We have an organization that is really dependent upon the interreaction of departments on a fairly immediate basis and our building is small, as compared to normal studios in the motion picture industry at large. It's somewhat of a disadvantage to have a space that is not quite big enough, but, on the other hand, it is an advantage in that it forces you to compact the departments closely together and to utilize this little nook and that little nook. The positive result is that all of us work close to each other and pass each other frequently in the course of doing our work, which is very complex in nature. The coffee machine is our most important meeting place, and when we pass each other in the hallway we can say, "What about the density in this scene?" This kind of thing happens in the normal course of getting from one place to another in the building, so we don't have the problem of departmentalization.

If the matte department were a block away from the optical department and the shooting stage were somewhere in the distance, we would lose that contact. If you are a block away, you may as well be miles away, because the work we do is so intricate and detailed and you get so involved in your aspect of it that unless you automatically tend to bump into each other you don't communicate.

One of our major problems in the beginning was to cope with the logistics of the various departments and decide how they were to be set up. This was difficult to do at first and we tried to look as far ahead as possible, because once you put an optical printer down and set up a department around it, that set-up gets fairly firmly entrenched. Things get bolted to the floor, utilities get piped in, air conditioning systems get installed. All of this is going to be there for quite a while, so you have to be careful about where you put things. This, together with the initial challenge of coming up into an environment (San Rafael) that was not oriented toward film, probably presented one of our chief difficulties in getting started.

Getting back to the problem of finding a staff—since we knew that there was no film labor pool, per se, in the San Francisco area (and certainly not that many people who had specific experience along the lines of the oddball type of work we were doing), it became obvious that we would have to draw most of our skeleton crew from Los Angeles. With that in mind, we tried to find the best people we could who would be willing to uproot their lives and move away from the hub of the film industry.

Bruce Nicholson (Optical Photography Supervisor), Dennis Muren (Effects Director of Photography) and I were approached at about the same time. Dennis and I were to share the work as effects cameramen, but I have been functioning more as a supervisor than a cameraman and have been enjoying that position. Lorne Peterson (Chief Model Maker) was a veteran of Star Wars. Conrad Buff (Visual Effects Editorial Supervisor) didn't work on Star Wars, but he had worked on an intermediate project with us, did excellent work and was definitely the person we wanted on The Empire Strikes Back. These were among the key personnel in the production departments.

In the support departments, such as machine shop and electronics systems development, there was Gene Whiteman, who became Machine Shop Supervisor and was a real lucky find. I didn't know him before we started, but he became a very good friend and was extremely adaptable to all of the many and varied projects that we wound up getting into. On a production like this every day brings something completely different. We don't know what's happening until we walk in and all of a sudden find ourselves faced with a problem and have to work our way out of it somehow. That's just the nature of the work.

Jerry Jeffress, who is from the Bay area, became our Electronics Supervisor, and Kris Brown our Systems Engineer. The Stop Motion Animators, Jon Berg and Phil Tippett, had done some work on Star Wars and were a very, very important part of this picture.

On Star Wars we had only two basic motion control cameras, both of which worked very well almost from the outset. On Empire we had those two cameras, one other camera which I rented from Lin Dunn for a while, and one high-speed camera which I rented from Paramount and which was capable of somewhere between 96 and 100 frames per second. Those were the cameras we had to work with—except for some shots that were done in anamorphic and which we filmed with standard cameras. Our work seemed generally to involve either a half-second to 30 seconds of exposure per frame or 100 frames per second or some other multiple of normal speed. Not much material was shot at sound speed, because we were always taking advantage of some quirk in the persistence of vision to effect our trick photography in one manner or another.

One of the projects which I initially started on was the building of a new high-speed movement in the VistaVision format by the Mitchell Camera Corporation. Only two of these had been made in the Fifties, when the company was in full production with an enormous assembly line. Now they had to drag the blueprints out of their files and I knew it would take them several months to complete the two movements that I ordered.

Meanwhile, we began design on a reflex VistaVision camera, which didn't exist at that time. We had a movement which we could use for that one and we immediately began building the housing, which we wanted to get finished in time for it to be delivered to the location in Norway. It had to have built-in heaters and be able to work at 30 degrees below zero. That was a real challenge and we came through on it. The reflex camera took three months to build and it worked fine. We finished it just sort of in the nick of time to use it on location.

At the same time, the sound speed version was being built with a motion control system that would enable us to photograph motion control work in the field. We could then bring the unit back to the stage and it would remember the exact tilts and pans which the operator had made. The operator would not necessarily even be aware that it was a motion control camera. The system would merely memorize what he did and capture that information on magnetic tape. We could then bring the data back and put the camera in a miniature set on our stage and do a move that would fit exactly to that which had been made on location. That did not get finished in time for location shooting, but it was used in-house for shooting all of the stop-motion work.