This is a small love letter to Starwars and specifically to John Dykstra for his pioneering of the first 7-axis camera motion control system used in motion pictures.
What does that mean? Well the space ships filmed in the original Starwars trilogy weren’t generated by computers in the late 1970s - which is why the shots still look organic and fantastic today. Model spaceships were filmed basically stationary on a stick in front of a blue screen, and the camera moved around them giving the impression they were moving. So using the first camera motion control system of its kind, John and his team would film each spaceship in a shot one by one, including a separate shot of the star field in the background. Because the camera motion was the same when filming each element of the shot, when all the film layers were stacked up, the end effect is that they were all filmed moving independently in the same shot all at once.
To get a taste of what John was up against creating each shot, we took on the challenge of shooting our own slice of space battle. We used the new MRMC Cinebot Mini exclusively as a model mover - a task made massively easier by the ability to shift the robot around by hand to find the optimal model positions a plot their paths. This was synchronised to the camera mounted to our Bolt robot arm which added ability to duplicate an orbit around and up and down each model in a shot. The shiny lego models needed coats of matte spray to reduce reflections from the green screen. We shot mostly at T8-16 to maximise the depth of field of the models to enhance their scale and assist them not look like miniatures. The Cinebot Mini was also a great tool for manipulating lighting around the cockpit pilots.
Camera used was a Phantom 4K VEO mostly at 25fps with Cooke s4 32mm prime lens stacked with a polariser.
And where John went on to optically key and print all the plates together, we could make use of DaVinci Resolve and Aftereffects to bring all our plates together and build in lasers blasts etc (big time saver there John!)
The wizardry of technology combined with aesthetics in these movies captivated me growing up - and being able to continue using these tools almost 50 years later is a dream come true.
Hats off to Steve Giralt and The Garage team for shooting their in-house test with Starwars lego models - it inspired me to push further to create this piece. Didn’t realise I had purchased exactly the same models as you until I got started shooting though…!
21 фев 2024
