Posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 by Peter Sciretta
I use to love watching the Movie Magic specials as a kid. It always amazed me to see the great lengths special effects teams would go to create some of the cinematic magic. I feel in recent years, with the growth of CG effects, these kind of documentary featurettes are far less interesting. So when I received an email VOTD submission with the email subject “Making of the Computer Graphics for Star Wars”, I almost hit “mark as read”… Good thing I didn’t.
Turns out this video is a ten minute featurette on how they created the computer effects for Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope. And I’m not talking about the digital trickery that Lucas forced into the “Special Editions”… I’m talking about the computer effects that were employed in the original 1977 theatrical release. The computer graphics for the first Star Wars film was created by Larry Cuba in the 1970s at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) (at the time known as the Circle Graphics Habitat) at the University of Illinois at Chicago. You can watch this vintage featurette embedded after the jump.
Thanks to /film Reader Dave Cfor the tip.