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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 compatriots 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 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. "We had fun with that, because the stuntmen did fantastic falls into this hole, and now they fall into this little beak," Carson says with a grin. "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."
The new and improved Sarlac was brought to life by John Campanaro, one of ILM's newer animators, who welcomed the opportunity to add a few finishing touches to one of his favorite childhood fantasy films. Working around a couple of existing rubber tentacles which seized actors in the original plates, Campanaro added half a dozen more in an effort to make the Sarlac more threatening. "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 just 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. Since the computer smoothly 'in-betweens' each shot, it doesn't call for a pose-set on every frame. 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 biggest difficulty in adding CG effects to shots with in-camera effects - nearly 15 years later - was making the new elements appear as though they had been featured in the original footage. "A lot of effort went into matching the lighting and the texture of the character and the original film grain, so the Sarlac wouldn't pop off the old plates," Campanaro says. "Since the monster was really in a sandpit, a lot of sand got picked up during the original plate shoot, and that atmosphere has to be added on top of our CG work. We used particle systems so the creature wouldn't look like as if it had just been popped in there."
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. "There are shots where we spent 80 percent of our time re-creating the original composites and 20 percent just putting the tentacles and beak in," reports CG supervisor Hutchinson. "The original shots contained various elements: two sand skiffs shot against bluescreen, several matte paintings, and the original plate shot on location [in Arizona]. All the roto work for the laserbolts and Luke's lightsaber had been farmed out to another company, so it's been very difficult to find very much of those original elements. We've had to re-create the green lightsaber and the red laserbolt animation, and blend it into the location shots with all of those matte-painting and blue-screen elements, exactly as if it had been done optically."
Perhaps the most amazing inclusion of all is a montage of planetary celebrations after the defeat of the Empire, with masses of CG extras carousing on the planets of Bespin, Tattooine and Endor. "We've added several shots showing more than just the Ewoks celebrating the victory over the Empire," Carson says. "There are quick cuts to mobs cheering on other planets to show that it really is a galaxy-wide event. Hopefully it'll be a rousing ending."
While the film's Endor forest sequence remains virtually unchanged, new shots of Tatooine and Bespin were created using CG elements built for the Empire and Empire Special Editions. The various worlds are connected via a single continuous moving pan, with wipes making subtle transitions between each environment, accompanied by a newly re-orchestrated John Williams score that ties everything together. "When we go back to Tatooine, instead of re-creating stuff from scratch, we actually cut, pasted and reworked shots already redone for Star Wars," Hutchinson reveals. "We took the downward view of all these people walking along the avenue in Mos Eisley, and readjusted our camera position. We also took a different view of the same Cloud City environment built for Empire; we start at ground level, then do a tilt up toward the spires."
There's 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 capital, which the Emperor of the Universe calls home, was originally visualized by concept artist Ralph McQuarrie. Now, the Special Edition's art director, George Hull, and ILM have provided audiences with a tantalizing peek at what awaits them in upcoming installments of Lucas' epic saga. "We start up high, looking down at the Emperor's city - a huge, spread-out metropolis," Hutchinson enthuses. "Then we tilt down through the buildings until we reach the ground plane, where we see crowds, confetti and a huge parade."
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. "One of the things we were told right up front was that we would hopefully be able to apply some of the things we learned on Empire and Jedi to the new prequels," Hutchinson states. "While budget and time considerations didn't really allow the Special Edition films to serve as R&D projects, I think George wishes we could have taken more of that kind of approach. Still, we've learned tremendous amounts of information that we can use when we do reach the R&D stage on the prequels."
