the opportunity to dramatically clean up the frenetic, frigid fracas. "To some exten, our task on EMPRE was to make the film look as good as people remember it," Carson states. "The primary problems were matte lines, which stood out against the snow and bright blue skies; elements that changed color from shot to shot; and transparency through the snowspeeders' cockpits, which was done to reduce the matte lines in the first place. The most ambitious task faced by Carson and crew on EMPIRE arises in the film's third act, with the re-imagining of the celestial floating Cloud City of Bespin. Here, Han Solo (Harrison Ford), Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) and company arrive via the Millennium Falcon, to seek refuge from the Imperial Forces, with the help of Lando Clarissian (Billy Dee Williams), the facility's administrator. The original film established Cloud City via Ralph McQuarrie's breathtaking matte paintings. This time around, ILM applied computer technology to expand the floating metropolis into the heavenly dreamscape Lucas had always envisioned. This complex challenge fell to art director George Hull. "I've kept about 75 percent of what had been established in EMPIRE," Hull says. Transforming the look of matte painted cityscape into a relistic 3-D buildings will prove to be quite a challenge. "Ralph McQuarrie's designs consisted of clean and simple buildings that worked beautifully in the stylized paintings. But in 3-D computer graphics, that aesthetic needed to be embellished if photorealism was the goal. So I designed the buildings with a similar language of forms, but with a new sense of architectural detail. I used cues of elevators, antennas, paneling, bridges, steam, etc - to help suspend disbelief. To be consistent, I used cues like domed tops to cap off my cylindrical buildings. The buildings in the original matte paintings were quite clean and solid, so I wanted to add a new sense of detail," explains Hull.

One of the more essential effects occurs when the Millennium Falcon first arrives at Cloud City. In the original sequence, it is set at nightfall with a limited view of Bespin as seen from the cockpit of the Falcon. What followed after was a shot of the spacecraft touching down on a landing pad. ILM has now inserted several new shots between the original two described above. First, the Falcon soars through a corridor of buildings towards the horizon; then, as the ship disappears behind a building, there is a cut to a new shot of it heading around the building towards the camera and settling over the landing pad. During that short 10 second scene, almost a quarter of Cloud City somes into view. Explains EMPIRE and JEDI CG supervisor Tom Hutchinson, "First of all, we set up a 3-D re-creation of the city in three-space. Jonathan Rothbart set up some relatively low-res animatics for us, which we used as template to plan our camera moves. After refining the move, we flew our virtual camera through the City, then built in the detail and flew the vehicles along that trajectory. At times we did it back and forth." The ILM team also struggled to define what clouds look like as they head off into infinity from above and below in a very nonterrestrial perspective. According to ILM, the clouds were strictly 2-D matte paintings on a disc in the background, but they had to figure out what the horizon line looks like when you're on the edge of a disk in the sky.

More challenges came to the ILM team while establishing shot's of Darth Vader heading for his Imperial Shuttle after Lando Clarissian orders the evacuation of Cloud City. Once again, the CG shuttle in EMPIRE had to precisely match the original miniature, which was previously seen only in the subsequent film, RETURN OF THE JEDI. This gave the chance to ILM's effects artists an excuse to add several additional ships fleeing the city, but also offered them an opportunity to create an entirely new view of Bespin. Now, a loudspeaker blares Clarissian's command over footage combining real people reacting in the foreground (shot against blue screen), and CG crowds running through massive CG architecture in the background.

The original interiors of Cloud City itself consisted primarily of setpieces enclosed corridors and rooms to help compensate for scheduling and financial limitations on EMPIRE. For the redo, Lucas decided to open those tight corridors up - literally. "George asked us to put windows in the enclosed hallways where there were a couple of windows with something hanging on the other side of the set to represent a skyline. In both cases, we've done some matte paintings to open those sets up and allow a better view of Cloud City," Huchinson explains. Since these shots were originally photographed with a moving camera, ILM had to construct their matte-painted views of Cloud City in layers (such as multi-plane animation setups) in order for the backgrounds to parallax in a believable fashion.

Though some diehard fans may consider Lucas' revisionist work on the three films to be obsessive tinkering, his revamping of effects for the Special Edition of RETURN OF THE JEDI has created a more fitting conclusion to this segment of the saga. In this case of JEDI, Lucas' impetus enabled ILM to enhance and expand one of JEDI's most memorable sequences: the visit to the desert den of Jabba the Hutt. Lucas has always visualized an extensive song-and-dance routine for the bloated crimelord's pleasure palace, and was now accomplished through a combination of computer graphics, mechanical effects and some serendipitous casting. Dubbed "JEDI ROCKS," this sequence demanded that a small portion of Jabba's throne room, along with numerous props be rebuilt on ILM's main stage. "We got out the original blueprints and looked them over," says ILM model/creature shop manager Mark Anderson, "then rebuilt about one-fourth of the set. We also built a lot of props, including a huge six-foot-diameter drum and all the different instruments." The new footage was shot on the same type of film stock as the original production of JEDI. While film stocks are relatively easy to match, Lucas was more concerned with finding an actress to re-create the role of Oola, one of Jabba's exotic slave girls and a backup singer for the Max Rebo Band's alien quartet. In the original film, Jabba drags Oola by her chain until she plummets through a trap door. But Lucas additionally wanted to include additional shots of Oola rolling into the pit of the towering Rancor monster in order to clarify that she's about to meet certain death. Fortunately, the actress who had originally played Oola was found. She was supplied with a headdress of fleshy horns, coated her in green makeup and draped her in the original costume.

ILM also created the wigs, costumes and prosthetic makeups for two additional Rebo Band backup singers. But not all the denizens of Jabba's throne room exist in the real world. The creature called Yuzzum, an Ewok-eater with a huge mouth, was constructed as a puppet for JEDI, even though he never appeared in any of the film's original scenes. ILM's animators have reinvented the Yuzzem in the CG realm. Since Yuzzem's puppet counterpart had been excised from the original JEDI, ILM's artists could modify the Ewok-eater without worrying about the continuity issues. Not so in the case of the Max Rebo Band's lead singer, Sy Snootles, a character who consists of a pair of luscious red lips on the end of a long stalk sprouting from a yellow bulbous body atop super-spindly legs. Lucas was determinded to do away with the original Sy rod puppet and transform the character into a rollicking CG rock star. While the old Sy stuck by her microphone, today's technology allows her to really strut her stuff. Unlike the hand-animated CG Jabba of the STAR WARS Special Edition, Sy's facial expressions took advantage of the latest advances in character animation - specifically, ILM's proprietary Caricature program (Cari for short), which was developed to handle the photo-realistic lip sync of the movie DRAGONHEART.

After the frivolity of the song-and-dance scene in Jabba's den, the next item on Lucas' list was the Dune Sea sequence, wherein Luke Skywalker and his companions are poised to walk the plank on Jabba's flying sand barge, and be devoured by a Sarlac, a wormlike creature lurking deep within a sandpit. This scene presented a tremendous opportunity to add drama and menace to the death of the bounty hunter Boba Fett, who originally met an anticlimactic end by tumbling into what resembled a sandy hole lined with rubber teeth. Lucas and ILM have improved the sequence by adding an actual beast in the pit - a tentacled, squid - like monstrosity which devours its victims with a snapping beak. "This is a better end for Boba. He still rolls into the hole, but now something eats him. I'm sure there will be some interesting sound effects as well," says Carson. The new and improved Sarlacc was brought to life by John Campanaro, one of ILM's newer animators. "I tried to incorporate the CG beak and tentacles with the practical tentacles pulling in a few characters that were there originally," Campanaro explains. "The tentacles are a series of joints that get smaller towards the tip, so animating them involved a series of rotations. I animated the tentacles using keyframes, keeping 12 or 14 frames between each pose. I also animated the beak using rotational values, making it translate up and down in the pit. The tongue has four joints which can be articulated. We rotoscoped the characters who originally dove or fell into the pit, such as Boba Fett, so that the beak could appear to come up behind and in front of them. This makes it look as if they're actually being swallowed."

The Sarlac animation was just a warmup compared to the chore of displaying the entire landscape of Tattoine's lumbering desert wasteland with Jabba's barge in the background, sand skiffs in the midground, and the Sarlac in the foreground. Perhaps the most amazing inclusion to me is a montage of planetary celebrations after the defeat of the Empire, with masses of CG extras carousing on planets of Bespin, Tattooine and Endor. While the film's Endor forest sequence remains virtually unchanged, new shots of Tatooine and Bespin were created using CG elements for the STAR WARS and EMPIRE Special Editions. The various worlds are connected via single continuous moving pan, with wipes making subtle transitions accompanied by a newly re-orchestrated John Williams score that ties everything together. There is also a fourth world that audiences will view for the first time, one which plays a dramatic role in the upcoming trilogy: Coruscant. The Metropolis-style galactic captial, which the Emperor calls home, was originally visualized by concept artist Ralph McQuarrie. This dazzling shot of Coruscant is actually a teaser for the effects that Lucas has planned for the upcoming prequels, many of which have been pioneered for these Special Editions.

There has been speculation that Lucas' real agenda on the STAR WARS Special Edition trilogy beyond boosting the excitement quotient - is to test new production techniques that might benefit the upcoming trilogy of prequels. As a result, the effects artists are well aware that there is a high level of expectation for the STAR WARS touch-ups. Meanwhile, Lucas is banking on his legions of STAR WARS devotees to forego the 1977 original in favor of the Special Edition, which he insists is the film he hopes audiences will be watching 20 years from now. "There will only one. And it won't be what I would call the 'rough cut,' it'll be the 'final cut.' The other one will be some sort of interesting artifact that people will look at and say, 'There was an earlier draft of this.' The same thing happens with plays and eariler drafts of books. In essence, films never get finished, they get abandoned. At some point, you're dragged off the picture kicking and screaming while somebody says, 'Okay, it's done.' That isn't really the way it should work." says Lucas. In the end, most people and I would agree that the STAR WARS trilogy needed this upgrade - and after watching the original's for the hundreth time, it started to show it's once break-through special effects were being out done by the latest SCI-FI movies....

All quotes, reference material, and Images are from American Cinematographer.


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