One of the biggest scenes seemingly in the Star Wars original trilogy was not in fact the biggest scene. The movies were huge in terms of size and scale for the 1980s and compared to today’s technologies they are a marvel in delivering special effects for a movie ahead of its time. But just like a Transformer, there is more than meets the eye to the special effects.
On this day in 1982 (the 11th of January), filming began for Return of the Jedi. With many big scenes containing hundreds of thousands of fighters and being the 3rd movie in the trilogy, the producers looked at ways to save money while still serving the scene. Artists were used to paint several backgrounds if the movie.
You knew it was a painting, right?
Back in these days movie sets didn’t have access to CGI movie effects and the team had to be innovative in how they showed different scenes and monsters. Star Wars took the approach of painting in background scenes instead of hiring thousands of extras to fill the rooms that they would have had to then build.
Star Wars artist, Christopher Evans finishing a matte painting for one of the scenes where the emperor lands on the death star. This scene had thousands of stormtroopers and imperial officers in the scene.
How The Movie Effect Worked
Below is a painting of the landing scene for when the emperor visits the Death Star. The black space to the right was reserved for actual actors to stand near the space shuttle.
Several actors were required to give this painting a touch more depth. Now see that the added imperial officers make the scene feel full and more complete below.
Then when the final paintings were added we ended up with a scene like this, being shot from an overhead corner angle gives the scene a sense of depth and scale of the army on the Death Star.
The final scene was mashed together with a video of the emperor and Darth Vader walking down the corridor giving the effect that they were walking in front of the Death Stars army. This perspective trick makes you think it’s happening as one big scene when it’s really a mix of two different scenes.
In Today Studios this scene would be CGI generated and take a few weeks to design. But back in the 80’s the tools available to the effects teams were nowhere near today’s technological powers and they had to improvise with what they had available. The movies went on to become box office hits and iconic in their own right.
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