Page 60 - Star Wars Insider #175

GRAPHIC DISPLAYS

Once the six basic trench
pieces were saved in the
computer’s memory, Cuba
used a separate program to
combine them in U-shaped 03
configurations to create the

bottom and sides of a trench
shape. The complete trench
animation uses more than
50 of these U-shaped
sections, and each frame
of animation features four
sections, combined and shown
in perspective.
In order to transfer the

finished animation onto fi lm,
Cuba pointed a Mitchell camera
with a stop-motion animation
motor at his monitor. The fi nal
animation was some 2,100
frames long, and each frame
took two minutes to process,
requiring more than 70 hours
of stop-motion fi lming. The

finished sequence was 90
seconds long, of which about
40 seconds appear in the movie.
Wash had been hired But while that technique
BACK TO BASICS to create postproduction worked well for most of the
Cuba delivered his animation display graphics alongside Jay graphics, blowing up the
on time, but that was not the Teitzell and Dan O’Bannon. Death Star was another
end of the story. The fi nal part ILM simply did not have the matter entirely, owing to
of the sequence, showing a time to tackle everything in the scale limitations of the
small ship delivering its payload house, so the three men were backlighting technology.
into the Death Star reactor assigned responsibility for “When the graphic for the

core, was actually a separate around 10 displays, such as the fighter comes in and drops the
endeavor, created months readout on Luke Skywalker’s torpedo,” Wash explains, “the
later by another animator, macrobinoculars, the targeting surface of the Death Star is just
John Wash. displays in various ships, and a straight line because we’re
the “fl oor-screen so close to it. But then we do
display” at the a huge zoom back so the fl at
“THE FINISHED rebel base. horizon starts to curve, and

“All that stuff finally we see that it’s an orb.
SEQUENCE WAS 90 except for one shot Then there’s a graphic of the
was done using torpedo exploding.
SECONDS LONG, OF traditional backlit “The biggest piece of
WHICH ABOUT 40 techniques,” says artwork I could get on an
Wash today. “We
Oxberry was 30 inches, but if
SECONDS APPEAR used high-contrast you backlight a 30-inch circle,
black-and-white you’re not going to be able to
IN THE MOVIE.” transparencies on zoom in and get that fl at line.
either an Oxberry For that, you need a circle that’s
[animation stand] about 24-feet across! So we got
or a small animation camera. a huge piece of aluminum and
By using different colored gels built a beam compass that was
over the lens of the camera or 12-feet long.

the artwork, we could get a “I set it up on the floor of my
very rich degree of complexity apartment and used it to draw
by doing multiple passes.” circular sections on about 72

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