Star Wars Featurette- Visual Effects

“The secret to film is that it’s an illusion, an illusion that’s created at 24frames a second, you have the illusion of movement and you have the illusion of space and time” George Lucas 

“A big film has maybe 250 fx shots, and a really monster film like Titanic would have 450-500, but it was really clear that George was thinking somewhere between 1700 to 2000 shots”. In pre production, while the ILM crew and technology people and artists were doing storyboarding and planning out, it clearly shows their biggest mistake of thinking about visual effects and showing off their made up universe rather than sticking to the main story that they are trying to tell. Clearly, you get the feeling this is a dream job George Lucas always had, exploring the world he imagined because he wanted to see it, not because it was relevant to the story. He is after spectacle and showing off.

“That was the fun part of writing this project is that I wasn’t limited, whatever my imagination could come up with I wrote it down on a page and said will worry about that later” He knows now that the technology has caught up to the point that you can do most of things if not everything you can imagine. Looking back at the period of original Star Wars and start of visual Effects, the limit was the technology and software. Maybe it is a good thing, or not. Presently, Budget is the only obstacle you have to surpass.  This is due to budget

The visual effect supervisors continue to talk about technology limitations and what couple of decades ago was like in terms of effects. They talk about having  “more freedom” than what George Lucas had at the period of the original Star Wars film, and that’s due to digital technology has not matured enough as it is presently. “Everything has been constrained by the compromises that you have to make because you virtually could not build something so big or could not have such an epic landscape to tell your story”