The first Star Wars sequel turns 30 this year, and to celebrate the occasion, fans are being treated with J.W. Rinzler’s The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. These incredible photos alone are worth the $US50 price tag.
Vanity Fair has been running excerpts from the book all week, and today’s photographs are the stuff that Rebel dreams are made of.
Oh hello Mr. Wamp!
And, sorry to spoil things, but…
Check out the rest of the photo set at Vanity Fair and oh hell why drag your feet just go order it at Amazon already. [Vanity Fair]
Ben
Wednesday, October 13, 2010 at 2:19 PMI might buy George Lucas a copy to remind him how to make good films again.
Steve
Wednesday, October 13, 2010 at 4:44 PMThe Cloud City set reminds me how great films used to look when they used actual physical sets and props. Notice the forefront stage with everything you need to see and the matte backdrop.
This scene remade in 2000+ would have just been green-screened and ended up looking like washed-out shit.
The Jedi Temple scenes from Attack of the Clones looked unusually bad. But the battle scenes from Geonosis, which should have looked dusty, gritty and real just looked plastic and air-brushed.
matt h
Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 1:13 PMAH geez Steve. Please at least do some homework on this. To see how greenscreen has nothing to do with it. Greenscreen is no different to bluescreen which is what they used in the old trilogy. They used as many miniatures for set extensions and vehicles and so on in Ep. 1 alone as in the whole of the original trilogy combined. They used salt filmed slo-mo to make waterfalls. They used cotton buds to make crowds. They used cg as well. But they had bad storytelling, bad editing, bad colour grading. Like I said in the Tarantino TB, it’s the PEOPLE behind it making it good or bad. Not the tools. Digital crowd replication is essentially no different to the quadruple exposure that was used to achieve the same thing in the ORIGINAL Day the Earth Stood Still in the 50s.
Case in point, exactly this scene. The longshot where you see the whole weather vane? BAD matte painting with bluescreened actor on tiny bit of set. Which was AIRBRUSHED (oldschool), ironically enough. The infamous/awful shot in the penthouse with the bad perspective? There are also many incredible shots that have never been bettered. There were miniature sets made for Geonosis as well as cg. If you’re gonna be so simplistic, don’t. If you feel you can comment, know your stuff first. And just because GL tells the artists to make Maul look idiotic and defy anything approaching physics when jumping off his speeder, doesn’t mean the fx guys didn’t know it looked ridiculous.
Now Ben had some good advice.
Agrippa
Wednesday, October 13, 2010 at 10:22 PMGreetings from Gizmodo Prime (America) just wanted to say, LOL Ben. That was awesomcles. (That’s like being as fun as testicles but made of awesomeness)