American Cinematographer - February 1997 - 58

nal glory. Soon, Kennedy had Star
Wars Special Edition film editor
Tom Christopher (at Skywalker

up with the original effects
elements so that these shots, as well
as other
less-than-perfect opticals,

original elements fit together and
time out perfectly. "Unlike live-ac¬
tion picture editing, which in¬
volves cutting shots together one
after another, visual effects editing
means
placing several layers of
film strips on top of each other to
make one shot," Tanaka explains.

could be

"The visual effects editor tradition¬

Ranch) and visual effects editor
Dave Tanaka (at ILM) searching to
come

recomposited digitally.
Remarkably, George

Lucas had saved all of those bits
and pieces - all the editors had to
do was find them. Despite Lucas'

painstaking archiving of every¬
thing connected to his work, much
of the original negatives, as well as
the other film elements and back¬

ground plates, were nearly impos¬
sible to find because they'd been
misfiled over the years. "Since
Lucasfilm has branched out into

so

many venues, a lot of original foot¬
age has been reused for other pur¬

poses," Tanaka explains. "Over the
course of 20
years, a lot of those
boxes and binders have been
moved from one place to the next,
so if a
page was missing from the

original Star Wars editorial
chives,

we

had to be

a

in

ar¬

bit creative

finding things. A lot of the origi¬
we were
redoing
or
adding to were found at ILM,
but most of the original live-action
footage - which was
nal effects shots

intended to be
used for special ef¬
fects plates, but which
we're also now ma¬
never

nipulating

- was
found at the Ranch,
because that's where

the live-action
Above: To

fully, Robert Hart, the neg cutter on

Reconstruct
the Death Star
trench sequence,

seemingly
identical back¬

ground plates had
to be sorted

through to find the
correct elements.

Right: The
Millennium Falcon

departs. To locate
a

starfield

element, the
desired
constellation
traced onto

was

an

animation cel.
Archival elements
were

then

inspected until the
right pattern was
found.

56

the second and third films, came in

put the negative back together.
After doing various tests, we found
to

room was

cutting

located."

Besides

tracking

down all the elements
needed for the shots
that ILM was recom¬

right away that nothing beats
scanning original negative. Star
Wars was an A-B neg cut, which
meant that they could actually lift
and slug original negative and

Tanaka's other respon¬

send it back to ILM whenever

ment that had been

out

we

a live-action shot.
I think this is the first time someone
has tried to bring a Seventies ef¬
fects film back to the big screen."
were

enhancing

Sadly, after 17

years, the
much dye

CRI material had lost so
that every shot realized on

that

re¬

positing and adding to,

sibility was to re-create
the editorial environ¬
es¬

tablished when Star

Wars' footage was first
assembled. Once that

system was again in

place, Tanaka could
then "get into that
mindset" while

em¬

versal stock had to be removed and

ploying today's visual

recomposited from scratch in order
to bring Star Wars back to its origi¬

effects

American

February 1997

Cinematographer

editing tech¬
niques to make the

ally decides when spaceships enter
frame, and when explosions are
supposed to happen. But since we
were

replacing original shots from

Star Wars with

new

effects shots,

job was also to ensure that we
didn't disrupt the original editing
of each sequence. Although George
wanted all of the spaceships to be
more
dynamic and to move twice
our

fast and double the distance, he
also insisted that the new shots be
the same length as the old ones.
That was a challenge."
as

While many of the shots in
the climactic space battle over the
Death Star involved new CG X-

wing, Y-wing and TIE fighters,
most of the backgrounds were re¬
created using original elements,
which were among the most diffi¬
cult pieces of film to find. "Part of
my job was to be an investigator
and solve the mystery of where the
pieces go had gone," Tanaka re-
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