Jambe Davdar wrote: I think I've just found on on page 36 and 37 of Cinefex issue 3 that shows the motor used to move the Tauntaun puppet along to create the motion blur effect.
Initial thought that go-motion would have been used for the shot of Han entering the hangar or approaching Luke. Wouldn't they have moved the camera, not the model?
*EDIT*
Fantastic Films issue 18 has an interview with Phil Tippett, and when talking about the Taun-Tauns they continually mention stop-motion.
pg. 25
FF: The stop-motion Taun creature sounds exciting. What was the genesis of the figure, and who designed it?
Tippett: When I started on Empire, George Luca had been working on the Taun design with Ralph McQuarrie and Joe Johnston. At that time, the way the animal was going to be designed was still up in the air. THere was takl of full size mechanical things, men in suits, stop-motion puppets - they ran the whole gamut of approaches.
I drew up a number of designs based on some of the things Joe had done, as well as some alternatives. Lucas wen for a design of an animal suited for stop-motion, and we spent the next month refining the thing with Irwin Kershner and Gary Kurtz. In September of 1978 we sent a design mock-up to England. They in turn sent back a mock-up with a numbe of practical and aesthetic changes. FOr that point, I began sculpting the final puppet, while Jon Berg and Toom St. Amand found time amongstthe Walker parts to put together a testing armature.
FF: When did test shots begin?
Tippett: That happened at the begninning of 1979. Ken Ralston began integrating the motion control equipemtnn with stop-motion requirements. Dennis Muren and Richard Edlund made a number of contributions. With relatively little adaptation, we got some promiising shots.
We went to the beach and photographed reference material on horses much like we had done with an elephant a few weeks earlier for the Walkers. We set up a situation similat to Muybridge's Animals in Motion, which helped us understand animal movement as it related to film.
I spent the next few months shooting tests, running fur tests, Walker tests. Jon Berg and I developed a final armature that would work better with the motion control equipment. Doug Beswick and Tom St. Amand refined and constructed it. The final The final Taun was ready in August 1979.
But for one reason or another, we didn't start the bulk of the Tuan shooting until January of 1980. We were involved with a number of other projects as well as the stop-motion, and we completed the Taun shots two and a half months later. There's where the planning paid off! There was no time for mistakes. All activity on the stage had to be shut down by mid-March in order to give the optical department time to composite everything.
Here's some more:
Tippett: We got most of our shots on the first take. But all of these problems are indicative of what we've been up against. Occasionally we would have to re-orient our approach to a troublesome shot. Especially with the Taun peppet, since we were dealing with blurs. In attempting to solve that problem, we created five more that had to be fixed.
Hey ho, also a cut scene i'm not familiar with:
FF: Were there stop motion out-takes, shots we will never see in the film?
Tippett: We shot the Walkers and Tauns like everything else in Empire, to replace a rather small slug of film in a particular roll. Everything was organized so that those shots were taken care of first. We were able to add a few extra things. Most of them are in the picture. But the only shot that didn't make it was the two-legged Walker that Joe, Jon and Tom came up with. The shot showed a Speeder strafing the scout Walker. It didn't cut in.
*EDIT*3
ah this was mentioned in the Annotated Screenplays:
http://www.starwarz.com/tbone/index.php?categoryid=10&p2_articleid=392
Well, the big thing that didn't end up in The Empire Strikes Back was the two-legged walker, but it did end up in Jedi. You get a brief glance of it in Empire, but there was a shot, a POV from one of the snowspeeders; the speeder is attacking the walker and passes right over its head. Unfortunately at the very end, we were under a deadline and were literally up all night shooting this scene. Someone didn't tighten up the backing of the painted sky, and no one noticed it. The next day in the dailies, you could see the background slip, and it slipped about eight inches half-way through the shot...It just fell, which completely ruined the shot.