Cinema: Ready, Set, Glow!

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In early 1996, Lucas invited a few trusted souls from Industrial Light & Magic, his 14-Oscar-winning special-effects unit, up to his Skywalker Ranch, north of San Francisco, and showed them 3,500 storyboards for the new film. Battle scenes, racing scenes, parades--all with thousands of characters in each shot and all to be computer generated. "Crew members said, 'It's too many shots. How are we going to do this?'" recalls ILM visual-effects supervisor John Knoll. "It was kind of scary."

The lesson in the making of Episode 1 was learning the difference between the impossible and the merely never-before-done-or-imagined. That's how an army of workaholics helped create three new computer-generated worlds, 1,200 costumes, 65 standing sets, 140 new beasties. To research Podrace vehicles, they went to the world's largest jet junkyard, outside Phoenix, and scavenged for 747 engines. They thought big (a Russian military-transport plane flew the Podracers to the Tunisian location) and cheap (a women's electric shaver serves as a Jedi comlink; the waterfalls in Naboo are...salt).

Making the original Star Wars trilogy, Lucas was forever frustrated that existing technology could not translate all his notions into compelling, realistic imagery. Today the whole palette of digital technology is much more subtle and supple; if you can dream it, you can see it. And you can play with a scene--keep reshooting it on the computer, so to speak, until it's perfect. As Lucas puts it, "An artist working on fresco had to paint everything before the plaster dried. Then oils were invented. That's what digital is to movies. You can go out in the real world and paint, then come back the next day and finish it." To makers of fantasy films, this is a pipe dream come true. "People have been talking about a digital back lot for years," says Dennis Muren, the grand wizard of the ILM staff and a senior visual-effects supervisor on Episode 1. "But George has done it."

In the end, most of the scenes were digitally created (the final Gungan battle) or enhanced (by extending the standing sets, built only 6 ft. or 7 ft. high, into palaces and Senate chambers). "A typical summer movie has maybe 2,000 shots, with, say, 250 effects shots," says Knoll. Titanic had about 500. "This one is backward. Of the 2,200 shots, only about 250 shots are not effects shots." There is just one sequence totally untouched by the digitalizers. Hint: watch for the vent.

Long before production began in the summer of 1997, two teams hunkered down to realize Lucas' vision. One was the art department, led by Doug Chiang. He and his crew cranked out some 3,000 drawings of planets, cities, swamps, creatures, racing pods, new mechanical versions of storm troopers (Lucas told Chiang to think of the elongated, skeletal shapes of African sculptures--and that did the trick). The Queen's ship is sleek chrome with streaks of yellow and fins inspired by an Art Deco pin. Fine, but would it fly? "Part of my phony-baloney research was to watch a lot of educational TV," says Chiang. "But this is film reality, not reality. Put my plane in a wind tunnel and it would fall apart."