Most of the traveling matte shots were achieved via the blue screen method, which Edlund described as "our stock in trade here." This widely used process makes it possible to combine foreground action photographed against a blue backing with any desired background which has been or will be photographed. The positive and negative mattes are made and the composites printed with little or no handwork.
"The whole idea of mastering the blue screen was something that interested us on Star Wars, Edlund said. "The original idea was to produce the space battle sequence that was happening outside the cockpits as plates, and then those were going to be front projected and shot with the actors in England. I felt that was a rather dodgey way to go, because first of all, the problem of synchronizing the plates to the action in the cockpit would be difficult and take a great deal of time. Every time we run a plate through it has to be rewound, cleaned, and threaded up again, costing about 20 minutes between runs. When I suggested we go for blue screen, that didn't strike too well because when directors go to the dailies and see the great action they want against a useless blue background, it makes them nervous. Also, at that time we were basically untried renegades who had never really done it before. I'd worked with Joe Westheimer, who was one of the first to do blue screening in Hollywood, so I was impressed with the process. I knew Joe could do it well and I had high expectations. We wound up doing it that way, because the front projection did give all sorts of problems—depth of field, haloing, et cetera."
Although Edlund considers blue screen "the most versatile and fastest way" of making composites, he made occasional use of front and back projection, mostly for putting explosions into scenes. The advantages of blue screen, however, are many—particularly for a company like ILM which uses it extensively.
"If someone who doesn't do much blue screen work is asked to do a blue screen shot, then it's complicated because he has to figure out the process, get all of his densities to work and get into all sorts of unfamiliar territory for one shot," Edlund agrees. "But we're doing a thousand shots or a thousand elements and more, so we've worked out these problems and its' just become 'hammer and nails.' It goes through like water over the dam, and while the dam gets worn down after a while, it's a process we have under control. The stage doesn't have to sit unused while we wait for the dailies to know whether a shot is good. Once it gets into optical, if it's not right the first time you can put it back through again and 'massage' the shot and get it to work. It gets tricky when we have a sequence out in the desert in full daylight, to mention one of the worst situations. If it isn't right, if there's something funny about it, if the lighting doesn't look like daylight, if there's a fringe or matte line or color mismatch, then the shot pops out and it doesn't work. But for the bulk of it we have it down to a fine art.
"We also used some front light/back light mattes and just ordinary density mattes, as well as frame by frame animation. For instance, when the walkers trudge through the forest among branches and ferns that are moving in the breeze, all this had to be matted a frame at a time. The work appears tedious, but those mattes are done through sheer artistry, because the person who can do them properly is not simply a robot. He has to be able to interpret how the shaded edges are going to work in relation to the hard-lit edges."
The wholesale utilization of miniatures is basic to a film like Jedi. "We would like to make the miniatures as large as possible, but we seldom do so," Edlund explained. "We try instead to get away with the smallest miniatures possible because we have a limited amount of real estate to work with. The larger the miniature, the bigger the set-up and the more people and lighting space. We have to hold the depth of field, which is the first rule with miniatures—you can't have a fuzzy foreground because that ruins the effect. Fortunately, most of the material in this show was shot with motion control, and therefore we were able to stop down and photograph one frame a second. By scaling the speed down we can still light with 200 foot-candles and thereabouts and stop down to f 22, f 32 or, occasionally, f 45. I've had the lenses modified over a period of time so that most of them stop down to at least f 32. Even the standard lenses we use, which normally stop down to 16 or 22, have been modified to have click stops, half-click stops and also a couple of extra stops down."
Although extreme sharpness of image is desirable in the space scenes, Edlund said that the land scenes employ varying kinds of diffusion effects. "We sometimes use large gauze sheets in the middle ground to give an aerial perspective or haze effect. I'd heard about Bill Abbott, a real master, doing that. These can be lit at the bottom so you have haze near the ground and none at the top. We often have a glass in front of the camera that has been sprayed down with dulling spray and various fine diffusing mists in order to soften certain areas. A lot of fine-tuning is possible with this—a little Vaseline, say. Usually we shoot takes sharply and we have all sorts of techniques in optical for diffusing. We have to be able to match blacks, whites and aerial haze. There are situations when something starts off a long way from the camera where it would be kind of soft, and then it comes in closer, becoming sharper. In this case it might have to be lap-dissolved out of the haze, which was achieved by using nylon stockings of various denier on the printer, and dissolved together with a shot with no diffusion to achieve the effect of coming from a distance. Flashing something when it's in the background and then fading out on the flash as it moves into the foreground is sometimes necessary. We call that massaging in optical when we have to massage a shot to the point where it works.
"In Poltergeist we had some really tough shots where the closet had changed into an esophagus, which was shot as a half-scale miniature and matted in. It looked like a postage stamp stuck onto the shot for a long time, just hanging there in mid-air, and it took a lot of massaging to push it back—the flashing of the edge, the amount of diffusion, shadows rotoscoped into the shot. It's amazing to look at a shot which just hangs there and won't work at all, and then all of a sudden it just falls right into the shot."
The Matte Department, which provides effects which require painted art elements, received an accolade from Edlund. "On our sequences, we have input and if there's a special point in a shot that we want to make, we put it across to them," Edlund said. "They've gotten so good that most of the time it's best to leave them alone and they end up adding things that make it better than we envisioned it. I remember shooting plates in London with the bare idea of a shot, and when I handed it to them they added things into the shot and made it into this absolutely stupendous painting. They're masters of composition and they're constantly looking for a place to add something else. They don't want to get bored.
"It's the same way with the go-motion and stop-motion work. That's Phil Tippett's daily work. He does all the programming on that and he's a great animator. That's an art all to itself, but it's a natural offshoot of motion control. It's very complex, programming each frame, and the body movement in the case of Dragonslayer, for example, with each foot and the body moving. The main parts have the blur, which gives it that live look, but still there are things like the head turning and the eyes moving and a lot of other subtleties that have to be moved one frame at a time."
KEN RALSTON
Sculptor, painter, designer, cinematographer—Ken Ralston is all of these and more. Richard Edlund calls him "the quintessential model photographer" and noted model builder Greg Jein is of the opinion that "Ralston is the premier photographer of the miniature today." He was an effects cinematographer on The Empire Strikes Back, helped create the dragon of Dragonslayer, worked on the intricate stop-motion effects of Poltergeist and was supervisor of visual effects on Star Trek II: The Wrath of the Khan. His first movie was done in his garage, and it was a 40-minute 8mm production into which he and his co-producer "piled in all the special effects we wanted to try" that got him his first professional job at Cascade Productions. There, under the expert supervision of Phil Kellison, he built props, sculpted, and did stop-motion work on many commercials—including the Pillsbury Doughboy. Through another Cascade alumnus, Dennis Muren, he graduated to the Star Wars crew.
"For two months I was sculpting and designing creatures for Jedi which was a lot of fun," Ralston said. "Then Star Trek II came along, and when that was finished I came back to this thing and have spent about 10 months shooting space stuff. Mainly, what I did is the space battle, which was the biggest and most difficult; the opening of the film, and the ship going into hyperspace. A few other things, of course, as there's always a miscellaneous shot that crops up out of nowhere. I've been doing some stuff for Dennis, and we're all shooting each other's stuff, just to get it done.
"There's one shot that will break all records for opticals. It's a huge space shuttle and a lot of tie ships flying everywhere. It has about 60 to 70 single elements in it that they had to put together into one piece of film. To choreograph that is very difficult, just to get everything to go the right way and to get the action to do everything we wanted and not get to be in such a mess that you couldn't follow the action. That's hard when you have so many different things in a shot. Sometimes your eye doesn't know where to go and you're looking all over but can't find the main action.
This three-ring circus problem had arisen before, during the making of Empire, Ralston recalled. "We did a shot in the asteroid sequence (which isn't in the film because we had to change it) in which we had Darth Vader's ship, about five star destroyers, asteroids flying and hitting the ships—all kinds of things going on. We saw the dailies and it was fine, technically, but we didn't know what the hell was happening. It was just too much. So we eliminated half the stuff and it made more sense. George likes to keep the shots very simple but not too abstract—which is understandable, considering how short his cuts are because you'll miss the pacing and won't be able to follow through with his most simple line of action. If you get to thinking, 'Wait a minute, I—wha—what?—' you'll get thrown off and it is hard to get back into it. It's like a revolving door: it's real fast, and if you happen to get out you think, 'I gotta get back into this action again.'"
Most of the battle elements were blue screened, but Ralston explained that some are shot against black backings: "mostly explosions, debris and things like that. There's a lot of pyrotechnics in the film. I like the results that I get when I shoot against black better than blue screen because there are fewer problems. I wouldn't say there's anything really innovative about anything that I did—the motion control is the same system we've used before, for instance. The only hard part about the whole thing was—and I say this like it was nothing when it was terrible!—was the size of it. That and getting things straightened out and organized enough to work. The ships are much more flamboyant than every before, but under control. There are just so many of them that getting it all shot was a real undertaking."
Most of the spacecraft were firmly mounted and rod controlled, but Ralston noted some exceptions. "In some of the battle we had ships rigged on wires on the big stage and filled with explosives. I'd say that 99% of the work, excluding the backgrounds, was with ships mounted onto the blue screen pylon with neon in it that's the same blue as the background blue screen. All was recorded for motion control on the Dykstraflex VistaVision or any other camera we could get our hands on toward the end. We had to make deals to get different cameras to get our shots done: 'Look, if your crew shoots this for me, I'll shoot that for you, and...'"
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