The Rotating Death Star

Anyone who’s paid close attention to this movie knows that we mostly only see one view of the Death Star, despite the fact that they built a very big and intricate model of the Death Star that allowed them to shoot it from a variety of angles. Consider the following storyboards from the Tydirium’s approach to Endor.

Nov 16, 82	Dec 3, 82	Feb 15, 83

I’m presenting them out of the order they appear in the film to highlight their revision dates. Even after the Black Friday cuts, the Death Star is still being shown from a side view - but when a storyboard gets revised in February, 1983, only 3 months before the movie needs to be in theaters, the Death Star is now only being shown from that one angle. It seems that only showing the Death Star from one side was probably a time and money saving shortcut, and this issue exists throughout the film.

The Size of the Rebel Fleet

Throughout the film, the Rebel Fleet has been greatly reduced in size. Consider IH 1

and compare it with its final form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A6PTCf6dVc

There are certainly less ships. Or consider RF 1, the first time we see the Rebel Fleet.

This one surprises me, because the storyboard was revised in mid-November, as part of the Black Friday cuts, yet the final shot is very different from the concept. Instead of seeing a long view, stretching “as far as the eye can see”, we’re given a 3/4ths view that shows a few ships but obscures the size of the Fleet. Was this done because it looked better in some way, or just because it was easier & quicker to shoot? We can never know, but I’d bet on the latter.

This issue is found throughout the Space Battle and I’ll do my best to note it in later posts.

As I think I’ve demonstrated on my Return of the Jedi Storyboard site, not to mention others’ work in threads like ROTJ’s Black Friday, the post-production process for ROTJ was rushed and featured multiple rounds of cuts to the finale due to problems with the special effects combined with budget and time constraints.

This issue, of course, is sometimes difficult to separate from cuts and alterations that were made for other reasons, and even when we can say pretty confidently that a change was made for unfortunate reasons, we can’t separate subsequent decisions from those changes, etc etc - an “original vision” of ROTJ is impossible to truly reconstruct.

Nonetheless, some things can be confidently labelled as unfinished. A clear example of this is effects shot RA 78. The previous shot, RA 77, shows Vader’s Super Stardestroyer careening out of control towards the Death Star.

The following shot, RA 78, should then show Admiral Ackbar watching this from his command ship, seeing the underside of the SSD from a different angle.

But look what happens in the final film!
https://youtu.be/sMqR0ANOSVM?t=33

First, it’s worth noting that the SSD has been mirrored from the original storyboards. I don’t know why, and this is one of those changes that we can’t really explain. It’s also not important, IMHO. Careful examination of the SSD as it falls shows that both its conning tower domes (which some call shield generators) are intact - this is probably because they only modeled the battle damage on the huge conning tower model seen in the closeups, and left the SSD model untouched, figuring that it wouldn’t be noticeable.

But the big, glaring thing is that they just reused the RA 77 footage for Ackbar’s view in RA 78, instead of shooting a second view of the ship burning from below. They’ve even added an explosion in space (please note that there’s nothing actually there that explodes. Just…an explosion) to provide some explanation (though its on the wrong side of his head) for the flashses which were originally supposed to come from the engine exploding. Making the shot as intended would probably have required building a separate, larger model of just that corner of the SSD and its the engines, for burning, plus all the work of filming that element. Taking a short cut is very understandable, given the crunch the production was under - but today’s fans are not in such a crunch.

I am going to do my best in this thread to catalog other unfinished shots that skilled modelers, CG artists, etc could potentially complete. I do not, myself, have the skills to do any of this work, and I have no idea if anyone out there will ever have any interest in attempting this kind of thing… but I figured I’d put it out there as an open invitation and challenge.

I have completed a huge update to the site.

https://macrobinoculars.wordpress.com/

It now features storyboards for the entire movie, not just Act 3. There are also numerous additions to the original reason for the whole site: The Space Battle & Rebel Attack sequences.

There are a few more things to add, such as a good way to just see all the raw storyboards without the script and my commentary, but I figured this was a big enough update to post.

Fruit672 said:

timdiggerm said:

Are you trying to convince industry professionals to send you high quality scans which are now the property of Disney?

Eh, worth a shot. And still, the comics from 1984, it should be in the public domain by now…

Morally, maybe, but definitely not legally 😦

Are you trying to convince industry professionals to send you high quality scans which are now the property of Disney?

Thanks for this. I forgot how good this movie looks most of the time.

Also interesting to see how clearly it frames Padme as the protagonist… unfortunately, some of her potential depth in the film is spoiled by attempting to maintain the surprise of her double identity.

I stumbled across this old document from 1995

https://www.cedmagic.com/featured/star-wars-lost-footage.html

It’s mostly concerned with documenting the differences between the mono & stereo audio versions of SW77, and providing a transcript of the contents of the deleted Biggs scenes (which basically no one had ever seen at the time). There are even some great bits of people having false memories towards the end of the document, much like the classic “my memory isn’t that bad, is it?” thread. The grappling hook legend is even mentioned on a different page!

It’s also a good example of what the Internet and fan culture were like back then. Concerned with many of the same things, but publishing in a very different format.

Channel72 said:

I hate Messianic prophecies in general, or the very idea of a Messiah, because it encourages the idea that all hope for the future is dependent on one dude, instead of like, the group effort that is required in real life.

Granted, Star Wars doesn’t incorporate a true Messiah into the mythology. Vader is more like a very round-about Messiah who only saves the Universe after he fucks over the entire Universe. So it’s at least a twist on the idea of a Messiah, kind of like Dune. But I still don’t like it, because it shrinks the Universe by elevating one guy to cosmic significance. At one point, Luke was just a random farmboy and Vader was just a cyborg SS officer carrying out the will of his government. There was a backstory intertwining the two of them, but it was personal, not a matter of cosmic importance.

This, of course, gets into the whole “myth” side of Star Wars. Like it or not, a messiah of some kind is a well-established archetype that really speaks to people.

I can’t believe I’ve never thought to ask (which probably means I did, or at least someone else): Any plans to fix the “DS II always faces the right towards the camera” problem?

Bingowings said:

collars

It’s an older code, sir, but it checks out.

So glad to hear you’re feeling better!

Those comparisons are incredible. It’s like they ran a grayscale filter over the DSII or something.

(As for the rest of the film, I will just be over here chanting “Prune face! Prune face!” in the corner)

D0rca said:

imsorrydave2448 said:

CamSMurph said:

I see TN1 was banned from the site. Why is that?

Because the stole a scan of Star Wars A New Hope.

Holy cow, really? I thought tn1 was one of the reputable people on here. That’s a real shame because I would be really interested in this project.

https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Why-was-this-user-banned-thread/id/54235/page/1#1165751

See the replies immediately after that post.

Hal 9000 said:

Why make this available only for a limited time?

This like Disney putting movies “in the vault” just to build hype & demand back in the day, only without the existing demand, reputation for quality, name recognition, etc.

Plus, anyone who receives the files can just distribute them as soon as he says it’s no longer available.

I doubt this is it, but have you considered https://youtu.be/M2A-LNQK4Z4?si=tYHQ2VVLDPhayr4b ?

I posted this in The Cantina, but I guess it could go here too

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/03/arts/star-wars-films-george-lucas.html

Includes a member of TN-1 going on the record with his name, and a link to this site.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/03/arts/star-wars-films-george-lucas.html

Notably, a member of TN-1 goes on the record with his name.

FVDnz said:

Actually, come to think of it, they were still in their ships, weren’t they? Maybe a backdrop of Sullust then…

The entirety of the Rebel rendezvous takes place on the Rebel Starcruiser. There’s no planet visible, and although Vader says they’re massing near Sullust, “near” in the grand scale of space can 100% mean that no planet, or even the star Sullust orbits (or maybe Sullust is the star), should appear. On the galactic scale, “near Earth” could mean somewhere beyond Pluto. The lack of any notable stars or planets in all of the exterior shots of the Fleet enhances the sense of isolation and attempted hiding from the Empire.

O00ll00O said:

Darth Sadifous said:

Honestly, my number one ask is to replace that matte painting shot when Han is departing with the strike team and talking to Lando with the falcon in the background. It is the most obvious matte shot in the entire saga in my opinion. I am still shocked Lucas didn’t tinker with it during the special edition. Especially in HD it always stands out to me like a sore thumb to me.

It’s hardly noticeable

https://imgur.com/a/AVXdzmD

I think the problem is they used a matte for the entire backdrop. They usually work a lot better when there’s other objects that help blend in to it. Like if the Falcon was a model, the rest as a matte wouldn’t be so bad. That poor ship is rough looking though.

https://youtu.be/hFadMn0EuO0?t=220

I think it’s a lot worse in motion. Also, the left side behind Lando looks so flat. And something is weird with the perspective, especially if you focus on the bottom of the frame when they start moving around near the end of the shot.

Jar Jar Bricks said:

Wouldn’t the second Death Star also have a magnetic field, then? And obviously this voice modulation effect doesn’t appear in ROTJ.

The magnetic field, IMHO, is some kind of shielding (ray shielding? no one knows.). DSII’s only shield was projected from Endor.

Oh, yeah, that’s actually really great

I think it’s a bit too prominent in the hangar shot, and makes a crowded shot just too crowded. But the shot with Ackbar and the DSII was very good. In general, the whole Rebel Fleet needs a lot of expansion anyway.

Sure, why not? Never made a single movie that would win the real award, yet undeniably a big deal in the history of filmmaking - That’s exactly what the Honorary award is for.

PsyGemini said:

left me with a barf taste in my mouth.

You may be a little more emotionally involved with this than you ought to be

Pete Byrdie said:

Gandalf the Cyan said:

Pete Byrdie said:

My understanding is that George Lucas maintains he intended for the Jabba scene to be in the movie, but they lacked the money to create the alien Jabba he wanted using stop motion or something.

It’s exceedingly likely that Jabba was originally intended to be a human; it’s been covered thoroughly here-
https://web.archive.org/web/20140928112036/http://secrethistoryofstarwars.com/jabba.html

According to Paul Hirsh (one of the editors) in his biography, Lucas came up with the alien Jabba idea in post-production, but it had to be dropped due to being impossible to achieve with contemporary special effects technology.

My phone’s protection software through a fit when I tried to follow that link. But it makes sense that Jabba was intended to be human during production. That still leaves us with two scenes that just don’t work together. Oh well! Filmmaking is not always a linear process, and in reality the details of the complications of a movie made half a century ago may remain unknowable.

I mean, I think the traditional explanation is pretty good: It was bad writing to have both scenes, but they didn’t really catch that until after filming.