The one last thing I got from Star Wars and Joe Johnston was the notion of managing the impossible. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. When you’re faced with a seemingly insurmountable task, figuring out what you want to do is only half of the problem. In preproduction, and on through production, you need to decide, and occasionally review in light of new information, HOW you’re going to do it.Take scale:
That drawing is classic Joe Johnston. Simple, quick little technical jot, but it sets the scale for the ships, so that everyone involved in the production can see at a glance, without having to go ask or look it up, exactly how big the ships are in relation to one another. That’s very important.
But equally important is how you break up the Impossible Task. Take the surface of the Death Star, for instance. It’s a nightmare of chunky detail, what the special effects guys call “greeble”. Look at this scene from the movie:
Bad enough you’ve got to create acres of this stuff, you’re going to fly a camera RIGHT DOWN IN AMONG IT! Sure, the camera will be whipping by, and there will be fighter ships and lasers to distract the viewer, but no matter what, it all has to be made (this is in the days before CG, when stuff was actually built and painted by hand) and it has to hold up reasonably well at close range.
Well, Johnston and his boys came up with a solution: a modular approach. They designed a series of modules that could be broken into sections and reattached, or turned 90 degrees to get different effects. These were then modeled, and mass produced out of a sort of high density styrofoam. Brilliant! But it all started with this series of drawings by Joe Johnston:
This ingenious approach has served me well when I’ve had to model stuff, even in the computer, that needed the appearance of detail and variety, but time or resource was short. Think of the “forest” in Channelwood in realMYST. They are all one tree, scaled and rotated to try to give the impression of more:
Next time, I want to talk about how this approach worked on Star Wars, the strange things they wound up doing to make it work, and discuss a little bit about the power of detail.
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 9:04 am and is filed under Ogden's SOAPBOX.
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May 9th, 2007 at 7:00 am e
This article is fascinating on so many levels. I love reading about the behind the scenes stuff for one of the all time great movie series, the info about the artists, techniques -the modular approach to the complex surfaces ’seems’ obvious now, but for a new guy like me this sparks the neurons in new and exciting ways.
Thanks for this incredible glimpse into the collective grey matter and genius that brought this movie to life.
May 9th, 2007 at 7:23 pm e
I’m really glad you enjoyed it. The guys at ILM were working against the clock, and in the Behind the Scenes materials on the DVD collection for the original trilogy, it is amazing to hear how much doubt there was about this film. The cast and crew sort of thought it was going to be a flop, George Lucas wasn’t happy with the FX, the studio was breathing down their necks…
It’s inspirational to me to see that they persevered and came up with one of the most appreciated films ever made.