KMC Forums - Post Notes: Exchanging Broadsides

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October 06, 2004

His Jedi starfighter comes to an abrupt halt, its cockpit canopy springs open, and Obi-Wan Kenobi continues his forward momentum, somersaulting through the air to land in a combat stance. He whirls his lightsaber around him, cutting down battle droids left and right.

"What I liked about this was that as he emerges, he's spooky, like a grim specter of destruction," describes George Lucas to Rob Coleman and his team of animators gathered at the ILM view-station to review animation. The spectacular jump will be executed by Obi-Wan's computer-generated proxy, and in a rare instance of digital serendipity, the cloth simulation for Kenobi's robes had the Jedi hood billow and pull up over his head during the jump. When he enters the fray, he's hooded, with his face shadowed.

Lucas has become particularly enamored with this fully rendered shot, but there's a complication. The next shot of Obi-Wan, gathered during the Shepperton pickups, is a very fast clip of Ewan McGregor swinging his lightsaber twice. And the hood is off.

When the Episode III pick-ups wrapped in Shepperton in early September, Rick McCallum did book a studio for a brief stint in January 2005, just in case any more pickups would be required as the edit continued to evolve. A prudent measure, given how early studio spaces can book up, but the hope of everyone would be that it's not necessary. The inertia of postproduction is difficult to overcome in order to pack up and jet over an ocean to do more photography, especially for something as tiny as a shot of Ewan redoing a quick action with his hood on.

There are plenty of digital solutions for a discontinuity like this. That doesn't mean, though, it's going to be easy.

"It would be easier to remove the hood in the cloth sim than try to match a simmed hood onto a live actor," points out Rob. His preference, shared by John Knoll, is to drop the hood during the jump, so it lines up with the next live action cut. George, though, is hesitant. He likes the idea of the hood. Though he doesn't shoot down the suggestion right away, he doesn't embrace it either.

The discussion bounces back and forth. "Let it go," whispers Rick, paraphrasing a ghostly Obi-Wan advising Luke during a Death Star trench run.

"Awright," says George. "I'll let you have it. Just don't say I haven't tried to go easy on you." Then he grins with a glint in his eye. "Especially considering what I've got in store for you next."

Every Tuesday and Thursday at ILM begins with the review of HD dailies projected on the big screen. In each session, 30 or so shots are presented for George's approval, and more often than not, they're finalled. Occasionally, he provides notes to lighten something, to darken something else, or to sharpen a detail here and there.

With the Knoll and Guyett units working on their assigned sequences in order, the dailies can be repetitive. By now, readers have become accustomed to hearing about the evolution of the space battle, the Jedi Council sequences, Padm�'s apartment and verandah scenes and shots of the Senate. Each sequence is chipped away at before new ones start to turn up, and the new ones are always a refreshing addition.

Last week, suddenly, new locales and images begin showing up. About half a dozen shots that jump us out of the sequences we had grown cozy with.

These are trailer shots. They don't strictly count toward the final totals, since they will more than likely be revisited again for the finished movie. But already, the ILM team knows which shots need to be completed for the world's first theatrical glimpses into Episode III, and that next milestone is weighing heavily on the horizon.

Star Wars has always been an intriguing mix of anachronistic technology. As Separatist and Republic cruisers exchange broadsides in the epic space battle, we cut into the Separatist gunnery bay. There, huge cannons recoil back into frame, while battle droid workers scramble to keep the hungry weapons loaded. It's like an old pirate movie, with grubby crew men working below decks, maneuvering past the heavy cannons that roll back after each blast.

The shot is currently in a low-rez layout iteration, with the gun geometry presented crudely and with little detail. Curving racks guide huge shells into the guns' firing chamber. And as the cannons fire, spent casings are ejected onto the bay floor. George wants it to look busy, but clear enough to understand just what's going on.

There's a problem with the first layout. "I can see what you're trying to do here," George points out, "but it doesn't really make sense." The guns are pointing to screen left, with the cameras looking at their rear-left sides. From our vantage point, the ammo racks are feeding into the camera-opposite side of the cannon, the same side from which the ejected shells emerge.

Technologically, we don't know how these cannons work, so there is really nothing to say that they can't feed and eject shells from the same side. But there aren't many examples of that in real life, and it reads as wrong to George.

"What if we took this part here," George suggests. At the tail end of each cannon is a cylinder, with a circular dimple at the end. With each blast, this cylinder pushes into and out of the rest of the cannon assembly. "What if the shell came out of this end?"

The animators mull this over. There's something not quite right about that either, because with the rhythmic firing patterns and ejected shells being pushed that way... there's something about it that would look... well, anatomical. Though, that wasn't exactly the word used that day.

"It'd look like a poop joke, wouldn't it?" laughs George. He jokes that the Editorial Department would have a field day putting in gag sound effects for something like that, a prank they've been known to play.

"What if we took this end, extended it out, and had the shell eject out the side?" he says. Instead of the spent shell extruding from the end of the cylinder, the cylinder would stretch out farther, to reveal a rectangular cut along its length. From this gap, the shell would eject laterally -- sideways, like a drinking straw from a hinged dispenser.

Within a week, there's a new version of the shot. And it will continue to evolve until it looks just right.

As the animation meeting draws to a close, George asks to pull up the shot of Obi-Wan jumping yet again.

"What if we did this," he thinks aloud, pulling up the shot of Obi-Wan taking the two swipes. "What if we had a stand-in do this exact same move, but wear a green or blue hood. That way, you guys can keep the hands and robes, and just paste in the face. It'll be obscured by the hood anyway, and dark."

"Yeah, we can do that," says John, but stage photography of bluescreen extras won't take place until November, and having a gap in this sequence ends up delaying Reel One.

"How about we shoot it on May 20th?" jokes Rick.

Postproduction is a million little decisions, driven by the thousands of little decisions you made during principal photography. This one, though not yet resolved, undoubtedly has similar cousins waiting in the wings.

Total Number of Shots: 2,300
JAK Finals: 841
Final Omits: 74
Finals Needed Per Week: 56
Weeks to Go: 26
Shots Left to Go: 1,459