Before the computing era, ILM was the master of oil matte painting, making audiences believe that some of the sets in the original Star Wars and Indiana Jones trilogy were real when they weren’t. They were the work of geniuses like Chris Evans,Michael Pangrazio,Frank Ordaz, Harrison Ellenshaw and Ralph McQuarrie! Forever thank you, to their handmade art and the work of their colleagues, that made us dream of impossible worlds and fantastic places across Earth and the Universe.
There are more background paintings on this article, featuring comments by the masters/artists themselves !
Some of the following pieces were made by other artists:
Jumped from Photoshop to After Effects and it was MUUUUCH harder to do this edit while the character is moving! X,,D Like… DUCK! I’m not doing that again any time soon! :o But it was an interesting exercise! (OBS! May be edited when the remaining wobbliness starts driving me bonkers)
More animated ladies with “realistic” proportions (because why not):
OBS: These edits were created simply to give me a chance to practice my manipulation/anatomy skills. Nothing more, nothing less. They are NOT meant to be “better than the original” or “what it should have looked like”, or serve as a general negative critic on the respective movies’ animation styles!
(How come that every time I work with Elsa the post/video gets it’s own life and runs away from me like a rebellious teen?! X,D)
Anyway: Some followers thought it was hard to compare the original with my edit so I threw together a side-by-side. :P Quite a dramatic difference compared to the other edits I have done. :o
And it is interesting to see how the trigger for the “uncanny-valley” effect varies SO MUCH from person to person. Like so many of you, I don’t feel it at all here, while others do and therefor can’t stand this edit. But at the same time some people are like “her eyes are still too big”, etc. I wonder if there are studies on this (on why the audiences’ reaction varies so drastically).
The term “filmmaker” had not been universally accepted yet. Actually, if you watch interviews on Star Wars from around 1977, they stil call it a “picture” instead of a film.
George Lucas is very, very disillusioned with how Hollywood worked at the time. Makes me wonder if the first Star Wars is simply an allegory of the Hollywood studio system.
He describes Hollywood the same way I see big game development today.
He describes himself as a visual director who is learning how to make more talking pictures.
Towards the end of the program, a really provocative conversation forseeing the future of media distribution. I think we are just now starting to see the first steps towards that future with Netflix, Vimeo, YouTube, Steam, App Stores. Still, they don’t forsee the next set of problems is marketing and other tactics (e.g. search engine optimization) that allow larger corporations to dominate.
