

Photos from the making of Empire Strikes Back - fogus
http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/features/2010/10/the-making-of-the-empire-strikes-back-201010?currentPage=all

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JunkDNA
This is a great set of shots. Having watched a _ton_ of "Making of Star Wars"
specials on PBS as a kid, I really thought I wasn't going to see anything new
here. There were a couple of surprises:

I'm a little embarrassed to admit that until seeing the first photo just a few
minutes ago, it never really occurred to me that they would have had to film
the opening crawl that way.

Having seen the sequence where Luke falls from the catwalk a million times,
it's quite jarring to see all those mattresses below him. Even though
intuitively you're aware that they did not film that scene hanging above a
thousand foot drop, the visual effects really do allow you to suspend
disbelief.

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barrettcolin
"I'm a little embarrassed to admit that until seeing the first photo just a
few minutes ago, it never really occurred to me that they would have had to
film the opening crawl that way."

I recently discovered (from browsing around the bonus material on the DVD on a
lazy Sunday, naturally) that the multi-layer CG starfield effects created by
ILM for Star Trek III were put on film by pointing a camera at a computer
monitor and recording the output.

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aw3c2
Single page: [http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/features/2010/10/the-
mak...](http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/features/2010/10/the-making-of-
the-empire-strikes-back-201010?currentPage=all)

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whatrocks
Lucas is so scourged for Jar-Jar and those late 1990s remakes that I often
lose sight of how innovative and influential he's been on special effects,
movies, and our lives in general.

Lucasfilm and its subsidiaries (Pixar, ILM, THX) should be considered among
the great start-ups of our time.

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gaius
You don't really see this in the films, but in a still it's amazing how
detailed the X-wing is.

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zandor
Some other one's which were published in Maxim,
<http://www.starwars.com/fans/media_news/maxim_esb/index.html>

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daten
This link is work-safe. At least with noscript. I don't know if there are any
racy ads I'm not seeing.

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scott_s
Note that it's starwars.com, not maxim.com.

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asmithmd1
I remember watching Empire Strikes Back in a theater and being very
disappointed -- I thought they should have flashed To Be Continued at the end
-- I had to wait 3 years for the next episode.

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danielnicollet
I was really fine with the painted figures, cardboard sets and resin armors. I
wonder why the saga of Star Wars could not continue and if it wouldn't maybe
be cheaper to do the next without CGI (classic style). Maybe time for Indian
Bollywood studios to show us what they can do to make us dream! ;-)

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InclinedPlane
What makes you believe that Bollywood studios don't use cgi? They do.

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Brashman
This was a reminder to me that special effects weren't always done sitting in
front of a computer.

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brandnewlow
So why can't we get more films shot with awesome matte backgrounds like that
anymore? Is it really that much cheaper to do a background via CGI than to
have it painted?

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icegreentea
Often the "CGI" background is a combination of "true" CGI, manipulated
photos/footage, and digital "hand" painting (at least for the deep
backgrounds). It's much more flexible than physical painting. For one thing,
there's undo, and versioning, not having to wait for paint to dry, etc etc.

For example, if you want a castle in the mountains in the background, the
mountains might be a composite of a photo, and some extra CG. A castle is then
rendered "in the rough" ontop of the mountain, and then details hand painted
in. And then the whole thing gets another CG/painting treatment to make sure
everything fits in and to create more atmosphere. Every matte painting is
different.

If you're interested, you can poke around cgsociety's (sorry it's blocked at
work) forums in the digital matte painting section. It's really just a huge
grab bag of techniques.

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conover
If you click the print icon the upper right, all the pictures will be
displayed on a single page vertically.

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hartror
Damn I forgot how roguishly good looking Harrison Ford was back in the day.

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kmfrk
He looks a lot like a young David Duchovny.

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jtbigwoo
I read an article about the X-Files once where the author talked about how the
show flipped the usual formula for television casting on its head. In most
television shows, the female lead is hired primarily for her looks while the
male lead is supposed to be the one the audience can identify with. In the
X-Files, Duchovny was the tall, slim model-ish one while Gillian Anderson was
short and basically normal looking. It seems like X-Files fans have a better
gender balance than most sci-fi shows. I wonder if having a more normal female
lead helped in that regard?

Something similar seems to have happened in Star Wars. It's easy to forget
since they've been around for so long, but Harrison Ford and Billy Dee
Williams were ridiculously good looking guys. Mark Hamill was a teen idol from
his time on shows like Eight is Enough and The Texas Wheelers (I had to look
that name up.) By looks alone, Carrie Fisher might be the least likely of the
four to get a magazine cover. (Don't tell my twelve-year-old self, though.)

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scott_s
The flaw in your theory is that Carrie Fisher looks absolutely stunning in
this picture: <http://www.vanityfair.com/images/hollywood/2010/10/esb08.jpg>

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jtbigwoo
Don't get me wrong--Carrie Fisher is pretty. She could have easily been the
homecoming queen at my high school. As long as she wasn't too busy doing coke
with Tony Bennett or whatever children of famous actors did in the 70's. I'm
just saying that she wasn't Daryl Hannah. (For those of you born after 1985,
Daryl Hannah was the Megan Fox of the late 70's/early 80's.)

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jmcnevin
Yawn. Wake me up when these photographs are re-released in 3D.

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hartror
Ssssh George will hear you, haven't we had our childhood raped enough as it
is?!

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sigzero
Unfortunately...it is coming whether we like it or not. :-(

