Star Wars: Birth of Modern Special Effects
When the first of the Star Wars trilogy, A New Hope, was released in 1977 it pushed the extent of special effects technology of the time to its limits. The film revolutionized the use of blue screen editing techniques that were used in countless action sequences in several movies in the years following. The movie also employed character and set design that was unprecidented prior to it’s creation. While primitive to today’s computer generated models, the anamotronic creatures in the origional movie were incredibly lifelike for the technology of the time.
Probably the most well-recognized special effect technique used in the origional Star Wars film was the use of blue screens to film both the space scenes and fast action vehicle scenes. The process of using blue screens is quite simple in theory yet was innovative at the time. It is a simple process of filming the vehicle ONLY in front of a screen of a solid color (usually blue). Later in editing, the appropriate blue tonw was removed from the film to “crop” out the vehicle or sequence being filmed. This was later superimposed on a previously recorded background sequence.
In theory, it seems like a rather simple procedure for a big budget Hollywood production. However, this technique had one huge flaw. The burning out of the blue background tone in the process left an unsightly black outline around the clip. Thus, when it superimposed on the background sequence, there was the possibility of a substantial loss of realism with this black line around speeding vehicles. This at first didn’t pose much of a problem in the first Star Wars, A New Hope, mainly due to the fact that mose scenes took place in space on a black background. Thus the black line was not too noticable.
The problem came during the production of the second in the series, The Empire Strikes Back. Particularly when filming a specific scene of the attack on Hoth. Rather than the previous scenes shot using the blue screen technique which were finished with a black space background, the Hoth scene was to have the blue screen produced Rebel speeder takes superimposed on WHITE snow. Thus, the black line I mentioned earlier was well visible against the white snow background. To rectify this, the producers burned out the blue screen image in an attempt to hide the black line. However, this had a tradeoff. Burning out the image in this manner also caused a transparent effect on the vehicle. This led to some scenes in the Hoth battle where the cockpit view from the Rebel speeders were transparent and the viewer could see the ground below. It was a technical limitation of the period that was not resolved until 1997 when the origional trilogy was digitally redone.
Star Wars truly pushed the techniques and technology of special effects to their limits and inspired future film-makers to top what it accomplished. Star Wars set the bar in special effects for years until truly digital editing and CGI emerged in the late 1990s. The “digital age” of film-making prompted a remastered version of the orgional trilogy that allowed for more detailed and realistic rendering of the strange creatures of the movie and the wide variety of otherworldly vehicles. CGI allowed for far more realistic rendering of scenes that any special effects technique 30 years ago could have offered. Yet, with all this said, none of todays fancy computer generated graphics would have been possible if it wasn’t for those advances in special effects years ago to get the film industry off the ground and striving for better and brighter film-making technologies.
