"We also have a front projection system which used to be our main compositing camera. It is capable of handling a lot more work to ease the setting up and it works rapidly. While the Automatte might require exposures of two seconds because it uses rear projection, a third of a second is appropriate with this system. It's capable of pans and tilts, but it can't move in and back. It has a crude sort of motion control that we call 'slime drive,' which is for smooth moves. Just press in a number—and it'll interlock with the camera on shoot so many increments per frame."
This equipment and personnel are kept busy by the demands of ILM. Krepela mentioned that they had been told they would have to do a lot of outside work because there wouldn't be enough work on Jedi to keep them occupied fully. "We were told there would be between 15 and 20 matte shots in the picture," he recalled. "It turned out to be much more"
Pangrazio agreed. "There's always twice as much. Very few times do they ever cut out a matte shot. They just want more, more and more, because they find that sometimes they can paint out things that they've mis-photographed. Nobody making a picture can really see the whole thing at once, so there are always surprises. From our view it seems there's more fixing up than cutting out."
"We supply a lot of Band-Aids," Krepela said. "They'll have something sticking out over there that shouldn't be there and we patch it up. We have a lot of interesting multiple plate stuff, though. Craig has gotten into quite a bit of that, putting in several pieces of action. And we're putting light effects on trees, putting in shadows, and trying to get movement into the still areas of shots."
Pangrazio observed that Krepela and Barron often come up with ambitious new ideas. "Sometimes a shot is almost done and Craig will say, 'Let's try this,' which is always good. Sometimes we really get involved to the point where I feel that we're almost over our heads in complicated animation of painting, which we try to get into now much more than we used to. We have little torches off in the distance and we're doing latent image torches and rear projection torches, light effects on things, and moving shadows.
"We did one big scene in which we shot in our own actors, the troopers, which we reduced into the painting of the floor of a huge docking bay. We had one plate which was supplied to us over on the right hand side of the painting. We tilted onto it came up in the frame.—All the rest of the shot—about three quarters of the frame—was pretty still, except that outside you can see space and some ships zooming by the window, which helped take the edge off. But we did little flashing light effects, which is an easy thing to do, and we shot these little men. They're going behind little space ships and walking around, and it's pretty magical. It really brings it all to life. that's something we've really gotten into more on this show than any other, breaking new ground. I think the more we do of that, the more we can approach reality. It's really a challenge and it's real fun. On a few shots we almost get there sometimes. We never have, but we almost get there. People are really amazed; they think it's the real thing."
Barron believes that much of the department's improvement is due to the tough audience that attends the rushes. "We have the highest echelon of critics, you know," he said. "Everyone else is just waiting to jump all over our stuff, and that's good, because they see different angles or something that maybe we haven't thought of. Our worst audience is the audience here in the dailies, they're hyper-critical."
"Yeah, and sometimes we get applause, too," Pangrazio added. "A couple of times we've gotten it and it feels good. It doesn't happen very often, maybe three or four times in a whole film."
Krepela noted that the shots that get the applause are "not always the ones you think are good."
"It's just because of a move or something that's going on in them, " Pangrazio added. "A surprise at the end of the tilt, or something happening that looks amazing to people. I with it would happen more often, but it doesn't; we can't expect it because everybody's pretty critical. And if there's a piece of dirt in front of something it's gone over and everybody has their pointers out and they're all pointing at that piece of dirt and shaking their heads in disapproval. Then it's 'redo it.' But that's probably why this effects building is as successful as it is in terms of really producing beautiful effects for films. It's that attitude which prevails—but it does get somewhat old after a while and a pat on the back helps.
"We have about 45 matte paintings in this show," Pangrazio revealed. "They're of all kinds of different things. In a movie like this, a fantasy, you've got to have them. You can't build everything you want to show and you can't shoot some of the things you need because they don't exist. Besides, George Lucas really knows how to use matte paintings. Most producers and directors don't. Sometimes they're told, 'there's no other way to do it, so let's use a matte shot,' and they do it, grudgingly. George has learned what they can do."
[ continued on page 3 ]