Making Star Wars

Let's come back down to Earth and look at what Star War has given us in real life. Think of the phrase, “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...".

What was really happening 30 years ago? By comparison, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope used a very different style of filmmaking to what was happening in cinematography at the time.

Without doubt, a fundamental difference was the push and talent of the Star Wars production team that joined George Lucas on the journey. Lucas himself remembers difficulties they were faced with.

“During the production of the first three episodes, I struggled with questions like: ‘How am I going to create Jabba the Hutt? What about Yoda, who only measures 40cm tall'. I could dream them, not construct them," Lucas told the French edition of Premiere magazine, in 1999.

It took a highly talented team and a huge effort to manipulate the puppets, latex and mechanisms of radio control that allowed them to make the creatures.

To realise his dreams, Lucas needed a complete crew of special effects, set decorators and creative costume designers.

The likes of Norman Reynolds, Lorne Peterson, John Stears, John Mollo and many others deserve tremendous credit for the end result, which would later acquire a much greater dimension due to the eruption of new technology.

The original Star Wars trilogy proved groundbreaking in the way visual effects were created. To develop innovations in the specialism, Lucas founded the Industrial Light and Magic Company (ILM) that introduced computer science technology to the world of the cinema and revolutionised special effects.

Since then, ILM has been awarded 16 Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects as well as other awards for technical and scientific advances in the field.

With new technology, the latest trilogy generated not only the scenery but also the vehicles of Star Wars with computer science.

But it wasn't just the visual aspect that revolutionised cinema. Its audio production also made a great contribution. The movement of a lightsabre, the artificial respiration of Darth Vader, the strange sounds of characters like Chewbacca and R2D2 – all these sounds created by Star Wars have settled in our collective subconscious.

The sound effects created by Ben Burtt and Matthew Wood are as important to the saga as the special effects of ILM or the music composed by John Williams. Without them, Star Wars would not be the same.

Looking back, it seems ridiculous that, three decades ago, only 37 cinemas dared to screen the first Star Wars movie. It shows what little faith people had at the time, but it never discouraged its creators.

The tremendous success and media phenomenon that followed were just desserts for those who had doubted the potential of the Star Wars project.

There's no question about it, creating Star Wars was a complete success for those who had the opportunity to work on the saga.

And it was a thrilling experience for those of us who enjoyed the final result — a magic world and a complete creation of a universe full of fantasy, action and adventure that was and still is, Star Wars.

The world

Throughout the six Star Wars films, the production staff chose different places in the world to shoot important scenes.

These included the exotic Tikal in Petén, Guatemala, which is the largest of the ancient ruined cities of the Maya civilisation, in Central America.

It was used as the location for Yavin 4 in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. In the scene where a Rebel oversees the Millennium Falcon landing on Yavin, the buildings known as Temple I, II and III are part of Tikal.

Another interesting location used in Star Wars is the Plaza de España in Seville, Spain, where the production crew, in 2000, filmed a sequence where Anakin and Padmé arrive on Naboo.

Other important places used to represent the surface of distant planets were Lake Como, in Italy, some desert areas of Tunisia and Death Valley in California, US.

Many residents of these locations were highly enthusiastic that Star Wars had chosen to film there. As well as attracting tourists on the back of the film, some truly got into the spirit of it by forming fan clubs, as they did in Seville.

Lorne Peterson

One of the most important craftsmen of all in the visual construction of Star Wars was Lorne Peterson, a man who joined the George Lucas crew since the first film, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, in 1977.

Lorne Peterson is a skilled visual effects artist who made a great impact working as a model maker for Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) on every one of the six Star Wars films.

Recently, Peterson wrote the book Sculpting a Galaxy: Inside the Star Wars Model Shop in which he explains how they created some of the models, such as the popular ship Slave I, used by Jango and Boba Fett.

In addition to Star Wars, Peterson has worked on other successful films, including Battlestar Galactica, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Poltergeist, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Jurassic Park and Men in Black, among others.

Deservingly, in 1984 Peterson received an Academy Award and a British Academy Award for Visual Effects for his work on the film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.