Craig Barron described the making of a similar scene in some detail. "The master shot has four different plates in it, with the creatures and pilots and some big bonfires. They didn't want to film the creatures around real bonfires because they were afraid the furry costumes would catch fire, so they were shot here in front of a blue screen. That gave us the shot of the little creatures running back and forth. And then there are separate shots made on location of a bonfire at night. The optical department matted the creatures in front of the bonfire. By this time Chris Evans had already finished most of the master painting, as far as the areas that are going to go behind the critters are concerned. At this point we took the cameras in very close to the painting—which is on a 2 and a half by six foot glass—and shot the areas that go behind the creatures and the bonfires. These areas are only a few square inches in size, no bigger than four inches wide, because these plates are going to be reduced to appear a long way out in the distance. This supplies the backgrounds for optical, and that is put together so the plate has the fire, the creatures and the background.
"We then took that piece of film and had a low contrast print made—we make low cons because contrast increases once we rephotograph them—and then we scraped out that area of the painting and by rear projection we placed them in the painting. This way the actors are able to walk in front of an area of the painting whereas otherwise they would have to be behind some set elements. They are in four different plates, and torches are added as well, so this kind of scene takes a long time to do. The creatures have to be flashed so there are no blacks in them, so they'll match the aerial perspective of the painting."
Barron pointed out the frustration of working for many hours on a scene which will be glimpsed only fleetingly in the final production. "That scene Mike described is only 57 frames," he noted—a matter of less than two and a half seconds on screen. "Mike and I worked on one shot which took 22 hours just for the compositing time. That's not including all the other time involved, such as just shooting torches. There are a lot of torches all through it and there's a camera tilt, so it's very complicated. The torches had to be photographed separately and lined up and rear projected and photographed with the tilt and burned in. When the camera knows where all the torches are then we play back the move and they burn into the proper areas of the painting. Then in the screening room the next day it's on for about three seconds!"
Pangrazio admitted to similar feelings. "I'll put a lot of little things that I like into a painting, " he said. "Little chickens, little sticks and all kinds of things to try to make it look real to me; lots of broken up areas with little things in them. Some are just objects that you can't quite identify. Then we do a tilt-up and you don't even notice any of it. If none of it were there it would look as real. My favorite shots always make me feel it would be nice if we could seem them for a few more seconds. After shooting the backgrounds, planning out the painting, doing the painting, compositing the painting and having it critiqued, and taking it back and making changes—it takes months, sometimes, for three or four seconds of screen time.
"But George has the whole movie in mind and he doesn't fall in love with a shot. He knows that's a real pitfall, because sometimes you see a movie where somebody says, 'Aw, it's such a beautiful shot, let's extend it another 15 seconds.' And while it may be beautiful to him, to an audience which is into the story it doesn't matter, so it falls apart. But it's a temptation."
Pangrazio said that the scene with the torches "will convince people, I'll guarantee. Also, there's always the knowledge that little shots like that impress themselves very deeply on peoples' memories. They'll remember those longer than the rest of the picture. There was one particular shot we worked on that I had a really hard time with and I didn't care much for it. It was a real 'cute' thing, and the action on it was so 'cute' that everybody was saying that was going to be the most memorable shot in the picture, that it would be on lunch pails and everything else. I thought, 'Oh, no, why does it have to be the only shot that I really dislike?' Fortunately, we had to redo that one, for other reasons than what I didn't like about it. So we got a second chance, and hopefully it will still go on lunch pails, but maybe it will also look great."
Curiously, only one matte shot in Jedi was done by the "latent image" method, which has been used since the earliest days of matte photography. In this technique both the live action and the matte art are composited in the camera on the original film without resort to optical or projection compositing. The scene shows the two robots, C-3PO and R2-D2, walking down a desert road toward the distant castle of Jabba. The actors were photographed in Death Valley with a black matte protecting the area of the film in which the castle and the sky must appear. The painting of the castle and sky were photographed onto the same film at ILM with the previously exposed area projected by a matching matte.
"We're pretty happy with most of our work in this show," Pangrazio enthused. "We've really moved ahead—past the ground we broke before with what we're able to do and how effective the shots look. Really, some of them, because they're inherently difficult to accept anyway, look like paintings. The subject matter is such that you just know it has to be a painting. Sometimes matte shots just don't work out from the beginning because they're ill-conceived, but we have to go through with them. Then we really struggle and try to put our hearts into it, but some of them never look right."
Krepela provided an illustration. "On Empire they even racked focus on us; that's a sweet thing to work with! And we may get a shot where nobody considered what was going to be surrounding it in the matte shot. We'd like to have more control over that."
"The bottom line, " Pangrazio added, "is how realistic they look and whether people accept them without questioning. I think we have a few out of the 45 that have achieved that."
