mverta said:
You_Too said:
mverta said:
In 1977, the flashes were a pale amber/yellow. At the outermost edges of the flashes, where the yellowish flash combines with the blue-ish walls, it creates a pale sort of green, but it's subtle.
Interesting. But what about that cyan flash frame I posted?
Well, first of all, the saber colors themselves have been grossly up-saturated. The original saber colors were no where near that colorful. They were more photographic; tinted glows. Vader's in particular was always a sort of pink with a slightly-more-reddish-outer edge.
Since you can't globally push the blues and reds that high to get that look without corrupting the rest of the scene, these elements were treated separately, and the impact flashes were, as well. That particular flash is easily the "whitest" of the flashes, which again highlights the blueish tint to the walls at its edges, but again the whole thing has been super-saturated way beyond what's on the negative.
This is all part of the cartoon-i-fication of Star Wars which began with Empire, where suddenly we see the droids are all shiny and repainted, and Vader's all clean and showroom new instead of interesting, historied, and weathered. It's just been a steady downhill trend of "bigger, brighter, shinier, more colorful," since then. Gritty realism more or less ended with the first film.
_Mike
The biggest reason the sabers and impact flashes looks so different is the recompositing done, not only have Obi-Wan borrowed someones lipstick but the whole thing is amateurish and looks ridiculous just in order to get rid of some generation loss in the original duel. It's impossible to know if everything is down to Lucas' poor taste or if the digital "artists" working on these were just some summer substitutes. To me it looks like the impact flashes in the original film have more often than not an orange-reddish outer edge.
As for the bluish flash, there's at least one other instance where it happens; the last one before Ben throws in the towel. There's also one particular impact flash somewhere in the beginning of the duel which looks like it was "burned" into the picture for several successive frames, can easily be mistaken for DVNR-artifacts if the 2006 bonus DVD is what you're looking at but that's actually how it appears in the original film.