The Lucas Legacy

Movie technology changed with the creation of 'Star Wars'

(CNN) -- Movies changed in 1977. From the moment Han Solo's Millennium Falcon jumped into hyperspace, filmmaking would never return to what it had been before.

Sure, plenty had gone on in George Lucas' "Star Wars" before movie-watchers peered out the Falcon's cockpit over Solo's shoulder and watched the stars fly by ... but the collective gasp of delight that echoed through every theater at that particular moment in the film underscored the finality of what Lucas had done.

The age of truly "special" effects had arrived.

Movie magic, once the domain of imagination, could suddenly make planetary warfare, unbelievable creatures, and hyperspace-jumping a reality, at least on celluloid.

"2001: A Space Odyssey" -- the premiere science fiction film before "Star Wars" -- was a drawing-room drama compared to the galactic expanse Lucas brought to the screen in "Star Wars" and its sequels. And while some might say the advent of such technological advances cost movies some of the magic of imagination, none can deny that Lucas' innovations dramatically affected the way movies are made.

From the past to the future

Innovators, yes -- but George Lucas' technical wizards looked to the past for futuristic filming and used a film process discarded 20 years earlier because of its expense.

George Lucas on the re-release
		An electric experience (30 sec./668K AIFF or WAV sound)
		What makes a shot special (25 sec./531K AIFF or WAV sound)
		The new Jabba the Hutt scene (24 sec./549K AIFF or WAV sound)

They turned to VistaVision, an innovative camera used briefly in the 1950s that turned 35mm film on it side give more exposure area in each frame for the image. Studio executives and theater owners at the time rejected the expense of retooling equipment to make use of VistaVision's product, but the technicians at Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) -- formed by Lucas in 1975 to create the visual effects of "Star Wars" -- resurrected the lost process and put the VistaVision cameras and their mammoth printers to use.

But they took the process leaps and bounds beyond its original purpose, using the expanded exposure area to film the expanse of space -- planets, the Death Star, vivid battles. To create those indelible images, ILM used both new techniques and old ones stretched to their fullest potential.

ILM technicians moved beyond the traditional model construction materials such as wood, plaster and steel, experimenting with aluminum, urethane foam and plastic. For the sweeping scenes in space, models of star cruisers and X-wing fighters were filmed in front of a blue background -- a technique that allows relatively easy removal of the background later, to be replaced by stars and planets seen in the final cut of the film.

But a battle scene with dozens of spacecraft could not be shot in one take. Bruce Nicholson, an optical camera assistant on "Star Wars," said that "it was not uncommon to have 30 to 40 separate foreground pieces combined with a background piece" to create a final scene. To match all the movement precisely, ILM achieved breakthrough in motion control -- electronically controlling camera movement -- with the computerized Dykstraflex system, developed by John Dykstra.

Once the movement of each foreground element had been filmed, ILM's optical department could piece the disparate elements together -- a cinematic jigsaw puzzle.

The ILM crew later built new cameras, based on the VistaVision cameras, and new film printers for the filming of "The Empire Strikes Back."

Since "Star Wars," ILM has created visual effects for more than 100 films: "Raiders of the Lost Ark," "E.T. The Extraterrestrial," "Back to the Future," "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?," "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," "Forrest Gump," "The Mask," "Jurassic Park" ... and the list goes on.

Digital technology -- computer graphics -- has replaced much of the wizardry ILM produced for "Star Wars" on 20-year-old cameras. But Lucas' magicians have not stopped innovating. They've won countless awards, including 14 Oscars, for their efforts. One Oscar was awarded in 1992 for the development of the morphing technique to metamorphose one image into another.

It's the advances in digital filmmaking made by ILM and others that brought Lucas back to "Star Wars" to take advantage of new technology to restore the 20-year-old film and bring it closer to his original vision -- "my ulterior motive," he said.

"A famous filmmaker once said that films are never completed, they are only abandoned," Lucas said. ""So rather than live with my 'abandoned' movies, I decided to go back and complete them."

But ILM also counters criticism that its splashy visual effects have degraded the storytelling ability of movies. ILM technicians created simple color -- in a child's coat, the flickering flame of candles -- for a film with not one single dinosaur, no space battles or jumps into hyperspace: Steven Spielberg's otherwise black-and-white "Schindler's List."