(Right-Click, —> “View Image” for full-size)
There’s a new coffee-table book coming out this month called The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, and Vanity Fair just published some of the pictures. While I’ve seen a few of them before — I published the one about how they created the text-crawl effect a while back — there’s still a ton of cool stuff from the days before George Lucas could just add a stupid family of CGI squirrels in the background if he wanted to (and it’s only by the grace of God that he ever gets talked out of it). The shot of Harrison Ford sitting on the X-wing makes it look like they created the X-wing fighter effect by pretty much just building an entire X-wing fighter. It even says that they considered using a monkey for the walking shots of Yoda because a model wouldn’t look right (they made the monkey wear pants, because with George Lucas around, you never know). A monkey! Christ, what did you do if you had to masturbate back then? Chisel your porn out of marble?
[more pics bigger over at VanityFair]
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George got his mnkey wearing pants wish when they rendered Jar-Jar.
“The shot of Harrison Ford sitting on the X-wing looks like to create the X-wing fighter effect, they pretty much just built an entire X-wing fighter…”
Uh, what? Did I write that?
Lucas’s black heart will not be satisfied until he can digitally replace all of Harrison Ford’s scenes with a 12 foot tall, green elephant-wombat-ferret thing that speaks in high pitched stereotypical Native-American lingo.
“How Jedi. Me Big Chief Solo”
It looks like Darth Vader and Luke took their fight back to Lando Calrissian’s bachelor pad.
I thought George Lucas was only into cats. Monkeys seem like more of a Tom Hardy thing.
James Cameron’s pretty much played out the cat/monkey/CGI seam for all it’s worth.
They even gave the monkey a cane! Are we sure these weren’t test shots for House?
There was a similar process in creating House, but the monkey could never decide if the cause of illness was mold or herpes.
Still, the cast was impressed that even the monkey knew it wasn’t lupus
That monkey happens to have lupus, fancyshark.
Oh come on how many dicks must I step on in one day.
And here I thought I was being clever. Turns out I’m just sore
The advent of CGI has done one markedly abject thing to fantasy films, it has created pairity. What ILM was able to do in the late 70′s early 80′s with special/optical effects was the work of true artisans. To use their imagination and skill to achieve relative suspension of disbelief of the fantastical subject matter was a masterstroke of brilliant miinds. But at a great cost of time and money. This, to a degree, carried the story. Cut to 25 years later and this pairity created by CGI means any studio of dubious charter can churn out films with visuals equivilent to any big budget film (Piranha 3D and the ilk), this creates a need for the story to carry the film. Why did so many fans hate the prequels. Jaded by the saturation of eye popping VFX the stories fell flat. Avatar, same problem, absolutely georgeous, but the tale in and of itself was, meh. It still made $2.5 bil but that was on the back of a new cinematic tech produced in truly immersive 3D. If Cameron rests on those same laurels will the sequel fall flat like Star Wars did? Discuss.
tl;dr George Lucas es un pelicano ROTFJO!
Bah! It’s never lupus, it’s lymphoma. Durr.
I only want one thing answered, why did millions of oysters cry out in terror and were suddenly silenced?
It’s never lupus, unless it actually is lupus. Which it was. One time.
They were all put into Tom Hardy’s ass?
And I’m completely sick of Lucas’ crazy cash grab… but I want this book.
Mmm, vintage Harrison Ford.
George Lucas texts pictures of his neck pouch to women he sexually harasses.
George Lupus was Red 2.
When Lucas does another round of special editions, he’ll CGI in John McCain in place of Jek Porkins. SEE? IT’S LIKE THE OLD VERSION, ONLY TOPICAL
SEE? IT’S LIKE THE OLD VERSION, ONLY TOPICAL
Like my herpes medication.
Darth Vader – taking it to the mattresses.
I don’t like coffee table books. I’m more into glass table books. My colombian interior designer suggested I get them to match the tables she got me. She hasn’t left yet. They need Home Depots in Massachusetts.