The Retro-Present Computer Graphics for Star Wars: A New Hope #SciFiSunday
How do you evergreen special effects? If you’re Ridley Scott making Blade Runner, you do it through restraint and clever framing. If you’re George Lucas making Star Wars you do it through making images so iconic we kinda don’t care if they look dated and, in fact, aren’t to pleased when they get updated. Case in point are the animated sections of Star Wars: A New Hope. Here’s Larry Cuba on how he designed whose memorable animations, from CDM:
Cuba reveals some fascinating nuggets:
He worked directly from matte paintings and concept art and full-scale models (traditions that have come back into vogue lately on productions like The Mandalorian)
Drawing might have been a bit more work, but he’s actually able to animate and rotate the resulting model in real time – stunning stuff for the 70s (with knobs and dials – hey MIDI fans!)
There’s an extensive, elaborate digitization process translating physical models to digital ones – here with a pen, though see also the recent advances like Apple’s AR tools on iOS (which let you scan, though… this manual approach is cleaner and still sometimes better)
To translate to film, they had to manually expose each frame. There were no after-the-fact animations on the film.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
