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 the case of Jedi, Lucas' impetus enabled Carson and Hutchinson to enhance and expand one of Jedi's most memorable sequences: the visit to the desert den of gargantuan galactic gangster Jabba the Hutt. Lucas had always visualized an extensive song-and-dance routine for the bloated crimelord's pleasure palace, and was now able accomplish this 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's 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 by cinematographer Patrick Turner on Eastman Kodak 5247 stock, the same negative employed during the original production of Jedi, which was directed by the late Richard Marquand and photographed by Alan Hume, BSC. 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 a grisly demise in the creature's belly. Fortunately, the actress who had originally played Oola was found. Anderson and company supplied her with a headdress of fleshy horns, coated her in green makeup and draped her in the original costume.
Anderson and his team of 50 model/creature shop colleagues 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 Yuzzum in the CG realm. "Yuzzum is this hairy creature with a deep voice who runs around and sings," Hutchinson explains. "He has a huge mouth which can open up to almost half the size of his body, so that was an aesthetic challenge. Also, he has ruffled fur which we've kept real short for design reasons, as well as to keep the render times down and to control lighting issues. We've done fur in the past, but it's still a bit of work to put fur on any creature and make it look natural."
Since Yuzzum's puppet counterpart had been excised from the original Jedi, ILM's artists could modify the Ewok-eater without worrying about 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 determined 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.
Hutchinson oversaw Sy's redesign and endowed her with more graceful movements and articulations. "It was pretty scary trying to match what she was originally," he admits. "The difficulty was that we were locked into a basic shape. She has no neck, her eyes are on stalks and her arm hardly reaches out beyond her snout, so to have her running around holding the microphone to her mouth didn't make any sense. We tried to hone in on making her appear aesthetically pleasing while sticking to her original shape. Ultimately, we only kept one longer shot of the original puppet. George pointed out that even though we still recognize the puppet as Sy, we never put the old Sy and new Sy side by side."
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 Dragonheart (see AC June 1996). "We're using Cari extensively for Sy's lip animation, as well as all her facial expressions, down to the movements of her eye stalks and eyelids," Hutchinson says. "The Cari software allows the animators to build extreme positions using shaded models, and dial in multiple expressions interactively; they can then work with the changes in real time until they achieve the exact pose they want. Since Sy's lips, eyes and facial expressions are animated at a separate time from the rest of her body, we had to combine those elements with the rest of the 3-D model. The animators animated her snout in the same pass with her legs, arms and body. Next, we had to skin the surface, and then do our corrective enveloping, which simulates muscle movements and keeps the joints looking proper and not rigid. Finally, we painted and texture-mapped Sy."
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