Thursday, 10 October 2013

Star Wars: Revenge of The Sith documentary

On our project briefing day, we watched the behind the scenes documentary of what processes and ideas went into making the 1 minute 'Duel on Mustafar' scene.

I learned that a lot of trial and error went into making certain effects work and make them aesthetically pleasing and do justice to what they felt the audience would appreciate.

I learned that many departments had to keep up to their work schedule so that the overall result would be completed in time.

I wrote down some names that I wanted to research about and learn more about the field they specialise in.
The many fields and roles that were mentioned were:


  • Costume Department: they created the outfits that each characters would wear and when it came to the Duel on Mustafar, with the environment being attacked by lava, the department had to create outfits that reflected that by having duplicate outfits with burnt patches to make sure that the outfits were in time with what was happening during the scene.
  • Set Design department: there were times when the animation or visual effects department couldn't figure out how a scene worked or it was better if they created an environment from scratch than computer generating it. One of the sets they built that I remembered was the lava river and they wanted to know how the lighting would affect the visual image of the lava so they built the set which was taken down once the job was completed and started taking images of different lighting effects to get the result they wanted. This is where the trial and error method was used a lot, and the information they gained from it was then given to other departments to work off.
  • Sound Production: In one of the scenes, an orchestra from a well known music school in London was hired to created the music from scratch for the duel. There were many talented musicians who worked on this and the timing was important for the soundtrack to work for the scene and be able to enhance what was happening. It was very interesting to see how much work went into that.
  • VFX: This department was very important, it had to create ships and environments that portrayed the scene where the duel was meant to take place. The animators also worked on how to make the lava look and act real and how the ship would look before and after it was destroyed. This meant that 3D modellers had a big job in creating this ship and making sure that any future problems that might appear later could be dealt with and revisited.
  • Concept Artists: I should have started with these guys but their one of the department that start off because they are present for creating the initial drafts of what the environments could look like which helps the animators work off that. They also have to create many different versions of the same design and from different angles to give as much information as they can.
I enjoyed watching this documentary and it showed me how much problems these workers are faced with and the creative enthusiasm they use to solve it.


One of them being JOHN KNOLL


He is a visual effects supervisor and chief creative officer (CCO) at Industrial Light & Magic (OLM).

Known more for his work on the Star Wars Films and Pirates of the Caribbean, he also was one of the creators of the first versions of Adobe Photoshop software. His company OLM has worked on numerous films and their company has been running for over thirty years so their knowledge in visual effects is huge.

I made note of him because he worked in the VFX department for Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. Besides our project being based on Visual Effects, I also have an interest in that field and will be generally looking into that in more detail.
I am going to look at the company he works for, OLM and research into films that they have worked on and look more at how they have approached problems that needed to be solved. If I cannot find the information I need, I shall look to research other behind the scenes documentaries on films that have used special effects.

REFERENCE: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0121766/?ref_=ttfc_fc_tt

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