Lots of cool behind the scenes stuff from ILM :
part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rel7NfI957A&feature=related
part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI-lURA3wbY&feature=related
part 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdSyl5ShGnI&feature=related
part 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A69N-FQvaqI&feature=related
part 5
captainsolo said:
I was just coming here to talk about TSWLM..I've been doing a LD preservation on and off for a while. The budget wasn't that much above SW (12-14 million as compared to slightly over 10) and was a return to the big scale of previous Bond adventures. It is extremely 70's (right down to the disco score, film stock, and amount of brown in the image) but this adds to it's charm in this day and age. And yes, I love raised eyebrows. And Lotus. And bad Russian accents. ;)
Oh undoubtedly!
The battle in the hull of the ship in the last half hour between the good and the bad guys is excellent by any standard.I feel a bit sorry for Bond because whenever a Bond film came out the same year as a Star wars film it was outshone;
1980 = Empire Strikes Back outshining For Your Eyes Only
1983 = Return Of The Jedi outdoing Octopussy
@Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda
If you were there in 77' then I envy you mate!
Just think that in december 77' ,in some places,Star Wars ,Close Encounters and Saturday Night Fever were all up on the big screen all at the same time!.
All of them ground breaking in one way or another but SW undoubtedly lead the pack.
Personally ,even though they are 2 completely different kinds of films, I feel SW kicks Annie Hall into touch.......but Annie Hall is still a great movie!
I forgot to mention A Spy Who Loved Me(probably the best Roger Moore Bond movie) as being another film that SW had to compete against.
Amazing to think that A Spy Who Loved Me probably cost twice as much to make as Star Wars.Yet Star Wars(the 77' version) makes A Spy Who Loved Me so dated by comparison.Especially if you watch them both now.
lo and behold!
a reviewer of Battle :LA agrees with me!
Good action movies develop their characters organically, in the heat of battle or in the midst of fight. Star Wars didn’t tell us Han Solo’s entire life story during his introduction scene at the Mos Eisely Cantina. That wouldn’t make sense. No one walks up to a stranger and says, “Hi I’m Han Solo. I’m from Corellia, I like long walks on the beach, sunsets, and I’m a big fan of Two and a Half Men. My mommy bought me a parakeet when I was eight, but I really wanted a dog.” We got to know what Han was all about while he was blasting around in the Millennium Falcon, scaring off entire battalions of Storm Troopers with nothing but sheer bravado. Battle: LA isn’t good enough to do that, and if it’s not good enough or smart enough to deal with its characters in a way that makes any sense, then I hope you’ve already assumed that it’s kind of clueless when it comes to everything else too.
http://www.cinemablend.com/reviews/Battle-Los-Angeles-5138.html
@twooffour
You made some good points.
Although I would maintain that something like LA battle does not hold a candle to a film like Close Encounters when it comes to emphasise on character.
Although I guess it is about balance.
The depth of character depends on the overall context of the film.If there is too much depth in a character like Luke Skywalker then the whole film can be brought down by that weight.
If there is not enough depth then the character has no resonance and you as a member of the audience has no affinity for the character.
This is where SW reached the right equilibrium between depth and resonance....making you care enough for the character without inquiring too much about what motivates him or where he comes from(like Han Solo).
I should have added;
Having just come off the best part of a week where I had watched nothing other than films from 1977; I went to watch a 2k digital projection of LA Battle at the local cinema here in cambridge the other night and that film pretty much epitomised(for me!) all that is wrong in the contempory fantasy/scfi fim genre at the moment(I saw Skyline just before xmas):
Great effects(although even though the "the effect" of those are redundant given the fact that we are so used to seeing cgi in practically every TV commercial going) but completely forgettable characters.
And that IMHO is the greatest contrast between then and now.
Even if 1977 films like The Deep,The Gauntlet,A Bridge Too Far and Smoky And The Bandit were a touch inconsistent in terms of overall quality(even at the time of their original theatrical release) they do have memorable character portrayals courtesy of the likes of Nolte(Deep),Eastwood(Gauntlet),Bogarde,Caine,Connery,Redford(Bridge Too Far) and Reynolds(Smoky And The Bandit) which was completely absent from supposedly from a contempory blockbuster like Battle LA!*
The magic of SW was that it encapsulated the emphasise on great characters with other factors like effects,editing,sound ect ect.
*
The trailer for "Source Code" looked kinda cool though.....though all trailers look cool!
Along with Chris Meledandri, they will be discussing all aspects of digital cinema - one of the more high-powered panels ever hosted by the convention.
James Cameron, Jeffrey Katzenberg, George Lucas and Chris Meledandri are set to appear together on a panel at CinemaCon, the annual convention of theater owners that takes place later this month in Las Vegas.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/james-cameron-jeffrey-katzenberg-george-167853
miker71 said:
it's a good job Lucas sacked his first editor or it would very much have been typical for the time from what I hear.
True.
The irony is that 20 years later in 1997 Lucas inhibited the flow of the original theatrical edit by inserting cut scenes.
The 1977 edit is perfect.
Baronlando said:
Supposedly A Bridge Too Far and The Deep in particular were the ones that really looked like flabby dinosaurs by comparison.
Oh it is no contest !
To be fair The Deep has some great underwater photography and A Bridge Too Far does have some well choreographed war battles.
But you have to give Lucas credit for going against the cinematic mainstream norms of the time and really injecting a sense of energy and pace into his then new film.Something which may have been risky at the time because that is something that audiences were not used to back then.
Ironically it is that energy and dynamism that so distinguished Star Wars from it's cinematic contempories that seems to be missing from the prequels.
But then again maybe that is the problem.
By the time the prequels came out; special effects and rip roar fast editing were something that audiences of the late 90's/early 2000's were used to.
@None
Oh definetely!
It is a question of cycles I guess.
I just picked films explicitly from 1977 to not only get an idea of the films that Star Wars went up directly against but also to immerse myself in the cultural and cinematic world of that moment in time.It is wierd but if you watch a couple of these films like The Deep, Saturday Night Fever, Annie Hall and Smokie And the Bandit back to back your "movie senses"--so to speak!-- acclamatise to the beats and rythms of these movies; i.e the slower editing, the emphasise on character(something which is missing from a lot of movies these days), the colour pallettes that are distinctive of 70's cinema,the mono sound!(for Annie Hall or Smokie And The Bandit) and the earth bound reality of the stories that comprise these films(even Close Encounters).
And then you watch Star Wars and the whole thing just leaps out at you!
I tried an interesting experiment which I thought would allow me to appreciate (and RE-experience!) why and how Star wars made such an impact in 77'........by watching a couple of DVD's of other films that were released that same year over a period of a couple of days.
These fims encompass a wide variety of genres and styles
Films like:
Annie Hall
A Bridge too Far
Saturday night fever
The Deep
Smoky And the Bandit
Close Encounters Of the Third Kind
The Gauntlet
and then Star Wars!(The GOUT DVD)
And Bam!
the difference is like night and day!
Star War's rythm and pacing, it's effects, the aesthetics of it' enviroment, the slightly oblique quality of it's characters,the sound effects,the music and above all the films powerful energy combine to provide an experience which all of the films lacked(even though some of them are fine films in their own right)
Trust me,try watching some of the above films or maybe even one of them and then watch Star Wars.......it will be like watching it for the first time!
Kinda cool to hear the audience applaud Luke after he cuts of the arm of the Wampa which was a creature that the audience could not even see(at least not completly)!
Today's audiences are so used to seeing everything that a similar scene in a contempory movie cut in this manner would induce disappointment.
Real shame as they don't know what they are missing out on!
delete:
doubleofive said:
No one knows. Perhaps they felt that it was good enough for now, or the conspiracy theorist in me thinks that maybe they didn't want the OT to be higher resolution than Ep2 and 3.Alexrd said:
Really? Why would they do that?
doubleofive said:
the 2004 versions were scanned and mastered at 1080p.
It is because a 1080/24p digital presentation is better/superior to a 3rd/4th generation 35mm interpositive release print(which is what all the Star Wars films were/are).
If you saw the original Star wars in the theater in 77' or in any of the other subsequent years up until 1985......all you saw was an image that was roughly equivalent to 700 lines per picture height(lpph).
That is barely above the resolution of standard definition dvd.
These tests confirmed the above:
http://www.etconsult.com/papers/Technical%20Issues%20in%20Cinema%20Resolution.pdf
Film theoretically has very good resolution capabilities. What is delivered to the theatre is another story. If we believe the ITU tests, then images captured at almost 2400 lines per picture height on the camera negative deliver significantly degraded on screen resolution through the projection system – in the range of 500 – 800 lines per picture height. 500 lines corresponds to about 9 line pairs per degree from 2 screen heights.
That is why Lucas said the following:
Lucas revealed that CineAlta is not only more easily manipulated but can also be blown up more than film. “We’ve done tests [where] we are blowing [digital images] up 50-60 percent on top of it already being blown up to be widescreen and getting an absolutely beautiful image. We had to go a long way before the [digital] image starts to fall apart… We were all shocked, even the guys at ILM.”
http://www.sony.co.uk/biz/content/id/1166605183359/section/broadcast-case-studies-hdcam?articlesection=2
There is no right or wrong-There is only opinion.
And it's my opinion that the prequels suck.
This guy has good observation---nearly all the dialogue scenes in ROTS were people who were either walking(slowly) against an obvious blu/green screen backing(and usually not interacting with that background)---or they were sitting down!
Now back to the real star wars-
*shoves in 1982 star wars vhs cassette in machine*
Cool!
I Guess it really depends on how "meticulouse" fans are with regards to star wars---lol!
But it would probably ruin his enjoyement if he is trying to take fotographs or even if he tries to film with a camcorder.
Still it would be nice to know If it is an original print from 77',78,79',81 or 82' and what the sound mix is(35mm stereo optical or the academy monoaural).
Would also be cool if he could get a shot of the binary sunset and the cantina sequence when Greedo is speaking(with subtitles).
Anyone here up for contacting Darth Spice who is a member of sandtroopers.com:
Posted by: Darth_Spice | 27 December 2010 | 22:08 EST
Sandtrooper rrighteous Reports:
"Chicago, Fox Valley correspondent checking in. Any local Troopers up for a showing of the original Star Wars Episode IV on the big screen? Or so it's being advertised, I don't know how accurate that is. Well, if your in Chicago, the western suburbs to be exact, it's playing at the Arcada Theater in St. Charles, IL on Wednesday at 3PM and 7PM. Admission is $5, - I hoping some 501st show up, it would be awesome to see some costumed fans there. I'm taking my boys age 9, 7 and 3 - since they've never seen it on a screen bigger than our TV."
Be cool to tell him to document as much as he can.
Hal
I think this is a good point:
Maybe he blames star wars for losing his wife marcia. Who knows.
Check out Lucas's first student film:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgjRbTNmBP0
There is more Kintetic energy and emotion in this short film than in the entire prequel trilogy(IMHO)
Ahhh!
Innocent times indeed:
Comparing a 70mm film cell from Jedi.net to the 2004se DVD:
Looks like it is the 2004 dvd that comes up a bit short!
There is just a tad bit more in the 70mm frame on the left hand side.
@Harmy
that is an interesting point.
I never knew projectors could do that.It might deserve more research.
I also had a a funny thought.
If a lot of the 35mm prints in 77' were " cropped" like the technicolour one above:
Then maybe George could not display his "original vision" in 77' after all!
Hmm......was drooling over the technicolour shots that i did not realize that the print had the edges of the frame cropped off.
I compared the same frames from the technicolour print to the 2004 DVD
Looks like the films in the set is are being picked by the higher -ups.
75th commemorative DVD box set of classic Fox films handpicked by the studio's co-chairmen and CEOs Tom Rothman and Jim Gianopulos.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/14/entertainment/la-et-classic-hollywood-20100414
I emailed Fox on sunday:
foxconnect@orderassistance.com
to find out which version it is.
Still no response.