So, it came to an end. With page/day 112, the Original Original Trilogy has come to closure and for a few pages I am reading about the SE work... Then it's on to the prequels! I thought of ripping the book in half and just keeping the OOT half... but the PT is quite interesting at a technical level. So, I've decided to read it anyways...
But that's besides todays point- John Knoll shares this anecdote on page 115 about the production schedule for ESB:SE.
John Knoll:
I had just finished the final "final" on The Empire Strikes Back Spedial Edition. It was a Friday (in January 1997) and I was at ILM's wrap party for A New Hope Special Edition. There were tents in the courtyard, everyone was having a good time, and I ran into George, who said -- and this was exactly six days before we were supposed to ship the last CG film out for Empire -- "I have one more shot I want to do for Empire. But we can talk about it Monday."
And I said, "No, no -- we have to talk about this now! What is it?"
"After Han's Falcon is parked on the Star Destroyer," he said, "It's not clear that Boba Fee is in the junk, too, and that he's following Han. I think we need one more shot in there to explain what's going on."
So that night I went home and got out my Art of Empire Strikes Back book and used it as a reference for a really quick CG model of Boba Fett's ship, Slave I. I paired that with an already constructed CG Millennium Falcon model.
Over the weekend, I cobbled together an animatic (a three-dimensional digital storyboard) of Slave I clandestinely following the Falcon, and showed it to George on Monday. He had a couple comments on the timing, so we started a revision. Meanwhile, Rod Woodall had been working, as a personal project, on building a detailed CG model of Slave I, so I got him to give me a copy with the textures. The rest of that Monday we worked on the shot revision, also completing the CG version of Slave I. On Tuesday morning, I showed George the revision of the animatic, and he approved it. The afternoon was spent lighting the shot, and by the end of that evening I was pretty much satisfied. I spent Wednesday continuing to light and render elements. Thursday, I put the comp together, and filmed it Thursday night. We screened the completed version Friday morning, and George gave it the thumbs-up. If anything had gone wrong during that week, we would've missed the deadline.
It's a pretty interesting story. Hard to believe they only had a couple guys and a couple days to do a whole shot like that. No wonder there are so many mistakes and whatnot in the SEs.