The Academy Follow We are The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and we champion the power of human imagination. May 4 · 8 min read One of the many miniatures Richard Edlund and the ILM crew shot for the original “Star Wars” trilogy. The force behind the original “Star Wars” magic: VFX legend Richard Edlund The wildly creative mind behind the eye-popping eects of many blockbuster lms has a secret oce in Los Angeles. At rst glance, you’ll spy a “Ghostbusters” coee table book, and over there are framed posters of movies he helped make. Behind him is the Pignose portable guitar amp he created. And on a crowded bookshelf anked by BAFTA and Academy Sci-Tech awards are his Oscars. Richard Edlund’s accomplishments seem as unbelievable as his visual eects. Richard Edlund preparing to shoot the Millennium Falcon for the original “Star Wars.” Shortly after graduating from USC in the ’60s, he shot the opening yby of the USS Enterprise for the original “Star Trek” TV series. After years of working on commercials in the ’70s, John Dykstra, the visual eects supervisor for “Star Wars” (1977), tapped Edlund to be his rst camera operator. Dykstra, Edlund and other trailblazers formed the legendary visual eects company Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) in Van Nuys, California, while making miniature ships y through space for “Star Wars.” The duo would win their rst Oscars for their eects on the lm. The pair would go on to work on the original “Battlestar Galactica” TV series in 1978, but when it was time to begin “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980), George Lucas chose Edlund to supervise the visual eects. Edlund’s remarkable ability to lm Luke Skywalker’s X-wing tripping up the AT-AT Walkers in “Empire” was one of the many feats in the movie that helped earn him his second Oscar. His success with “Empire,” notably his knack for evoking the white, snowy environs of Hoth, would open the door to wielding his magic on “Return of the Jedi,” “Poltergeist,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Die Hard,” “Ghostbusters,” “Fright Night,” “Air Force One” and many other lms that shaped generations. On a rainy morning, the longtime Academy member and current Academy Governor discussed the rst two “Star Wars” lms. Below, in bold, are facts learned in an hour-long conversation, followed by Edlund’s comments. Richard Edlund would earn an Oscar for his work as rst camera operator for the special eects on “Star Wars.” The original “Star Wars” had a limited eects budget. We created all the eects — 365 shots in “Star Wars” — in two years for about $2.5 million. That was our budget. And that included building the optical department. We got a fantastic deal from Howard Anderson, who had an optical company on the Paramount lot, and sold us the VistaVision equipment that had been built up and amassed by Paramount. We bought what we called the Anderson printer for $14,000. It was a two- headed printer with a camera, a complete optical system, a lamp house and everything built in. Edlund had his doubts about “Star Wars” until they hired for the role of Obi-Wan. Alec Guinness and George Lucas on the set of “Star Wars” (1977). I was a little worried about the script because of the “Trust in the Force, Luke” line. It would have to be Marlon Brando or somebody like that. But, when George [Lucas] cast Alec Guinness [as Obi-Wan Kenobi], I gured, it’s a blockbuster. I knew that it was going to be a hit. In my soul. I was worried that it was going to be a teenage movie, but Alec Guinness had the gravitas for that part. He basically transcended the teenage demographic. George Lucas based the space battles on real ones from WWII. George had cut a 10-minute reel of 16mm footage that he had gotten from “Battle of Britain” (1969) and other World War II dogght movies. We understood the cutting dynamic that he had in mind from this reel. For example, a B-25 became a Millennium Falcon and a Spitre became the X-Wing. Although Edlund thought about light (like the two suns in the Tatooine sky), he cared more about people being lit well as opposed to being lit realistically. R2-D2 accepts an important message from Princess Leia in “Star Wars” (1977). My attitude was every shot of the X-Wing is gonna be lit to make it look as good as it can look. And that means they are virtually always back lit. At one point John did this construct of the galaxy and where the sun was and how each shot would be lit by this sun that would be here. And I said, “John.” I said, “Do you remember, you’ve seen all those great movies in the ’30s and ’40s and ’50s and the actors always looks great in every shot.” It’s like, they’re not paying attention. They’re all using Rembrandt lighting, which is like, it’s like here. And so half the face falls in shadow. And so I said, “I’m gonna light every shot to look the best it can and nobody’s gonna give a damn. Because it’s a fantasy.” So his whole concept of the lighting schedule went out the window. In between “Star Wars” and “The Empire Strikes Back,” ILM went by the codename Kerner Company. Because “Star Wars” was such a monstrous hit, we had to go underground as the Kerner Company. All purchase orders were made under the Kerner Company, inspired by Kerner Avenue in San Rafael. Otherwise, we’d have all these fans scouring through the trash. I mean, we had people begging for model shop sweepings. We had to protect ourselves from that. Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill in “Return of the Jedi” (1983). Since the Kerner Company ruse worked so well, on the set of “Return of the Jedi,” the crew tried to throw o fans once more. On “Jedi,” when we were shooting the Sarlacc Pit and Jabba’s barge in Yuma, Arizona, they built this enormous, 40-foot structure out of telephone poles. On top of it, there was a big dish with an edge that would blend with the dunes in the distance. The idea was that we could shoot this whole scene and not worry about the thousand dune buggies that were swarming around down under the base. There were people who asked, “Aren’t you guys working on ‘Star Wars’?” But everybody had Blue Harvest t-shirts and Blue Harvest hats. So we said, “No, we’re shooting a movie called ‘Blue Harvest.’” It worked until one day you could see 3P0 and R2 in a pick-up truck on the way to the set. John Dykstra used his Dykstraex camera on “Star Wars,” but for “The Empire Strikes Back,” Richard Edlund devised his own motion-controlled camera. The Vista Cruiser was a much more sophisticated camera and it had much better movement. The logo was swiped from a Buick station wagon. It wouldn’t run at any speed other than one frame a second. When you’re moving something with that much mass, you can’t move it fast because then you have frame rate issues. The whole idea was all of these shots were programmed at 1/24th of actual speed, so you had to think in slow motion. The toughest sequence for Edlund in “Star Wars” wasn’t a ghting scene. The hardest shot was the shot of the Millennium Falcon coming into the docking bay. The lightsaber eect wasn’t very easy to achieve. It was producer Gary Kurtz’s idea to use front projection material on a stick, have a beam splitter on the front of the camera and reect light o the beam splitter towards the front projection material. That brings light back very brightly to the camera. It was a good idea on side shots, but when it starts getting into this angle, the eect goes away because it has to be almost plane to the camera. So it was very limiting in terms of what you could do. A contact sheet of Obi-Wan dueling with Darth Vader in “Star Wars” (1977). What worked was far simpler in practice. Basically, they fought with sticks, and each shot had to then be rotoscoped. So all of the light sabers in [the original] Star Wars [trilogy] were rotoscoped. They were animated. What wasn’t simple was creating the opening scenes in “The Empire Strikes Back.” On “Star Wars,” the shots were mainly of spaceships against star elds. It’s pretty easy to get a matte for that, and it’s easy to x a matte. On the other hand, on “Empire” we had light gray ships zooming around with motion blur, with blurred engines, against a snow scene, or a white sky, or a sky with puy white clouds. Any matte lines would give it away and it wouldn’t work. Visually, we had to conquer the matte line, and we did that with a Quad printer. Using a Quad printer is complicated photographically. In other words, one of the mattes had to hold up the motion blur. However, that matte wasn’t heavy enough to hold a ship out against the background, so I had to use two. Rebel forces retreat from the AT-AT walkers during the Battle of Hoth in “The Empire Strikes Back.” I had to have the motion blur matte, which took care of the edges, and then I made another mat that was shrunken in size.