Pyrotechnics were the province of Thaine Morris, who Ralston describes as "pretty much a resident here. He's terrific—he can blow up anything." Camera speeds used for explosives varied. "We had Bruce Hill's speed camera shooting about 360 fps for some of the bigger explosions such as the star destroyer. One of the conning towers blows up, a colossal explosion as if an oil tank erupted. For the x-wings we could shoot 48 fps up to 72—it varied all the time because we tried different speeds and we used whatever worked.
"We shot a lot of them on the ceiling. We just let gravity do the work, so if the ship was falling we could shoot it and give it the angle we wanted, whether from underneath it or as a profile. We had one incident when we were shooting some pyro stuff on the big stage. It was a tie ship that flies past the camera on fire and blows up. We got the thing going, started the camera up and the tie ship ball—which was where all the pyro was—blew off. It fell behind us and landed on one of Dennis' forest miniatures and started it on fire, so everyone was looking at that. What we didn't realize was that the tie ship had taken off and was flying with two wings and a heavy metal rod. It was pitch black out there—there weren't any lights on. One of the still photographers, Roberto McGrath, grabbed the fire extinguisher and started to run across the stage without realizing the tie ship was coming right at him. It hit him on the chin and knocked him down. He had to have stitches and he still has a scar across his chin."
Like most hard-working visual effects men, Ralston occasionally indulges his sense of humor. "On Empire I had a potato flying around in the asteroid sequence. You can't spot it. In Jedi there are fleets of ships in some shots, and some of the ships are just chewing gum stuck on glass. I even put my Nike tennis shoes out there. We wanted to see if George could pick up on it in the dailies. It's fun if the dailies are going smoothly, but if we happen to have a real bad day and then you see it...But I don't know if even I will be able to spot those wads of gum flying through space after we pass all that stuff in front of them.
"We use anything that's handy if we can't find a model, including some built from model kits. We have some fleet shots where we use actual models that Bill George and some of the other model makers have built—just generic shapes, ships that don't make any sense that you can put in the background. Sometimes you just grab debris and stick it out there, because it's so small you can't see anything except some weird shapes. The impression is the same and people come away thinking, 'Wow! Did you see all those ships?' It's good to know that you can get away with it in film because some people waste a lot of time overbuilding things to the point that it's ridiculous. It's fine for a museum piece, but in a movie you lose it.
"If it's too refined it comes away looking artificial. It's like a matte painting that works great, but when you look at it close up, it's just a bunch of shapeless blobs. Its looseness gives it a natural quality. If they refined it and really tightened it up it would start looking like an illustration. When you're looking out there in reality you have all kinds of things to distract your eye, so we have to force distraction so you can't focus in on any one thing closely. We diffuse shots, throw them out of focus, all sorts of things to give reality, especially the sequences on some planet with atmospheric effects such as haze, dust in the foreground or whatever.
"With the space stuff we keep it pretty crisp because it has a different look. It's funny they build the whole optical system so crystal clear. We have the most incredible optical department in the world, and now that we have the sharpest lens ever designed we're throwing diffusions and screens in front of it trying to soften it up. It's too clear, too sharp, and it shows all those unwanted details. Even in a fantasy situation, if you don't give the effects that false sense of reality, the customer won't buy anything, no matter how crazy the shots are. We have to design them in such a way that they almost seem real. We have to do things that relate to what people can understand here, in their everyday lives. If we start getting really way out and abstract they won't buy it. That's why we have the space ships fly like planes and things like that—it gives a reality which is totally false, but they buy it."
DENNIS MUREN
Like many of the leading visual effects men of today, Dennis Muren idolized the work of Willis O'Brien, of King Kong fame, and Ray Haryhausen, master of stop-motion cinematography. While attending college in Los Angeles, he was given a 16mm camera by his parents. During summer vacation he filmed a feature-length fantasy, Equinox, which was acquired by an Eastern distributor, blown up to 35mm, and distributed theatrically. This led to work in independent productions such as Flesh Gordon and a job at Cascade Productions creating effects for commercials. He was prominent in the effects crew of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and was made effects director of photography on The Empire Strikes Back and Dragonslayer. He was supervisor of visual effects on E.T., The Extra-terrestrial. Muren won Academy Awards for both Empire and E.T.
Muren's major responsibilities on Jedi were three sequences: the Rancor pit fight, the bike chase and the walking machines action.
"The Rancor Pit Creature is an 18-foot tall giant man-reptile combination that has to fight Luke," Muren explained. "I started before everybody else. Even while I was still finishing up E.T. I went over to England for a couple of weeks and worked on the live-action shoot of the Rancor Creature and then came back and finished up E.T. and then jumped off onto the location shoot. We started here heavily around May or June.
"The Rancor Creature, of all the things we've done here, is one of the most natural for stop-motion or go-motion. But we went into it with the idea of using a man in a suit, to see if we could do the most advanced man in a suit that's been done and get something we could do like a live-action shoot; not like a slow-moving effects shoot but do four or five shots a day. The sequence runs to about 50 cuts and lasts about three minutes. Unfortunately, we could never get it to work. We finally got something that was almost working with three people operating it, but it was going off in difficult directions, compromising the moves so it wasn't quite as positive as going through a controlled smaller scale operation.
"We didn't really want to try stop-motion, but we felt maybe it was time to look for something new and we came up with another approach that is much more effective. It's sort of like a rod puppet type of thing about 20 inches high, shooting at high speeds, sometimes 72 and other times 96 fps. It's worked from within the puppet, with Phil Tippett's arm inside. The creature's arms were worked by Tom St. Amand through rods that come up and down through the puppet. The sequence is very claustrophobic, taking place in an enclosed space, so most of the shots would be in closer views, from the knees up or the waist up or just the head, which meant that the extraneous paraphernalia that it takes to move the stuff would be out of the bottom of the frame. We got the thing done in a very short time and yet it looks good.
"There are a lot of things you can do with that which you can't do with stop-motion. Like, you can see stuff falling off the creature—dust and so on—and it's got this slime hanging down from its mouth that's really—yucky and it's not animated but is a real thing in the camera. I shot it all the way an operator would do it, as though he were shooting some sort of unleased animal and he didn't know what was going to happen—and all this while shooting three or four times faster than normal. I was trying to figure out just what he would be doing, responding to the moves instead of anticipating them, so the thing would go quickly across the frame, or rear up and we'd follow it up not even knowing what it was going to do. It then cuts in neatly with the live action stuff, which is panning and tilting around much the same way. It was really satisfying to come up with something like that. We're the biggest fans of stop-motion around, still you'll be able to see that there's something else you can apply to certain operations. But, you could never really do a dragon or King Kong in the jungle like that. It depends on the situation, and this was a good chance to try something and not have to go to all the trouble of stop-motion. We could have done some go-motion shots in there, blue screen them and put them in, and we missed the shots where you could see the entire creature and really see it moving, but in the design of the sequence we really didn't quite need them."
Muren recalled an unusual lighting situation which arose during the filming of the Rancor Pit sequence:
"The creature was in the bottom of the pit. It was all very gloomy, and there was a grating up above and people looking down. The light source was there, from the top, and the set was a little smoky with a shaft of light coming down from overhead. We didn't want to work in smoke for a month, plus the scale of miniature smoke is just not the same as it is on a big scale.
"Finally, we came up with a reflection thing. After looking all over for a clear piece of glass with a slight milk over it that doesn't screw the image up, we tried sandblasting. We thought we could put it in front of the camera and have it etched in such a way that it would represent the shaft of light and we'd shoot right through it, but we couldn't come up with anything. We talked to Harrison & Harrison about etching a large sheet of glass, but they don't really make them big enough for what we needed. What we did was put a piece of glass at a 45 degree angle from the camera and reflect a large white card above the camera so it just gave a ghost image of white and then lit the card in a V-shape so the light would seem to come down through the grating. We didn't attach it to the camera; the whole rig was separated so you could pan and tilt and keep it locked on the background. It was sort of like Lightflex, but by not locking it to the cmaera it looks like a shaft of light that's within the shot. Screens gave us gray tones throughout that looked as though the whole thing was shot in a smoke environment without us having to breathe that stuff. Plus, it gave us more control. With very little extra effort we could go ahead and make the shaft look a little nicer and position it better, without straining to see through a lot of smoke.
"There was a lot of hit and miss. The shots were quick, and we did something like we did on some of E.T. when Steven would just keep—the camera rolling and the guys would go on and try it over and over again, without waiting for slates or anything. There is a much better chance that way, if a specific movement doesn't have to be done, of getting something that will look like a real, living thing. Most moves were rehearsed, but sometimes we could go back quickly to the same position and try it again. Sometimes we didn't rehearse them and sometimes we'd do a rehearsal and at the end of the take we'd say, 'well, let's just try something different.' It seemed if we'd sort of flail around a bit, sometimes that would look like the unexpected behavior of an animal."
The so-called Bike sequence depicts a chase on "speeder bikes," which somewhat resemble the rocket-cycles in the old Buck Rogers cartoons. Muren described it as "a consecutive 100-effect shot series that's right in the middle and runs about three minutes. It shows Luke and Leia pursuing a couple of Empircal bikers on bikes that fly through the air at about 120 miles per hour. The remarkable thing is that this sequence is all effects. Every single shot has an effect in it and there are no cutaways.
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