For Star Wars and the Empire Strikes Back, PanaVision cameras were used, but for Return of the Jedi they switched to Arriflex cameras. Why was this?
On an unrelated note, Return of the Jedi just didn’t look as good as it’s predecessors, in my personal opinion. I don’t if it’s the DP they used, or the director, or the cameras, but Return of the Jedi just didn’t look as good as Star Wars or the Empire Strikes Back.
Evening all (long time lurker, first time poster).
I agree with the suggestion that either Marquand or Hume preferred to shoot with Arri cameras. It is also possible that, by the time of principal photography, Lucasfilm had built its own camera inventory. Panavision cameras can only be hired.
As for the look of the film, it was shot on Eastman 250T 5293 colour negative film - new in 1982 and discontinued just a year later (Kodak replaced it with a faster 400 ASA stock). Although 250 ASA sounds laughably slow now, it was a fast film at the time, which meant ‘grainy’. Fast films became less grainy as Kodak refined their technology through the late 80s/90s.
Some of the Endor exterior shots looks underexposed to me - ‘muddy’ - but Alan Hume was a very good DP, so there might have been some characteristic of 5293 that was not well suited to low light (deep forest) daylight exteriors.
I’m guessing that the ‘T’ at the end of 250T stands for Tungsten, which meant the film was balanced for warm, artificial light. When you use tungsten balanced film in daylight, you get a strong blue cast which normally has to be corrected by a filter - but this might cost you a stop of exposure, negating the advantage of fast film. So perhaps some of the Endor exteriors were shot without filtration and the cast was corrected - but not eradicated - by colour correction in the lab.
This is all guesswork, I hope wiser people will chime in 😃
This makes perfect sense and seems pretty spot on from my understanding of stocks and tungsten lighting.
ROTJ has less intricate lighting for sure and you can tell there was less time spent on it especially in Imperial set interiors. The film stock is improved but it never has the wow factor of SW or ESB despite being made by a team of two of the best British cameramen then working. I’d chalk it up to production interference and a lack of desire to be artistic like ESB because George hated spending all the time and money on that film when they could just do it fast.
The Making of book has some possible answers. Marquand talks about how often the set up would get thrown out the window because George would add cameras. Lucas is very much a ‘figure it out in the edit’ kind of guy, and he wanted a lot of coverage on the film, and would often add them to set ups himself and tell Marquand “don’t worry about it.” Sometimes this meant up to five cameras shooting at once, if I’m remembering correctly. This leads of course to some flat lighting and also some cameras being forced to change their position or composition so that the other cameras didn’t end up in the frame.
Yes the book is filled with stuff like this and constantly trying to meet deadlines. I think this dovetails with the discussion above and it was likely a number of multicamera setups with less intricate positions combined with less time allowed for lighting and George was dissatisfied with how long it took on ESB despite having very difficult sets to shoot not to mention effects and fog.
I’m extremely curious about the source on Hume and or Marquand leaving. Never before have I heard or seen this stated.
With the children as Ewoks it is entirely possible they had some fill in for pick up shots if everyone else had gone back to London or vice versa if they needed stuff beforehand such as when Garrett Brown was shooting Steadicam plates etc.