You can work much quicker with front-projection than you can with rear-projection. Because you have a very bright light source your exposure times are very fast, which is terrific. You can whip off all your shots very rapidly. Rear-projection, as used at Disney Studios, has tremendous advantages, but when you have to take six, seven or eight hours to do a shot, it can get a little frustrating, especially toward the end.
We bi-packed the shots that we felt were extremely critical qualitywise. We have two shots in the picture that have a power generator in the background, and one of them had to be done optically. In other words, we shot the power generator with front light and then with back light and gave those elements to Bruce Nicholson in the Optical Department. He then composited them optically. We also did a similar shot ourselves with bi-pack. Both shots look good, but each is a bit different. I don't know exactly why they are different, but I think his added a little contrast and ours took away a little contrast. The reason we used bi-pack was that we were very concerned with quality, because we had a sequence that took place in the snow and there were a number of mattes that had big areas of snow that would show up grain quite easily. I think that's one of the main things you have to worry about giving your shot away because of a lack of quality in the dupe.
We probably had 10 or 15 mattes in the snow sequence, but they were relatively less complex than most of the others. We got those finished toward the beginning. We had a couple of shots of an ice cave entrance, one of which was put together optically because we had a stop-motion figure that went into the cave. I had a shot looking out the window of one of the Walkers as they approached the trenches.
I don't think anything we did on The Empire Strikes Back could be called startlingly innovative because, as is so often the case, we were using ideas and methods that had been used before, many times, going way back. Motion-control, of course, is a sophisticated technique and it has been a terrific help, but all it has really done is taken the place of a man sitting there with a lathe-bed or Acme screw-drive, making one little turn at a time for each frame. I'm not down-playing motion-control, because it has cut the time factor down tremendously and, thereby, increased flexibility. It gives you shots that you wouldn't have been able to attempt before, because the man-hours just did not exist, nor the patience, nor the reliability. But I think that everything we do today is still, at the most, new applications of old ideas. When it comes right down to it, we are still using 35mm film that has perforations along its sides and this is old-fashioned, but nobody has come up with anything better yet. We simply try to eliminate the variables and get it down to its nth degree and make it as good as we can.
So there was nothing really innovation in what I did on Empirejust six months of problem solving, of deciding to go with front-projection and finding that there is a reflection in the glass because you put the screen in back of it, lining up the camera, figuring out how much you are going to tilt the painting and mechanically what kind of little goodies you are going to put on it. These are all problems which, perhaps, have been tackled before and solved, but they were in a slightly different context; maybe the set-up was bigger. Anyway, each time you change a little something you just institute another problem that has its own unique way of being solved and, hopefully, you can come up with the solution before you run out of time.
In working the special effects areas, especially on a really big picture, too many people get caught up in the fine points and fail to be aware of the overall reasons for the shot, the reasons for the show, the big picture kind of thing. It's almost like trying to find out what kind of colors Rembrandt used and how he set them up on his palette and thinking that this will allow you to paint like Rembrandt. Those are interesting things to know, but they are just tools, but eventually you've got to come down to doing it and keeping in mind the purpose of the shot.
The purpose of the shot is to get from the preceding shot to the next shot and move the story along. It gets said so many times, but it gets forgotten so easily when you're in there pulling your hair out because you've got a scratch on your yellow record. It's difficult to remind yourself of why you are cursing and swearing. Of course, you are curing and swearing because you have to remake your separations master, but basically there is a purpose for it all. I forget it continually and I have to hit myself over the head occasionally and not look at that, but keep getting back and looking at the shot and saying, "Is the shot doing what it's supposed to?"
I thing that's the basic. That's the bottom lineeasy to say, difficult to do.
