For the explosion shots, Dykstra\u2019s team built effects models that were pre-ordained to die out of a breakaway mold-making material that master modeler Grant McCune brought to the table called \u201cfast tool.\u201d \u201cI didn\u2019t want it all just to go bang,\u201d Dykstra says. \u201cI wanted it to go bang, bang, bang, bang, and, you know, have different parts explode at different times.\u201d To create the appropriate symphony of bangs, ILM tweaked the chemistry of the fast tool in order to manipulate the material\u2019s structural integrity to their needs. The internal parts of the pyrotechnic models also had to be painted so that discerning viewers going through the film in detail would not be able to pick out bare fast tool fragments tumbling through space. As with most of the STAR WARS visual effects, the exploding ships were not a simple, one-element process. Each explosion was the result of detailed compositing. \u201cIn some cases, we shot bigger explosions to overlay over existing, smaller explosions to help give more punch to it.\u201d In the days before computer-generated anything, this compositing was not a quick process. It was often frustrating and always delicate and tedious.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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The ships were built and the detonators were primed. Now, someone had to fly these things. And it wasn\u2019t going to be Han Solo behind the wheel. It was going to be John Dykstra, the man who now had to put his money where his mouth was and prove to Lucas and Kurtz that he could create all the miracles he had promised them when they hired him. \u201cFrom George\u2019s point of view, it was tough to believe that we were going to be successful with this stuff. As we went forward, we ad to build the cameras before we could prove that the miniatures were going to work, [the miniatures] before we could prove that the optical composites were going to work\u2026 He got frustrated. And I\u2019m sure there were a lot of times that he would have preferred to do the stuff as physical effects.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Essentially, Dykstra was asking George Lucas for the same faith in him that Lucas received from Alan Ladd, Jr. and 20th Century Fox when they greenlit STAR WARS. Most directors are control guys, which is part of what cuts them out for the job. But the flip side of that is that they hate not being in control, something Lucas surely felt in those early days when he was trying so desperately to see his vision realized. Despite the anxiety, despite concerns about a hundred different factors standing between STAR WARS and oblivion, the show went on. \u201cI don\u2019t know whether it was [George Lucas] or Gary Kurtz or what, or momentum, but there was follow through on it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
More than anything else, Lucas\u2014and the whole of 20th Century Fox, for that matter\u2014was putting his faith in the motion control aspect of Dykstra-vision. In the STAR WARS 1970s, computers were just beginning to come onto the larger industrial scene. They were still more than a decade away from popular individual use. Like mostly everything else ILM created for STAR WARS, the cameras and camera rigs had to be invented before they could be used. In a turn from kit-bashing to circuit-bashing, Dykstra oversaw the construction of the computer boards as they were built out of component electronics that his team collected. The end goal was similar to what he was working on when Lucas discovered him at the University of California at Berkeley: programmable cameras that could be given specific, detailed tasks and repeat them again and again within strict tolerances.<\/p>\n
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\u201cIt was all about process.\u201d \u201cProcess\u201d at the time meant inventing this so that they could shoot that, putting this subject here instead of there, re-engineering the optical printers, the film, the build materials, everything in the name of getting to the end goal of shooting what needed to be shot. Speak to Dykstra about STAR WARS and you\u2019ll hear the word \u201cprocess\u201d frequently repeated.<\/p>\n
This particular process was all leading to the models moving during exposure at the same time the cameras did. This created motion blur, another facet of the visual effects that made everything seem a bit more real in STAR WARS. \u201cIf you look at a stop motion animation, on an individual frame, the subject is sharp and in full detail. If you look at a picture of a car going by on a street shot on a motion picture camera, the car itself is streaked because there\u2019s movement during exposure.\u201d In a stop-motion shot, still photographs of a model that is moved frame-by-frame are taken and then played back as a motion picture to create the illusion of movement. In STAR WARS, it wouldn\u2019t be an illusion; the models would actually be moving, an effect that had never been achieved before with miniatures.<\/p>\n
As the camera rigs came together, Dykstra worked on adding their most critical feature: the tilting lens port. Built onto the front of the camera, this is an old technique from still photography that helps to create an enormous depth of field. That is, the portion of a photographed image that remains in acceptable focus. Dykstra illustrates with the props available on the table in front of him. \u201cYou put the forks and knives in the foreground and you want to keep the other side of the notebook in focus, you do that with a conventional camera, either these (the forks and knives) will be soft (out of focus) or that (the notebook) will be soft. But if you use a tilting lens port, you can tilt the lens. And by tilting the lens, you can carry depth of field (focus on all the subjects) all the way from there to there.\u201d Adding the tilting lens port to the Dykstraflex camera system made it so that as the model miniature and the camera came closer and closer together, the operator could keep the entire subject in constant focus. This little trick helped to create something crucial to creating believable spaceships and interstellar combat: scale. \u201c[Depth of field] was a critical part of making people who were watching the film believe that these things were big, was that they carried depth of field.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even after ILM got the shots they needed, they had to turn to the fussy and fickle optical printer. Before the days of digitized footage and fancy software packages, visual effects were created in an optical printer, which is essentially two or more film projectors mechanically linked to a movie camera. Together, the rig allows the operator to re-photograph strips of film.<\/p>\n
In a word\u2014compositing. But there are limits to optical printing, beginning with how much film one could feed into the printer. The longer the effects shot, the more chances (frames) there were to ruin it during the optical printing process. Perhaps Dykstra himself illustrates best. \u201cMultiple ship shots were hard because of the limitations of optical printing. You put twelve pieces of film through the optical printer and after twelve or thirteen pieces of film, the film started to get damaged and so you\u2019d get to a point where if you had to make three passes on something\u2026 you look at the final product and you go \u2018you know, that ship\u2019s just a little too blue.\u2019 So they go back and they do everything again, but the next time through, they had scratched the separations from one of the elements. Well if you made new separations, the new separations weren\u2019t the same as the old separations, so you had to go back and run the old elements that weren\u2019t scratched with the new element that had been generated, and then there\u2019d be color skews\u2026\u201d At times, the very process that Dykstra preached seemed like it could be their undoing. \u201cThe number of elements increased the amount of work for a given shot exponentially.\u201d The optical printer was at the center of achieving the vision laid out on the storyboards, many of which included multiple separate elements (i.e., different ships) that had to be composited onto one image. If Dykstra\u2019s team couldn\u2019t get the optical printer to do what they needed it to do, all that process would be for naught. Much like everything else at ILM, the things they were doing with the optical printer had never been done before. \u201cThe technique itself had been used before, but the way we were using it was relatively new.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even after tackling the veritable menagerie of issues associated with the visual effects for the spaceships, Dykstra and ILM weren\u2019t out of the Endor woods yet. Other never-before-attempted challenges remained, perhaps chief among them was the most iconic invention in George Lucas\u2019s STAR WARS universe: the Jedi\u2019s lightsaber.<\/p>\n
Dykstra recalls the first (mis-)step of making the prop team\u2019s lightsabers work. \u201cI started out the deal with the lightsabers by suggesting that we put retro-reflective material on sticks and shine[d] a light from the camera.\u201d<\/p>\n
There wasn\u2019t discussion at the time about making the lightsaber blades different colors, necessarily, but Dykstra knew it would be possible to make them essentially any color in postproduction. \u201cWe just knew we could make the lightsabers whatever color we wanted by filtering the light. But of course with two lightsabers in the same scene, that became problematic because the light source hit them both.\u201d The approach presented even more problems that confounded the effect. It was awkward for the actors to wield convincingly and didn\u2019t achieve the visual effect that Lucas had envisioned. Dykstra therefore turned to compositing via rotoscoping, essentially animating the lightsaber\u2019s blade frame-by-frame in post-production. While time-consuming and tedious with the technology available in 1976, this technique created much more freedom for the actors, director of photography, and ILM. \u201cOf course with rotoscoping, we had no problem. We could make them whatever color we wanted.\u201d Still, a vestige of the practical effect survives in the famous duel between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader on the Death Star, where the bitter adversaries do battle with Dykstra\u2019s rather impractical retro-reflective sticks. He laughs, \u201cYou can tell [it\u2019s practical], because when you bring [the lightsabers] together, stuff flies off of them!\u201d<\/p>\n
So much wizardry was created at ILM that it might be easy to look past the seemingly simple hyperspace effect, or as Dykstra refers to it\u2014\u201cstar streak and disappear.\u201d \u201cWe didn\u2019t know what we were going to do until the last minute\u2026 and we just started talking about doing some kind of streak photography, which is something that Doug Trumbull was known for (from his work on 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY) where you do open exposure and make the camera move during the exposure to get these smears (the stars)\u2026 so this was sort of a very simple version of 2001.\u201d In theory, it should have worked. In practice, it ended up working perfectly. \u201cIt was one of those deals where it was serendipity\u2026 We essentially took something that we already knew was going to be something and tried it. And it was successful.\u201d One can surmise that such serendipity was a welcomed guest at ILM.<\/p>\n
Dykstra\u2019s Los Angeles shop also served as somewhat of a visual effects triage center, performing emergency surgery on effects that had gone awry in England. A famous example of this is Luke\u2019s landspeeder, an aborted bluescreen effect that can be seen in its original form in the EMPIRE OF DREAMS documentary, among other places. It\u2019s Dykstra\u2019s opinion that ILM saved the landspeeder effect from certain cutting-floor doom. \u201c[The landspeeder recreation] may have been something he decided he needed [to re-do] after he started cutting the picture together. That was my impression.\u201d ILM touched up the Ogle Noor body, got the mechanical guts running, and added the mirror to the side for the distance shots that would make the vehicle appear as if it were hovering over the desert\u2019s surface.<\/p>\n
For pickup shots that would need to be intercut seamlessly with what was already shot in Tunisia, ILM and Dykstra packed up and journeyed into the deserts outside Los Angeles. ILM shot pickups all over the areas in and around the ghost towns of Death Valley, including Searles Lake and the Trona Dry Lake. Visible in the shots of the Jawas\u2019 sandcrawler miniature are the Randsburg mountains that once contained rich gold mines. \u201cThat\u2019s where [you see] those funny-looking mountain shapes that are behind the sandcrawler, where it\u2019s going through the canyon.\u201d<\/p>\n
With such attuned forward-looking vision, it\u2019s hard to believe that Dykstra didn\u2019t know he and his ILM team were in the middle of creating history. But when asked if he had any idea how huge STAR WARS was going to be, Dykstra modestly parries. \u201cI didn\u2019t know how big it was going to be, I just knew I was having a good time doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ain\u2019t that the truth. During production, ILM\u2019s Southern California operation was associated more with a twenty-four hour party than a place where any serious film production was going on.<\/p>\n
Like any self-respecting visual effects crew, Dykstra\u2019s team then set about discovering the best way to blow these models up.<\/p>\n
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