"Let the Wookie Win!" Circa April 1978

Another neat little article from back in the day. It's amazing all the spelling errors you find in old film magazines. This was originally published in the April 1978 issue of Fantastic Films:

"LET THE WOOKIE WIN!"

 (OR ... ANIMATING THE STAR WARS "CHESS" SEQUENCE)

By Vicky O'Hara

America is in love with Star Wars—a movie in which heroes are real heroes, villians are real villians, and the special effects crew are the real stars.

Monsters and other grotesqueries abound, each more hideous than the most terrifying childhood nightmare. Two of the major monster-makers in Star Wars were John Berg and Philip Tippett, who are well known in Hollywood for their work in stop motion animation. They worked on two segments of the film, both memorable for their outlandish space creatures. One was the cantina sequence, where Luke Skywalker and Ben Kenobi get involved in a barroom brawl with a bunch of monsters...and the other was the chess game between the robot R2D2 and the Wookie, the furry creature, resembling the offspring of an ape and a dog.

John and Phil originally were called in to work on the film when director George Lucas decided he needed more monsters in the Cantina. Cameraman Dennis Moren had worked with John and Phil many times before, and admired their creative genius at designing and animation. Upon his recommendation, the two were assigned to work with make-up artist Rick Baker. Together, they did make-ups and masks for various creatures. According to Phil, Lucas took many of the monster designs from drawings by Ron Kobb, a Hollywood cartoonist who works for the Free Press. The others Phil and John made up themselves from their own monstrous imaginations.

Both had plenty of experience in that area. In John's words, "I WAS the Jolly Green Giant." While they were both working for the now defunct Cascade Pictures, they did the famous Jolly Green Giant TV commercial. John carefully lathered in green make-up, stood in for the giant in a miniature set they'd built, using animated characters. Phil said that's where they received much of their training. Another of their well-known commercials was the Pillsbury doughboy...the plump little guy with the cute giggle.

They got involved in the chess sequence of Star Wars after Lucas saw some monster designs they'd submitted for use in the cantina sequence. Originally, Lucas and producer Gary Kurtz had planned to use people dressed as monsters for the chessmen. However, someone else used the idea first, and Lucas and Kurtz didn't want to duplicate it. When Lucas saw the little monster sculptures, which were about four or five inches tall, he got the idea of using animated characters instead. So they went to work.

Lucas shot the spaceship scene in which the chess game took place, as a plate. The still showed three characters standing around looking at the chess game. There was nohing on the game table, which was covered with black velvet. After shooting the scene at a number of different angles, the background plates were put in the camera and a line-up clip was made of those shots. The clip was then put in the camera, to line up the perspectives on the little chessmen, animated by Phil and John. Through a double-exposure system, the two elements—the background and the chessmen—were combined photographically.

After consulting with Lucas on the types and numbers of creatures he wanted, John and Phil had sculpted 10 or 12 wild-looking creatures, about five or six inches tall. Most were made of foam rubber, the kind used for upholstery wrapped around wire armatures. The wire made the figures flexible enough to be bent into different positions, repeatedly, and strong enough to hold the shape. The figures which didn't move around were sculpted of solid materials. One creature was a little more elaborate. A ball and socket was used in the skeleton to allow for more dramatic movement. The skeleton was then sculpted and cast. All figures were attached to the set using screws tied into their feet.

Initially, John and Phil set up 10 figures in the game line, but it didn't work out. Phil explained, "Because of the nature of these things—they were really goofy looking little creatures— Lucas decided to pull some out. There were so many, you couldn't tell what was going on on the board. Then he said to go ahead and shoot, and just explained basically what he wanted in the shots."

One of the first shots was a long one of a couple of figures moving across the board, in the background. It was fairly easy. Then, Lucas wanted one of the background creatures to jump into the foreground, after which another creature, manipulated by R2D2, would run over to the first figure, and throw it to the ground. This second creature was the one with the ball and socket articulated skeleton. According to the rules of the game as spelled out in the script, the Wookie moved the first creature, and R2D2 countered with the second creature. R2D2 won the skirmish.

Phil said John did most of the more difficult primary animation, while he manipulated the figures in the background. The very nature of stop motion animation makes it a very tedious task, requiring great concentration. In stop motion animation," Phil said, "You don't have anything to relate to, no record of each fractional movement, as you do in cartoon animation, where you have each drawing to look back on and refer to. Stop motion animation is all in your mind. Each character is moved manually, one frame at a time."

"The more characters you have," he added, "the more you have to concentrate—which way the arm is moving on one character and which way the head is moving on another— which direction, how fast, So it took two of us to do all the characters." They divided up the board, with each of them handling four creatures at a time.

Dennis Muren, who did many of the space ship shots, did the shooting for the chess sequence, watching carefully to see that the characters were always lined up in proper perspective to the background. The whole film was shot in split shifts, with Richard Edlund and his crew manning the cameras during the day, and Muren's crew taking over at night. Phil said that in addition to having worked together, he, John and Muren had been good friends for years. Muren, Phil said, had been in the film business quite a while. When he was 17 years old, Muren produced and directed a film called "The Equinox." After putting together the entire feature, Muren sold it to distributor Jack Harris.

Together, the three of them worked for a solid week to shoot the chess sequence, trying to meet a tight deadline. John said they were given a quiet corner of the studio in which to work, and left alone most of the time. He explained that even with the hectic production schedule, their need for concentration was respected. "They were really good about leaving us alone to do the work" he said. "They knew we were doing the best we could. Sometimes, somebody'd pop in just to see what was going on— because it is pretty interesting."

John added that they worked from three in the afternoon, when they'd start setting up their shots, until seven the next morning. Every single day of the week, just to complete that one sequence. You can imagine what we looked like at the end of all that," said John, "pretty haggard." Phil added, "We'd go home, sleep, and come back the next day to start the whole thing over again."

When the shooting was completed, they took the two separate elements—the background and the chessmen—to Frank Van Der Veer's optical house. There, the two images were combined on an optical printer. "It actually was a very simple kind of effect," Phil said, "but it worked well. It was just a double exposure, where you could see right through the characters onto the plate that had been shot previously. It was a ghost image, with the black background allowing a blank field so nothing would show up."

They used one frame per movement, which they said tended to give the little creatures a more fluid look. John explained that using more exposures per movement would have produced a more stroboscopic, or junkier effect. "We went for a more natural, flowing kind of movement," said Phil, "yet we tried to imbue the characters with a mechanical feel so they weren't like real animals jumping around. In the script, they were supposed to be more like holographically projected images."

A camera normally shoots 24 frames per second, so with all those figures to manipulate, the process was extremely painstaking and backbreakingly tedious. Each two or three second shot of the chess board took close to 10 hours to produce. The whole segment, as it appeared in the film, was not more than 15 seconds long. Phil said the only thing which was edited out of the sequence, were two close-ups of two figures interacting with each other.

The cantina and the chess game were their major efforts, but Phil and John also worked on a few other minor segments. One of them, said Phil, "was working the little eyeball that pops up in the sewer."

Stop motion animation is not a new technique. Phil explained that it's been around since the inception of film in the early 1900s. Both John and Phil call "King Kong", which was released in 1933, the classic example of stop motion animation as applied to motion pictures. The technique was used extensively to manipulate the film's abundance of prehistoric animals. Star Wars is perhaps the culmination of some 70 years of experimentation, the most impressive display of stop motion animation to date. John said there are very few good stop motion animators; it is a very specialized field. Both he and Phil list Ray Harryhausen and Jim Danforth as the best living practitioners of the technique. Harryhausen is an American filmmaker who works out of England, and Danforth is based in Hollywood. In fact, Phil currently is working on Danforth's latest picture, called "Time Gate." Phil said it's about a hunting expedition into the past...and it relies heavily on stop motion animation.

John and Phil said the market for their work is small, although Star Wars has done a lot to expand it. John says one reason stop motion animation is not used more frequently, is because of the time involved. Moving each limb of each character a fraction of an inch, a hundred different times, doesn't usually fit into tight production schedules. He says cost isn't that much of a factor, because "it's a very specialized, esoteric kind of thing" and if they want it, they're usually willing to pay for it." He and Phil generally charge $150 per day, each, for their services.

Phil explained that the artificial look is caused by shooting one frame at a time. Each particular frame," he said, each motion, is very clean, as opposed to a live action shot. If you shot some live action stuff or a guy running down the street, you'd see a great deal of movement, kind of a blur coming off—trailing the guy's limbs, which are pushing forward very quickly. Stop motion animation can't create that effect, because each frame is so crystal clear. "As a consequence of that," said Phil, "the illusion, even though it might seem fluid, tends to have an unrealistic effect. The image has no blur on it. Because the entire movement is being interpreted through a person, you lose a great deal."

However, that odd artificiality can be very well suited to science fiction. "It tends to bridge the gap between reality and unreality," Phil said. "If something looks artificial, yet is a structural and dynamic part of the film, you (the viewer) fit in with whatever illusion the filmmaker is trying to create. Today's audience tends to expect a great deal of realism from special effects, so maybe this technique is suited to the mass audience that's been educated to look at films in that particular way. But in basic filmmaking terms, it serves a function. It's the most viable way of making a prehistoric animal or a large animal ambling through the streets of New York, come off looking convincing."

He and John said a number of people are working on ways to combat the lack of realism in stop motion animation...and Star Wars was a big step forward. In the film's motion-control set-up, the space ships were shot with a lot of blurring in the frames, which added much fluidity to the overall effect. "But as far as puppet, or character animations where you have to be moving four or five limbs of one creature," Phil said, "it's hard to achieve the same thing." In his words, "There's no way of mechanically guaging how much to move limbs to create the effect which lends fluidity to movement on film. A lot of people are working on it, but their own techniques are pretty secret."

Even though stop motion animation is so highly specialized, neither John nor Phil have had any trouble getting work...even before Star Wars. Much of their work prior to the film was in TV commercials. In fact Star Wars has generated a great demand for their talents among advertisers anxious to capitalize on Star Wars' success. Phil had only worked on one feature film before he was approached by Lucas...a low budget picture directed by David Allen, who is now working for CPC and Associates on a film called "The Crater Lake Monster." John had never worked on a feature film before Star Wars. What a way to start. Or, as he puts it, "What do I do after that?"

Coraline was another great example of the old art done in modern times.

TheBoost said:

Tobar said:

Coraline was another great example of the old art done in modern times.

I disagree that it's 'old art.'

Coraline and Corpse Bride show that stop motion is just as living, vibrant, and evolving as CGI.

The Hellboy films show that men in suits is a special effect technology that has also grown by leaps and bounds. These aren't old art. This is cutting edge stuff.

It's a little quibble I know.

I never meant old as in outdated, I'm well aware of the advances it has taken over the years and am always excited to hear when it's being used in upcoming projects. I just meant old as in it's been around a long time just like the art of filmmaking itself has been.