129 – The Star Wars Influence: Live at the BFI’s Film on Film Festival

Weird Being Way Media. Welcome to episode one hundred and twenty nine of the Film Yourmentaries podcast. I'm your host, Jamie Benning. As you may know, I've just got back from a week shooting on Martha's Vineyard for my Joe Al's documentary. Huge thanks to those of you that supported the gofund me.

We really couldn't have done it without you. My goodness is expensive over there. It's still open the GoFundMe, and any donations that you make from now on will go towards post production and any of the other costs associated with getting the film released. There'll be more on news on that later this month. I'm going to do an episode of report episode about our visit to Martha's Vineyard and all the crazy stuff that we managed to do.

Kind of insane. I'm jet lag to hell and it's all swelling around in my head. There's so much to tell. There really is so much to tell. Meanwhile, for this episode number one hundred and twenty nine, I'm bringing you a special recording from the BFI's Film on Film Festival, where I was invited alongside post production legend Paul Collard as a guest of Doug Weir, the BFI's remastering lead and curator of this particular panel.

Together, we explored the technical and cultural legacy of George Lucas's Star Wars, from the pioneering use of VistaVision and optical printers to the development of edit Droid and Soundroid, and how these innovations kind of laid the groundwork for today's digital workflows. We also touched on Lucas's determination to break away from the traditional Hollywood system, the early days of I LEM, and the enduring value of the diet transfer prints, especially relevant given them. This conversation was held just ahead of the rare thirty five millimeter technicolor screening of Styles at the Bfire. So I won't keep you any longer. Here's my conversation with Doug Weir and Paul Collard, and as usual, I'll be back at the end for a bit more jabbering.

On the point in the story was the you know, effects and his realization and more existential ideas involved in making his step to leave, you know. And they all they saw it was the love story and the action and the adventure and all that kind of stuff. What what what happened? What did they say to you? Did they get really nasty?

And and I mean, what what really? You seem to be so upset by this, you know, I'm not really, I'm just upset. I'm more upset at the idea. You know. It's more of a young idealist facing the reality of the fact that these people exist.

It's I guess what most kids face when they see the government. I mean, it's the same thing as the government. I just face it with Warner Brothers. It's there are certain freedoms that people expect, you know, in certain respect that people, you know, to ideas, the respect of the idea coming out of school, and when you respect the idea more than when you realize that in the real world they don't even know what an idea is and they just walk all over it. The problem is that making film as an art, selling film is a business.

The trouble is that they don't know how to sell films. As a result, they try to make you make films that people will go to without them having to be sold, which is the real key to the problem. You really don't have to be in Los Angeles to make films or Hollywood. You can make them anywhere. Make them anywhere in the world.

All you have to do is have the knowledge. I mean the facilities that they have here you can have anywhere. You know, well, you use a camera. Buy a camera. So we essentially bought a camera and moved to San Francisco, said we're going to make movies up here, and we don't need the stories.

I heard that We're a little more elaborate than that. The word went out that Zoeuchrope had the state of the art technology and you had all these fabulous bass of equipment. We got a lot of new equipment in and we had problems getting it working and stuff. A lot of experimental equipment. You know, we were you know, it's cheaper because it's experimental, I mean because nobody uses it.

Well, there's a guy with a day. Thanks very much for coming, I learned just ten minutes ago. I think this is the first event of the film On Film Festival. So now that I've said that, someone's going to say no. Actually, there was another event earlier on Thanks very much for coming, And I chose that video clip.

He's only twenty seven in that video clip, but it's right after THCHX one one three eight was made. And as you can see, he was pretty disgruntled with the process, with the system of Hollywood. And at the age of twenty seven, you know, as we all were in our twenties, we wanted to do something different. We wanted to make a difference, break the system, do our own thing. And he actually did it.

Not many of us did it. And that's kind of what we're here to discuss today. And I am joined by two guys. These two we've been sitting here for about half an hour and it was about it was like a sort of strange art installation project. We're just sitting here.

So I went to the back and came back again, just sort of to break the monotony. But we're joined by Jamie Benning. Jamie runs the Filmingmentaries podcast. How many people listen to the film Inventries podcast? Four people, five six?

That's half my audience. I think it's you know, you've got more people that It's very good. I highly recommend it. Jamie also works in broadcast television I got that right, and also does work with Lucasfilm. On his podcast, He's got a huge what you'd call an audio audible audio history where he's interviewed a lot of the people that worked on the Star Wars films, the original Star Wars Wars films, as well as countless other Lucas productions and other you know, people that worked at lots of other visual fetes coveries, and me, I'm in a few those dodges, those ones, but the and I'm also joined by post production film legend.

Sorry, Paul, Paul Collard, I've got it written here. Paul was Vice president of Film and Digital Services at de Luxe Media, where he specialized in archive and restoration services. So he actually worked with us a lot of the BFI, supervising a lot of our projects projects, I think the Hitchcock Nine and the Great White Silence Today two the Paul began his career as a lecturer at the Kodak Photography School, and he was technical manager at the Case and Metrocolor Film The Bora Tree, where he worked on the UK release prints of The Empire Strikes Back and the Return of the Jedi, So he was there. My name is Doug Douglas Wheir. I work here at the BFI.

I supervise remastering and restoration projects for BFI distribution, So anything the BFI releases on Blu Ray and back into cinemas. So you can go to the BFI shop and you can buy everything there that's got a BFI logo on it and I had something to do with it, and you'll also be giving money to the BFI. Anyway, moving on these is vague. This is good. We've got forty five minutes now, we had fifteen minutes.

We don't have a long time, but we're going to be discussing these vague points in the history of no real specific history, the history of what came slightly before Star Wars with George Lucas and then what spawned after Star Wars, not just with George Lucas, but what he is for what of a better word, empire influenced and developed that the boundaries that he broke and the ground that they broke in technology and not just in visual effects but in other areas. Trying not to move too fast. So the future is here? Which is the tagline to TCHX one, one, three, eight. How many people have seen THCHX everybody?

Of course, there's a couple that haven't. A very good film. Is it available in the shop. Probably, it's a very well stopped shop. As you heard from the opening video clip, it wasn't a very good experience for George Lucas.

This is what led him to want to get away from Hollywood. He wanted to get out of the old system because at that point, in nineteen seventy one, we were getting into the new Hollywood era where your Scasseses and your Spielbergs and all the film school brats, I want to say, were wanted to get away from Hollywood. Hollywood was kind of dead. The studios were dying, they were empty. There was a lot of equipment sitting about being unused, and Lucas wanted to get away from that.

There was a lot of people there that refused to acknowledge that the system was no longer working, which is what he's talking about in the early clip there he's saying they didn't understand. You know, I wanted to get away from this. I would have start my own community up in San Francisco where we can do what we want, which ended up being American Zootrope with Coppola, and he produced American Coffeiti, directed by George Lucas, which was huge. It was I can't remember, but I looked up in Wikipedia. But it was something like seven hundred and something thousand budget, but then hundreds of millions profit, so he made a lot of money.

He did pretty well for a guy who would have been still in his late twenties maybe thirty at the time. That's pretty groovy. So when that happened, he had this idea, has anyone got this poster? No, it's all one. Have you got an original exactly if anyone's If anyone's got an original, oh you've got the original art?

Oh okay, just if anyone's got an original one of these, look after it because it's worth a lot of money. This little film is called Star Wars, not episode. This not episode that. He took a risk making this film because he suddenly had the financial freedom to do it. It was part financed by twentyth century Fox, but he also used his own money because he had that idea to break out and use his own money to do what he wanted.

If he was looking for funding. This is my own opinion, and this is where I'm going to break out in a second. If he had his own money, would he have got the fundings you think to make Star Wars? If he didn't have the money to open to start Ireland what became il n Do you think the studios would have backed him entirely? Mixture of having that money but also having made so much money on American Graffiti, was the hottest talent around for a portion of time.

Even though this was a still a very hard sell because you read that original script. If any of you have seen that original script, it's unmakeable. Yeah, but yeah, I think there was, you know, multiple factors involved there. Definitely is that the was it the will of the what was the original journal of the will? The Journal of the Wills?

Look Starker killer? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it gave him the financial freedom to make Star Wars. I'm not going to go into the making of Star Wars because I think looking at the T shirts, there's a few people who know about stars. So many people here are actually going to see the film this evening.

Oh wow, oh wow, lucky people. Amazing is that almost everybody? Fantastic. We're going to talk about that towards the end. You are very lucky people, not just because you get to see Star Wars, because you've all seen it before.

If anyone has anyone never seen Star Wars. Yeah, I don't think so. Well. Usually I ask people have seen films, But we had Jaws at the last Film and Film Festival, and I remember saying, is anyone not seeing Jars? And actually quite a lot of people in the audience hadn't seen it, and it was such an amazing experience.

But I'm going to come back to that and tell you why it's an amazing experience later on. So what Star Wars allowed was what Lucas was talking about in the video. All the equipment. So this is VistaVision. It's my favorite format.

This is the what's called the Anderson Printer, and this is a VistaVision camera. This VistaVision camera is actually the camera that was used to shoot the Brutalist, on one of the cameras to shoot the Brutalist. So VistaVision is still a format. It's got a revival happening at the moment. I think Paul Thomas Anderson shot his new film on VistaVision, and what's amazing.

I saw the trailer in Imax and one of the selling points of the trailer was shot in VistaVision. It was like, how many people in this audience are going to I went to that. But what we got here, But this is just a vague description from the original VistaVision pamphlet of what VistaVision is. And this is an old optical printer from the nineteen fifties. This optical printer, I mean, I getting a lot of you probably know all this, but this optical printer is used for the visual effects of things like north and Northwest and the Ten Commandments.

It's a paramount who were you who invented who had the VistaVision said system, which was part of the format wars of the fifties, which included things like Sindemoscope, And this is the VistaVision camera, but the optical printer and looking at you over there, poll it's quite a complicated but also complicated but beautiful simple device. In my opinion, I remember staring at optical printers as a young boy in books and being fascinated by them. But these were sitting about not being used. And Lukas took this one printer to do all the visual effects. But it wasn't just the printer, was it that allowed them?

Because on to the next slide here they combined the printer with this. Yeah, it's fantastic come to see an optical printer like that being reborn and used so effectively, because in the seventies we really were fighting film grain and loss of sharpness as images were duplicated and carried through. So to have something that had a larger format yet was still thirty five miles so it's economic to you. This division went through the camera horizontally. Think of a still thirty five mil camera and you see all the frames horizontally.

That's how they come out in this division. So you are using the full width of the between the perforations as the height of the frame, which you could never do in normal thirty five minimeters. So very very. Effective and efficient use of the emulsion area. Yeah.

But I think from my point of view is that one of the greatest things that because well, one of the things Lookers was really good at was annoying, you know, to surround himself with the right people, and he shownded himself both from what occurrence is a bunch of hippies, right, Yeah. I mean a lot of the people that were brought on and ILM when I was founded in seventy five were in their early twenties. Some of them were in their late teens in fact, and some of those people I've spoken to, you know, Phil Tippia and Ken Rouston. They it seems each time I interview one of them, there's there's something that's the same about each of them, and it's a personality type that he picked. He picked these problems solders.

They weren't necessarily technically amazing or artistically amazing. They were somehow both of those things, and they were driven by solving problems. So you know, famously, I'm sure we've all heard of styles fans that they spent a million dollars and hadn't produced a single shot. Well, that's because they were manufacturing and retro fitting this stuff that I was talking about, like the optical printer, like the motion control systems that they kind of got from I think the Diaster were working on like a municipal city project where they had a motion control camera going through the model of a city and they could reproduce those movements, and they you know, they were brought on board and revolutionized special effects.

I mean, if you think think of an R and D project, this is what he set up in ILM and this camera here, this this is called the distra Flex, and that's named after John Dykstra, who was the lead person in ILM. For visual effects. It's a motion control rig and motion can control simply didn't exist before that. So he created code and programs on very basic computers to actually control stepper motors on the dolly, so you've got a track on the booms so that they could track and zoom. Everything was controllable, which mate which completely opened up the possibility of repeat tracking shots, and that's what Lucas craved.

He absolutely wanted moving cameras. He refers time and time again to footages of old World War two, World War One dog fights and the fact that you can look around and you can see the camera moving around and the dog. Fight going on. And in two thousand and one Jeffrey Unsworth shot that. But they were totally limited in terms of being able to do compositing with static cameras.

So if they used a had a camera with a background and they moved something around, they absolutely had to have it locked off because they had no means of doing another repeat shot. Whereas this completely opened up the possibility of special effects and visual effects for the future, and this is born out of research and development. It's born out of, as you were saying, you know, a certain mindset, a certain camaraderie between all these people who thought we can do anything, anything is possible. And I think that's the wonderful thing about it. If they'd have if they'd have been that experience and had tried many times before to do they would never have started.

They were knew fresh to it and they had a can do view and was a massive well. There was also a massive necessity. It was and do that. So there wasn't a system at that time for creating visual effects. It was literally every shot solve a problem, solving problem.

There were no visual effects companies in Hollywood. Don't it And what was remaining they said, can't be done, or we don't have. The tools for it. Why would you want to do that? Nobody wants to watch.

All the studios said no, it's not possible to do it within that budget. And it was you know, Alan Lanja Junior that took that leap and that leap of faith in Lucas to say, well, I like what you did before in American Coffiti. I think we should give this guy a chance. And that's the distribution. They actually had.

I don't know if it was exactly when they had that dister flex at the Academy Museum and they were the demos. Of it in museum now yeah, yeah, yeah. And what's fascinating is you can see behind the scenes footage of the new Star Wars shows and they're using the same not that system, but it's the same system, but it's a modern version. Of Yeah, John, no, don't worry creating the Mandalorian And. You're saying earlier, but that's a video camera.

Yeah, that's the really interesting thing we're looking at and realizing from back in the mid seventies and hanging off of that boom, there is a video camera because they obviously shot, so they get an incidant readout of the tracking shot, does it work or doesn't it work? And the repeat shots so they could actually preview it. And that was the earliest form of previewing. You've I mean it's like an early almost video assessed. But also I mean it's a cost saving.

You know, you're saving a lot of money not for shooting film and films when the beginning, Yeah, you don't want to waste film. And also if you're making a film that is a big chance, and everybody's looking at you going this is going to feel this is going to be rubbish. But you've got all these young guys going no, no, we've got optimism. We're from the sexties, it's going to be great. Yeah, And they're happy to work through the night and exactly carry on and.

There's no unions and it's great, not on and it's just on another point, you know about film and film stocks, because we're right back in the sempties, there was only one color negative stock at that time. It was one hundred ASA, nothing any faster, so they had to have loads of light to get certain types of shot. And when they were making Star. Wars, they even it was shot in the summer of nineteen seventy six in the UK, which is the hottest summer, hottest, hottest day, so lots of sunlight. They moved all a read outside and they use natural light to give them that extra boost.

To get the shots. Similarly, you see the shots with the effects crew in the US, the trench model and they're just driving by on a truck the camera, the VistaVision camera on the back with the sunlight. Yeah, those shots you see of like you know the X Wings die bombing and blowing up on the desk start. They're from outside, which I mean it's quite incredible and is quite incredible. You see photographs of them and they're all, as you say, a long haired guys just going here.

I'm just trying this thing out and it just works. Anyway, moving on to the next we're moving on to beyond Star Wars. Did you see I did the nice effects there's people would later, Thanks very much, Thattle Touch. Then this is the edit raid, which I'm sure a lot of you if you watch Disney Plus No Vote, But this is a really really important bit of kit. My day to day job, we use things like Adoby Premiere all the time.

You can everybody has it on their laptop. That would not exist if it wasn't for that. And I'll tell you right no, that is not I mean that there's nothing on that edit station other than two one unit, a keyboard and a few monitors. That's not a real edit station. And these pails of tips and theedse loads of stuff and junk and cans of cork.

This was a demo, Yeah, this was a demo and workstation they took I. Tell you you go to any place any edit Sweet any come to right at Sweet come see it. It's full of junk. But the no that's actually designed by Nilo Rhodis Jamiro who is the Filipino designer that they plucked out of Gym Motors Or he was working Remoter Company to design things like the snow Speeder and later the speed by. He designed that work stage.

This is what we're here for. This was about nineteen eighty two and they took this to NAB, the big broadcast show in Vegas, had to say, this is what we want to try to achieve. George's idea was to take away the mechanics of editing all of that stuff and just give the full plexity need. Yeah, because before you had an edit a trend in which would literally be a ben with a sort of cart and cloth and iraq. I just have all your trims.

You'd have bits of film everywhere. And you know, I've worked with Cellu Lloyd and the people here that's work. I know other people here that what so, and it can get incredibly complex. You don't want to damage the film, but also when you've got it's a very very complicated thing to do and his it was him again going there must be a simple way of doing this. I've got money.

But and what's interesting is that this wasn't simpler. They had to well take the film, they had to get it onto video, so they. Would, you know, so tell us any early tells. Yeah, and then put it on laser discs, burn it on laser discs, which you couldn't rewrite at the time, and then have those and they would be like the random access drives that we used to now having o this and it didn't work. And George knew it was a laborious process, but it was heading towards things.

Of the point. And I kind of admire that idea that, look, I kind of know this isn't going to work. Man. Yeah, I like to think he probably didn't, but it's like, we should that step, you should try it. Let's find a way of making this process work.

And that I think was the first non linear edit system. And yeah, I can actually see how it worked in my head because when I was a kid, you know, I'd shoot on video and then you could make the video camera using someone smarter than Meal. Nor did it, but it was like an audio jack and then it could control the VHS deck and it was basically buzzed through the tape and it made the VHS deck recard the bets you wanted. It's kind of not dissimilar to that, except that's a film negative and that's Elizar disc and it's telling you basically where the neck cutter were the cut. Yeah, so it obviously produces, you know, a paper edit, you know for.

Yeah, yeah, but for Big Star Wars nerds is like, no, you all are if you go online. The demo reel that they took to NAB in eighty two was actually rushes of the scene of Yoda dying with Mark Hamil there, just the two of them on set and you see all of the rushes all over there. Somebody, Yeah, somebody found it and just put it on YouTube, which is quite interesting. I mean yes, So, not only did it was not a a very operational edit system, it was also unfeasibly tidy looking. I'd like to I'd like to see that after one day of serious editing and here we go.

So beyond the editing, back in the post production world, there was as you can see in the left, that's a very much more smarter looking optical printer than the one they started out with. The one that they started out with being a dusty old optical printer from the nineteen fifties. This they've suddenly got the resources and the money to build their own equipment and improve and refine what it is they're doing. And this is going to be starting to bleed out into the post production world, so the world that Paul's working in. So we're now into the early eighties.

I guess this is around Empire strikes back, retire the Jedi, and on the right is oh no, sorry, it's not on the right. It's on the right to me, but not to you. So that's that's basically you're seeing the progression of development technology and at the moment in this slide, they're really at the forefront of what they're doing. And you know they they've already Lucases started as a computer division. They're starting to explore computer effects.

They're starting to explore ways of digitizing sound and digitizing film to work on film digitally, so you saw that kind of in the edit way. But it's still still analog is, it's still Lazardis, but they're still trying to push into that digital world. And that's this is interesting that Peter who shot Empire strikes Back, he was approached for Star Wars, but really they mutually declined it on the basis that he'd never done anything in visual effects or special effects. When it came to Empire Strikes Back, George Lucas actually approached him and said, don't worry about your lack of experience of visual effects, because we've got a system. No.

Literally, they've done so much work development that they had a process in place, and he slotted into it. And I think it's a great compliment. That he says in his interview that he found that working with the visual effects teams was very smooth and surprisingly straightforward, and he was totally relaxed about. It, and it's the best looking styles film to this day. Still controversial, but probably truly commonly held opinions.

I've just been the Devil's advocate. But yeah, So by that point they refined. They were continually refining the process. Again. Part of continually refining the processes refining the technology, which is I mean, I'm going to try not to jump ahead too much, but that's kind of what's going on to day.

That's why they put out to tender a lot of effects work. You know, they invited not to Star Wars films to be made by Iland. This is other films to this is. The moment where they started breaking out exactly. But then you work on Star Trek.

Does that help them move along? Yeah? Yeah, And speaking of Star Trek, the this you can never photograph a bit of equipment at least and make it look interesting, trust me, I try. But you had a Star Wars wipe on it. Yeah, I did.

I tried to Jazz. I've got lots of photographs of this with sort of boring men with screwdrivers, you know. But this is a very important day of kit. This is I don't see that film in a that's a laser machine that they were developing for film scanning but also putting digital, so digitizing the film but then also putting that back out to film. So we're slowly moving into the world of digital.

We're creeping in. I mean, we all know here and if you didn't. The first film to have a full digital sequence that it was Star Trek two, The Wrath of Ken, The Genesis, the Genesis project, which. Was actually on a computer in the film is Genesis. Sorry, Star Wars fans, I gotta be very careful the Yeah, yeah, but they I don't know, Sorry, I don't know if you just said it, but they at that time when they did create that animated effect of Genesis, they literally filmed a monitor.

That's how they got the computer effect into the film world. And this is before what we know called just a film a digital laser out was really developed. And yeah, I was sort of moving into the world where Paul would have been seeing developments because you were working on the prints of The Empire strikes Back and your Turn of the Jedi. And was the technology in the post productial in the lab world, was it being influenced by any of these? Was it leaping forward into digital at that point it was.

No. I would say that it was still very much in the world of making duplicates and compositing everything together into a file duplicate negative which was graded and approved and then you made the release prints from it. So yeah, I mean release printing was the same really for right until two thousand. You know that you basically needed a signed off negative with all color corrections, all effects all built into it, and then you made your release. I mean nowadays, for the work that we do in film restorish and remastering.

It's common practice just to scan our film element and digitize it and then it would be worked on digitally. And this is the beginning of that technology right there. And now it's commonplace even to shoot a film and just even if you're you know, apart from Christopher Nolan, if you're somebody else, you shoot a film and you scan it and it gets taken into the digital realm and it's worked on digitally and then it's put back out to film. There's even some filmmakers who are shooting digitally, editing and finishing the film, then putting it back out to film and then scanning the film, yeah, because they want to give it that film look. So sometimes to achieve that film look, you still have to go some point back out to film.

But the technology that we use for film restoration, you know, if there's a scratch in the film and there's software and now specially as film restoration software to move that scratch, that goes back to visual effects. That's why of removal, you could say, that's why they were you know, Ilen, we're developing that in the eighties for removing the wires of people and harverboards and stuff. We now use that to remove scratches from older films. We also use, as I say, in the technology now to take a very fragile piece of film. Obviously the equipment we use is designed entirely for that process, but it has its genesis right here in this very boring photograph of scanning very carefully, very fragile pieces of film.

I got colleagues here that work at the National Film Archive, and you could have pieces of film that go back to the eighteen hundreds that, you you know, really really fragile. But as soon as you digitize that a very very high resolution, you can help it and then make a new film copy from that, but obviously preserve the original. You wouldn't get rid of the original effort. And you can see all of these stepping stones that George is trying to make and make this whole process seamless, you know. So he's trying to digitize the visual effects.

He's looking out process, the post production and then of course camera, he's. Looking for a fully digital workflow, and you know. And not not to minimize his use of this division as well, because this division, let's be clear that those horizontally shot images were all for the background plates because they produced the resolution because they had a bigger image area. But for many, many years beyond that, this division was used for background plates. Yeah.

So, and I love that it's back now being used for production. Yeah, you know, because it has got that resolution and it has it does allow you to then go on to seventy MIIL or IMAX and hold that quality and a good logos and a great logo. Just kind of start doing that now. The Yeah, so he was pushing for an entirely digital workflow, but he was doing that as early as the late seventies early eighties. Yeah, and we're kind of we're in that world now, you know, we are in that Well, they're entirely digital workflow and the equipment equipment software that we use Adobe Premier, Final Cut prole Avid.

Actually Avid ended up buying out edit droid. Avid had the advantage of being having hard drives. Edit Droid had laser disk, which was as good, but they wanted other bits of the technology, so bits of excuse me, edit droid ended up in Avid. So if you're a film editor, you're going to be using bits of edit Droid probably maybe they're in that software somewhere, those those you know functions. Yeah, George wanted to get out of the manufacturing business, he said, because they were making eded droid to kind of sell the whole thing, and actually the technology is what he wanted to drive.

So he knew that by selling out elements of it to Avid Avid Average were already on that trajectory to to kind of develop a system. There was also sound Droid, right. Yeah, they had the whole droid word Droids drod yeahs actually a video game called that when I was a kid, Droid Works. But yeah, they had the sound apartment they had. I mean we haven't mentioned that, you know, but Skywalker Sound was set up a time as ILM to create you know, the sound soundscapes that were needed for and Ben Buter, the sound sound designer, was based there and he was the main guy.

But so you know, we always say, you know, fifty percent of is the sound image. I mean, the sound is really really important. Absolutely, and out of that came the software and if you can see it online, you look at it, you go, well, that's that's any other bit of sound software I've ever seen. Well, this is the first one. So they were developing that to find a way of easing the process of making films.

And it goes back to that original clip where he said I'm going to go and do my own thing I wanted to do. You know, he's looking for a way to change the system, to break the system, to get away from the studios and the way he sees it should be done, to make films the way he sees films should be made, and that you know, he's still doing that here I say here in the eighties, in this photograph, in the eighties, this really amazing photograph. Just moving on, so we don't have much longer, so I'm moving along. I'm not going to read all this, but you can just look at it. And all these are the technologies developed by Lucas companies.

So this all goes down to one guy paying, writing the checks, saying that sounds good, do it, and out of that, out of his foresight to say, Jamie, I trust you, I think you've got a vision. Here's some money. Yeah, sor right. They birthed all these things, and you've got editroids, Soundroid, go, Motion, Fistaflex, distra Flex and all the others. I'm not going to read them out.

But I can see a lot of you taking photographs, so that's good. I can move on to the next Those risk taking oh absolutely. You know he was never like this is how we're going to do it. It was I think this is the best route to take. Risk taking, but also I need to solve a problem.

Yeah. You know, if anyone's seen the documentaries on Deserty plus Light and Magic, there is a great bitter footage for he basically says, well, this is what I want to do, and they're like, we can't do that, and he says, we'll find a way of do it. And you know, it's like it's easy to say that, but he had the capacity to do that. He had the talent. He had the talent exactly.

He was still by this point, I think the younger people from Star Wars, as you were saying earlier, had spun off into their own companies, so that talent was bleeding into the system. There's a quote from Richard Edlund, who was I mean, he's in every photograph of every bit of equipment, whereas a cameraman. He's on all of it. But he talks about them starting work at ten o'clock in the morning and finishing at six am and having four hours sleep and coming back at ten am. You're doing the same thing again.

He said. That's the way they worked on that film. And he was an older guy. Yeah, he was older than them. He had worked on the original series of Star Trek, which I only found out recently, and he'd obviously come into all these kids, you know, and he's like, God, damn it, you know, but you know, but he's again an absolut visually, he'd already gone off and started his own company.

I think he did Ghostbusters and films like that. He'd already gone by this point. Love of them came back, though they went away and came back. You always come back. There's another way.

Technologies enabled are influenced by Lucasfilm Project Innovations. So Pexar was, as you can see, Lucas's computer division. He sold it to Steve Jobs. We all know who that is. And so Pexar was started by the Lucas Computer Vision it was.

The computer was called the Pixar. And interesting, the computer division was very separate from ILM. It was a completely separate interest and they you know, did things like the Genesis effect or the stained Glass window from Young Sherlock Holmes and then it just got to the point where it was again sort of costing too much, and George sold that off to Pixel and they went off and went running with it. But you got some obvious things here, like I can't see it, but there's digital projection. All cinemas in the UK now project digital.

Paul will probably be able to tell me when when was the when was the real change? What year would be the change from film today? Yeah, I mean the big big change was when three D came along. With the. Fifteen years ago, about fifteen years ago, and suddenly cinemas that weren't swapping over realized that if they could project three D there was a whole new audience and they'd make a lot of money and the use that as business cases and that's how they became.

So you were elier. Was it one of the Harry Potter films? It was at ten thousand prints. Yeah, So just to give an example, when Star Wars was initially released, I think they struck something like forty prints initially and then about two hundred. But by the height of film print distribution, Harry Potter in twenty eleven, Yeah, it was like two.

Two hundred Harry Potter prints. Just a little interjection here. It was, of course twenty thousand prints. But two those eleven, you know, it's not that long ago. And then a few years later.

It was literally like that and exploded. Yeah, so it hit a. Peak around twenty eleven twelve. And then thereafter, well, the labs the. Work that I do, and there was a moment that that were obviously scanning film and we were taking delivery of tapes.

And then, funny enough, one of the drivers for the tapeless world was the tsunami in Japan because it affected the Sony factory and you could no longer get HD CAMSR tapes, and Disney went, okay, great, we don't need that. We're going to go tapeless. And because such a huge studio chose to have a tapeless workflow, everyone had to follow, because if you wanted to work with Disney, you had to go tapeless. So it pushed the whole industry away from solid tape media tape media into hard drives and digital delivery. And it's not easier to take it from me, it's not easier, it's just more data.

Data gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and it still takes a long time to get it play. Is that it's still hard to manage? Sorry, I just remember it was Avatar was the big Avatar. Avatar but the Yeah, and Lucas was pushing digital projection and the innovations and developments of digital projection with the first prequel film, and he wanted to shoot entirely digital. And again I learned from that documentary, Sony were like that, why do you want to use a digital camera?

And they went interest. He had to push them to use it again. He was saying, but I want to do this, and I think by the second or third film it was entirely digital, and then by Avatar it was already for I'm trying to sort of avoid an Avatar pun, but the wave had already started. Terrible pun anyway, So there you go. This is these are the systems that basically exist.

You can probably trace all the way back to the nucleus of Star Wars basically and the people that came from that and the people that had the ideas and suddenly thought, hey, I can find a way of solving these problems. I'm sure a lot of these things. I mean, I'm most likely a lot of these things would have come about eventually, but I just it's very interesting. Another actually just thinking that I found fascinating is Star Wars was such a watershed moment. But in production at the same time as Star Wars, and actually maybe a bit earlier than Star Wars.

You already had Alien, you already had Superman the movie, and I think maybe Star Trek the Motion picture maybe, But these films were already in the process of being made, so there was obviously something in the water for these sort of films coming out. But Star Wars was probably the most innovative, the most groundbreaking, and it really sort of gave you know, you could probably say a lot of the box office for the following films. You know that I just mentioned probably came off the back of people being so energized by Star Wars. One of the most interesting things, you know, that George Lucas said about Star Wars and what happened subsequently, is that it spawned a whole range of special effects films using the techniques.

He's had a lot of them bonds because they didn't have good stories and what so he was very he's very balanced about saying that that was to create the environment. He did all of this to create the environment for a film and a story. But the end of the day, it was about strong characters, it was about human bonding, and it was a human story and that was what he was. The tools and a hell of a lot of blue screen. So as I think everybody in the audience we found out earlier on is going to be seeing that again.

Nobody owns that poster, but you will own the experience of seeing a die transfer a print of Star Wars, either soon or later on in the evening. Die transfer is a very interesting process. As a person that works in the field that I do. Die transfer prints are kind of prized for their unique quality and that they're susceptible to not fade. So if I'm looking for a reference for color when we were grading a film when it's being restored, if you have a diet transfer print, it's a great It's a great thing to have because you've got the original color sitting there and they haven't faded, and you can use that as your reference to the restore the color in a film.

And it's a slightly complicated process, but I'm hoping Paul will help us understand it together about how it works and how it's different. I've tried. This is just a pretty picture. Don't read it. It's fine.

Yeah, yeah, the pictures there too. But just before, just to start Paul off, there are prints of Star Wars that we could put on an NFT one that would be unwatchable because they would have completely faded and gone pink. But then the print of Star Wars that you're going to see hasn't faded, it hasn't gone pink. I've seen it. It's in very good condition.

It sounds really great, and there's a reason why that is. Yeah, when Eastman color came in, the dies in the film were produced by a chemical reaction BETE between some color couplers which were in each of the emulsion layers cimogens and yellow layers, an oxidized developer which was byproduct of a black and white process, and they color couplers and the oxidides developer combined together to form these dyes. So that was a brilliant step forward, but the dyes did not have the permanence that dyes that Technicolor used had. Technicolor was a printing process, it wasn't a photographic process, so they had the In fact, the dyes, interestingly enough, were I think proprietary to Technicolor, even although Kodak made the special films that they used, Technicolor provided the dyes, and the dyes were excellent as fifty years on they've proven to be.

So the way it worked was that that the master film was split into three components, a red record, a green record, and a blue record, and then what we call matrix masters were made from these on special film that Kodak made for this process, and where the film was exposed, the matrix film was exposed, it was hardened and a tanning developer was used which effectively created a relief image in the film, and then the remaining emulsion that wasn't exposed was washed off, so you ended up with a printing plate literally for every single frame of the film. And then those matrix masters would be sprayed in these huge chambers. And I had the great privilege of actually going to the Technicolor plant in West Strayton and seeing a Technicolor printing line actually working, and.

There were these huge, huge sort. Of cabinets with. Simon Genten yellow dyes being sprayed onto the film. The film absorbed the dyes and then was presting contact with a blank which was again Kodak made, and the blank was a black and white film print film which on which previously had been printed the soundtrack, so the sound is perfectly is silver, and therefore it's perfectly preserved because silver is so good at preservation rather like. Black and white prints.

So the soundtrack was on there and frame lines were on there, and this blank film then was presting contact with the imperfect registration with each of the three matrix masters signed magenta and yellow, and then they went through a drying process and then the print was ready to go out, and it was high speed process, so they could do hundreds of prints, but it was extremely expensive to set up. And that's where Eastman Color went out, because you could make a few prints very cost effectively in Eastman color, but Technicolor only economically viable if you needed to at least five hundred prints. There you go, that's a Mike drop and a half. And that's why George wanted to do everything digitally.

That's why George wanted to do everything today. But we're sort of thinking that maybe Star Wars, so you a technical print production dye Transfer Print Productions gives Me stopped in the UK in seventy seventy eight. Yes, they sold the entire plant and line to China and a gentleman called Bernard happeho was technical director there, went over to China for about two years to set it all up forward and. They continued to produce diet transfer prints in China until the nineties. And we're thinking, I say, we were thinking.

We're having a couple of year earlier talking that maybe the Star Wars Prince It was one of the last films on the line for transfer a p George, George under the line, which you could have seen last year if you were here. Yeah, I mean that that was a perfect description. And my voice is beginning to go. So this is a perfect moment to go there, you go, there is anybody, We got five minutes, So if there's a question, if anyone's got a question, put your hand up. One question.

To lie, But can you tell us how George let you show the film. He's very protective. I think it's a very simple answer to that, and that he was asked. Yeah, I don't know the specific so I can't speak for it, but I do know that all the right people were asked and eventually it was approved, which is quite an amazing thing. I think, you know, maybe it has something to do with George is no longer pushing technology forward.

He's not looking forward now. He is at an age where he's looking backwards and he's looking back to his origins. Maybe that's something to do with it. Possibly. I know that when we showed Jars two years ago, Spielberg found out about it, and that print ended up being shown at the TCN Festival this year, so in La Yes, So maybe that effect got to him and he thought that was so well receive and people were talking about it in a not from a perspective of oh, it's great to see Jars again, but people were talking about the print and the technical qualities of the print and how amazing it was.

I think people were engaging with the technology that we don't use anymore. But also showing these prints as part of the festival, I mean, this is the festival as a whole. Showing these prints is a great way for people to engage with seeing a film the way it's supposed to be seen. Obviously, every time you see a film it is completely different even if it's the same print, every time you watch it having a different experience. But all the prints in the festival have been chosen specifically for their qualities, and Star Wars has been chosen because it just looks so good and it's Star Wars, and I think we just took a punt to see if they'd approve it, and they did so.

And it's a real privilege to be able to watch a die transfer print absolute as Star Wars. And that's measured by the fact that George Lucas used a Technicolor print as his reference for the nineteen nineties seven special edition re release of Star Wars, where it had been digitally taken apart on compositive back together, but he used the technicallor print as the color references. As I've shared on the good point is there is I don't think there's any film I can think of, and I've seen a few in history that has been pulled apart and put back together backward as far as left, right, upside down in every format. I think there's about a million audio mixes, there's a several different color palettes, all sorts of different versions, but ultimately the film that you will see chains all that I've gotta make it.

The film that you'll see this evening is the film as it was seen in nineteen seventy seven. It's the absolute original. It's the original surround sound. You'll have the experience of the ship going over your head. It's quite amazing.

You'll have all that stuff. And also you'll have the original credits and one of them, well, mister IMDb there you'll have the credits. And what I like about the original credits, as somebody who's very dyslexic is, is that they're formatted differently. They're a deeper. This is so nerdy, but it look but it meant a lot to me.

I suddenly went way a minute. It was something different here, and it's that the raking of the credits thurning. Yeah, on the opening crawl. Theer's shallower. They're also a bit wider, and the formatting of the text is different.

It's easier to read, and it's slightly slower, and it's really there was something about it that I prefer, just purely from a reading background. And I'm going to stop speaking in a minute. So thank you very much for coming. Thanks you. So that was my conversation with Doug Weir and Paul Coollard, or rather my part in the panel with those chaps, recorded live at the BFI's Film on Film Festival.

Huge thanks again to Doug for inviting me along and to Paul for sharing so much insight from his years in post production. It was a genuine highlight to be part of the event, and yes, you know, seeing Star Wars projected from original technicolor dye transfer print was every bit as special as you could imagine. In fact, I'm going to dedicate another bonus episode to that screening coming very soon, so keep your eye or your ear out for that one. Thanks as always for listening. If you've been enjoying the podcast, please do spread the word, leave a review, or consider supporting it via Patreon, Patreon, dot com, forward slash Jamie Benning and I'll be back with more soon.

Until then, take care, we are taking away media