Three visual effects supervisors were in charge: Richard Edlund, ASC, Dennis Muren and Ken Ralston. These are young men who have become old pros in a few short years, rising to the top of their exacting profession. Among them they have garnered enough awards to decorate a lodge hall. Shortly before they completed their work on Jedi, the celebrated three revealed for American Cinematographer some of the methods they use in the creation of their fantasy worlds.
RICHARD EDLUND, ASC
Edlund, who hails from Fargo, North Dakota, began his career in visual effects at The Westheimer Company, a leading Hollywood special effects facility. There he became a first rate optical camera operator whose work appeared in many television shows, most notably The Outer Limits, Star Trek and Twilight Zone. He also lettered titles, made documentary and experimental films on his own, photographed commercials, and became an expert at motion control and electronic cinematography. His features include China Syndrome, Poltergeist, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of The Lost Ark. The latter three brought him Academy Awards.
In his work for Lucasfilm, Edlund has not only been active as a cinematographer and supervisor, but as a technician, having designed much of the key equipment in use at ILM. Edlund developed the Empire Camera System, so-named by producer Gary Kurtz because the first one was built for The Empire Strikes Back.
"We put it together from a movement that we took out of an old Technirama camera and rebuilt to a certain degree, and then designed a reflex VistaVision camera which wasn't extant at the time, " Edlund recalled. "I felt that a couple of the things that we needed when we moved up here were, one, an improved printer so that we could composite all of our material in much better quality than we got on Star Wars; and, secondly, a reflex camera system that would enable us to photograph while looking through the camera as well as being able to do pans and tilts either on location or on the stage, which could then be played back either at the same speed or at a ratio of the speed. This sounds like an easy project, just putting a couple of motors on a head; but when you get into these things you uncover all sorts of laws of physics that are fighting you. During Empire we built the first camera, which is a sound-speed version, then we had Mitchell build us a high-speed movement and we refined it to go very fast. They're lightweight, space-age looking cameras, and they're covered with an epoxy graphite material, so they're quite handsome and they're built for effects work.
"Rather than going for a 1000 or 2000-foot load we settled for 400-foot loads, because most of our shots last 50 or 100 feet. We built a pan-tilt head for these cameras during Empire, but it wasn't precise enough to do some of the things we wanted to do. We rebuilt the whole system, including the electronic controls Jerry Jeffress and Chris Brown came up with. It can pan very fast so we can shoot high speed material with panning and it does the exact same thing each time, so that we can rehearse a shot and get everything worked out. We have to control everything as closely as possible, but we can't control explosions and the like. Therefore, we control everything we can and leave that one element—the explosion or whatever—to itself. The camera will make the same move and we can do a number of takes to take advantage of any happy accidents. It is a very valuable feature when we have to do many takes to get one that works."
Edlund explained that the camera itself is a computer-assisted system. "The camera has to let the electronics know exactly when the shutter is opening, for instance, in relation to the angle of the camera at a given point. It's very sensitive, and if you don't control it accurately, then it doesn't work, because the background will move at a different rate than the separately photographed foreground, or it will lag or get ahead during a pan. It can be a real pain, frankly—it's not as easy as it's thought to be.
"The camera is very lightweight and it has handles on it for mobility. The head is basically a rebuilt Mitchell gearhead, one of the best in terms of mechanical design. It's not as smooth as, say, a Worrall head, but it can be more accurate. It's a heavy head and the electronics are in a couple of suitcases, so it can be moved around. It's not as lightweight as a Panaflex, of course.
"Most of our equipment is hot-rodded to a certain extent. Nothing ever fills the bill as it comes off the showroom floor, if it's on any showroom floor to begin with. We generally build everything we have, all of our own tools being specialized stuff that needs to do certain things that nobody else needs to do or that haven't been thought of before. It's a continuing process of inventing effects because we're never up against the same wall twice."
The ILM crew, according to Edlund, was faced with the problem of trying to top their previous achievements in the first two films of the trilogy. This was no mean feat in that both pictures won "Oscars" for their effects work. "This show is more of a refinement of the things we've been doing than a great deal of new invention. Star Wars was the initial invention period where we put the whole system together in basic terms, utilizing new electronics, making motion control available to a large production where a lot of elements and a lot of material can be shot in a reliable way, day after day, to produce the complex battles and other effects. In Empire, it was phase 2 of equipment development and refining of techniques so that the shots outshone those in Star Wars to a large extent because everyone had had more time to learn how to play the instrument, so to speak. The cameras and printers were built so that we could get great quality on the screen and achieve parity with the original photography, so that when we cut to an effects shot you don't suddenly see something that's grainy and makes you wonder what's going to happen now—a problem with effects over the decades.
"The idea of using the larger format and being able to reduce and composite without generation loss so that we don't have a drop in quality when we go to an optical was the basic reason for building the printer. The techniques of stop-motion also achieved a good state here. There's really some great stuff in Empire, but the stop-motion in this picture has gone beyond that because now we have Dragonslayer under our collective belt, and it is some of the best that's been done. The matte painting department has really blossomed out on this picture. They have truly excelled in this field and some of their work is just stunning. We have finished what may be the most versatile, high-quality horizontal tracking camera that exists for the purpose of doing matte shots, with an anamorphic lens so that we can shoot matte paintings with a rear projection technique for putting plates into the paintings and thereby able to pan, tilt and rotate the camera to a very high degree of accuracy."
"I usually work with cameramen and have two or three set ups going at the same time," Edlund revealed. "When things are really moving sometimes it's four or five crews, and I'm putting in my two bits worth in other situations as well, such as working with Bruce Nicholson in opticals."
Time, Edlund stated, was a strong factor in determining the modus operandi of the effects men. "Almost all the elements you'll see in Jedi are take ones, because we had less time than we would like to have had. We were just finishing three big pictures: Dennis had E.T., Ken had Star Trek II, and I was still shooting Poltergeist.
The pictures backed up on one another and nobody had time for much of a breather between pictures. Though we were short on time, we were long on experience and we have an excellent group of camera people who know what they're doing. When we'd see a shot in the dailies we'd just make sure it didn't have any scratches or digs or technical problems that meant it couldn't be used, because we knew it had to be used to get the show done.
"There were thousands of individually photographed elements and hundreds of background plates required, all of which had to be photographed with the special cameras and which had to be perfectly steady and tested constantly to make sure there wasn't any subtle tenth-of-a-thousandth-of-an-inch problem in the movements of the cameras. Occasionally we'd have a scene that wasn't steady or had a flicker or some other problem, and we'd have to work our way around that and try to fix it because we couldn't set up the scene and go back to shoot it again. It's been a constant situation of being up against the wall."
Edlund believes that proper editing of effects is an important part of achieving conviction. "In Star Wars the visual photographic effects don't exceed 14 minutes of the entire screen time. In Empire they're not much more than 20 minutes of the whole film. George has a way of putting them in at the right points so that the impression is that they're always there. They're not; they're in the right places for just the right amount of time because he has a gift for knowing how long to leave a shot on the screen before you start seeing the seams. Any visual effect, if left on the screen for a long period of time, will give itself away. What we go after is an impression, and often that impression can be achieved in less than a second. Jedi has at least a hundred more effects shots than Empire.
The complexity of certain scenes in Jedi was described by Edlund: "Some of our more complicated shots have had hundreds of pieces of film generated for each individual piece in the shot. This is done separately, then it has to be separated photographically into three colors by divers methods. Next, a matte has to be extracted from that, which takes several pieces of film. Then animation enhancement mattes, or garbage mattes, to clean up the frame, have to be made for each element. Animation then adds things like lasers and flares and flashes, and little sweetening things that make the shot work—shadows, for instance, which go across when something flies past a surface. You need things like that to tie it together and make the shots work peripherally. You don't see these things—you look at a shot and you either buy it or you don't—but your mind is perceiving things peripherally as well as from the exact spot you're looking at, so if the shadows are missing it doesn't look right. The truth behind the adage that the 10-year-old is one of our most severe critics is that he knows what things look like. He's probably seen five million feet of film on television and at the theater, so he's very sophisticated as to what film looks like. If we get a shot that doesn't work we can't explain it away. We can't put subtitles on there and say, 'Sorry, this has a matte line on it,' or, 'Sorry the color balance isn't right or the angle doesn't match.' If it doesn't work we've let the director down, because he's trying to maintain a visual continuity. We've disrupted the train of drama."
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