The man sat down on the next stool. He tipped back his hat. Rain slicked off it and pooled on the floor. He asked if I was ready for the interview. Taken by surprise, I said yes. I’ve never interviewed a fictional character before. Much less one of my own. It was a curious experience.

Q. How did you get here? Don’t you live in some kind of other dimension?

A. Some kind. If you have to know, I walked. It’s not so hard.

Q. All right. Let’s start with the basics. Just for the record, what’s your name?

A. It’s on the sign over my office door, plain to see. You call yourself a writer, I’m guessing you can read.

Q. How would you describe your business?

A. Private investigator.

Q. There are some who might call you a weird detective.

A. Who are you calling weird?

Q. Can you tell us something about the city you live in?

A. You already mentioned dimensions. The place I live – it’s where all the dimensions get knotted together. Like a snarl in a ball of yarn. Only this ain’t yarn – it’s cosmic string. And when dimensions crowd up, everything kind of tangles together. Reality. Unreality. Other things. It gets so anything can happen.

Q. Is that why it’s called String City?

A. I guess. Me, I call it home.

Q. What’s the strangest case you’ve had to deal with?

A. Hard to say. The one with the werewolf in the hat was a doozie. Then there was the spider woman who lactated silk instead of milk and wanted to inject millions of eggs directly into your skull so her babies could eat your brain. Now she was what I call a femme fatale.

Q. She sounds creepy.

A. Then there was the behemoth with the insatiable appetite, and I haven’t even started on Jimmy the Griff. He moves through time in interesting ways on account of losing to Cronos at chess.

Q. It all seems very … random.

A. Depends on your point of view. Look hard enough, you’ll start to see a pattern. What some folk call the big picture. Take any individual case, it doesn’t amount to much. Start stringing them together, that’s when pieces start falling into place.

Q. So the stories sort of fit together?

A. Mind what you’re calling ‘stories’, pal. This is my life you’re talking about.

Q. Sorry. So who runs the show in String City?

A. Some would say the Thanes. They’re the ones sitting pretty up on the mountain. Crime’s pretty organised too, run mostly by Titans. And the occasional lost god. The cops try to keep control, but they’re more concerned with stopping their guts from spilling out all over the patrol cars. That happens when you’re undead.

Q. The cops are zombies?

A. You should know. You wrote them.

Q. How does this work, exactly? If you’re fictional, how come I can talk to you?

A. Like I said, in String City everything gets tangled together. You and me included. Are we done?

Q. I suppose so. No, wait. I’ve got one last question. Well, more of a request really.

A. Make it quick. I’ve got an appointment with a dame who wears dresses so tight you can see the pores in her skin.

Q. Will you do the thing with the coat?

At this point, my interviewee let out a world-weary sigh and stood up. He took off his leather coat and turned it inside-out three times. When he put it back on again, it was made of a dazzling material that shimmered with all the colours of the rainbow and more besides.

Q. That’s incredible.

A. It’s just a coat.

He opened the coat’s inside pocket and unfolded the lining. Turquoise fabric expanded to become an origami octopus with silver tentacles that wrapped him up and turned him into a collapsing accordion-shape that twisted and dwindled until there was nothing left but a single yellow button spinning on the floor. My ears popped as a sudden wind rushed in from some distant other dimension. It smelt of sea-salt and spice and hot dogs. Then the air fell still.

I picked up the button and put it in my pocket. Maybe I could use it in a story sometime. If I do, you’ll be the first to know.

The String City Mysteries by Graham Edwards feature a weird detective with a rather unusual coat. The first three stories in the series are available as ebooks from 40k Books. New instalments are coming soon.

Rules of Micro SF:

• Tell a story in one sentence. It can be any length but must work grammatically and be reasonably well parsed by a reader.
• Include at least two or more hyperlinks to current developments in science, technology or the humanities.
• You may expand the stories meaning through the title, which is not part of the one sentence story.
• Tweet the man behind this @damiengwalter and he’ll share your stories with others.

My Ten Reasons For Writing not only outlines the various stimuli that motivate the average writer, but also offers useful clues about which particular genre said writer is best suited to. I’ve compiled the list using the very latest scientific and statistical techniques, and I’m confident of its value as a tool to all writers large and small. I cannot, however, be held responsible for any injuries sustained while using it.

1. I write because it transports me to another world – Science Fiction
2. I write because I love it when the prose wraps me up in its strong muscular arms – Romance
3. I write because the words are worms in my head and if I don’t let them out they will eat up my brain from the inside with their tiny whirring teeth – Horror
4. I write because it makes me laugh – Comedy
   
5. I write because I want to win a major award and sell up to ten copies of my book in hardback – Literary Fiction
6. I write because I want to find out whodunnit – Crime
7. I write because the voices tell me to – Psychological Thriller
8. I write because I like putting my characters in jeopardy and seeing how they escape – Adventure
9. I write because … wait, I’ll tell you in a minute – Suspense
10. I write because I want to sell millions and make lots and lots of money – Fantasy

The only trouble is, I have a nagging feeling this list is incomplete. If any of you lovely people want to add to it, feel free. Just remember I’ve already reserved a spot for one I missed. And which happens to be the best reason of all: write because you can’t stop.

I list these reasons here in the same way I might list the Ten Most Wanted. There’s a reward out for their capture. If you round one up, let me know. We’ll have us a lynchin’.

1. I can’t seem to find the time. The classic writer’s excuse. Most days there are 24 hours. I guarantee you’re not using them all.
2. I’m too tired. Another popular choice. If you can’t get the matchsticks propped under your eyelids, try writing with your eyes closed and call the resulting prose ‘stream of consciousness’. Alternatively, just do a little bit at a time. You can accomplish a hell of a lot between yawns.
3. It’s bath time. Apparently this was a favourite excuse of Douglas Adams. But then he was a genius. Don’t kid yourself you are too.
4. I need something to eat. Write hungry. Those growls from your stomach are really the voice of your Muse. Listen to them.
5. I don’t feel inspired. Pathetic. You might as well sit in your car with the engine turned off and moan that you’re not going very fast. Put the key in the ignition and drive somewhere. Anywhere. Sooner or later you’ll see something interesting.
6. I’m scared. Understandable. The blank page – or screen – is infinitely more terrifying than the above-mentioned trolls. Try treating the situation like a showdown. Pretend you’re Clint Eastwood. Narrow your eyes. Chew that cheroot. Draw first.
7. It’s too big a mountain to climb. Don’t look up. Forget about reaching the end. All you need to do is write the next sentence. Strike that, just focus on the next word. Keep doing that and the altitude sickness will come soon enough.
8. Everything I’ve written so far is crap. If you really believed that, you wouldn’t be writing in the first place. If it really is crap, however (all humans generate crap on a regular basis), just write something different. Sooner or later the words will start smelling sweet again.
9. My laptop needs a new recharger. Then buy one. Duh.
10. It’s just so damn hard. Yes, it is. Also joyful. And inspiring. And infuriating. And thrilling. And rewarding. In fact, writing is pretty much the best thing you can do with your clothes on. Or, if your name is Ernest Hemingway, naked.

The reason I’ve decided to publish this list is not to inspire you (though if it does even a tiny bit, I’ll be delighted) but to mark the day on which I finally started working on my current novel again. You see, since Christmas I have personally been using some or all the above excuses on a more or less daily basis, and my writing has suffered dismally.

All that changed this morning, when I reinstated the write-before-I-go-to-the-day-job routine I normally reserve for the summer months and added around 800 words to the manuscript that’s been sitting idle for weeks.

Makes me wonder what all the fuss was about.

It’s an almost Arthurian moment, one that defines War Horse as that most magical of things – a fable. Once you accept that fact, everything about the movie makes perfect sense. It validates both the sentimental sun-washed tone of the establishing scenes in Devon and the more formal structure that develops once the narrative carries us off to war.

Spielberg and his crew are on top form here. Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography is good enough to eat, and John Williams blesses us with a ravishing score. The cast is one of the best ensembles I’ve seen for a long time. Because of the film’s episodic nature, with Joey being passed in rapid succession from one owner to the next, each actor has only a few moments of screen time to establish their character. Top-drawer performances ensure we’re engaged instantly with each new turn of the plot wheel. The film lags a little in the middle – I found the scenes with the German brothers and the French peasants a little slow. The war scenes are stunning though, as heart-stopping as Saving Private Ryan but without the gore.

And, for once, I wasted scarcely a thought on the special effects.

Those of you who know me – or who read this blog regularly – will know I’m an effects geek. A friend of mine used to complain that he always knew when a matte painting appeared on screen because I would lean forward in my seat. Watching War Horse, I mostly just sat back and drank things in. All the same, I couldn’t stop myself from doing a little effects-spotting …

Since seeing the film, I’ve read this fine Fire By Design article on Framestore’s effects for the film and was pleased to see my suspicions were right – namely that most of the effects in War Horse are what they now call ‘invisible’. By that I mean things like scenery manipulation, rig removal, atmospherics and so on. I’d guessed – correctly – that the ‘jumping over the trench’ shot featured a CG horse, not because Framestore didn’t execute it flawlessly but because there’s no way they’d have let a real horse do a stunt like that. But I didn’t spot the CG horse leaping over the tank, nor was I quite sure how they’d managed to wrangle all that barbed wire.

In the end, it didn’t matter. All that mattered were the tears on my face and the agreement with my wife and daughter that it was refreshing to see a film that managed somehow to be old-fashioned and up-to-date. I realise I’m fighting the zeitgeist with this view, but the zeitgeist will just have to live with that.

Oh, and for the record, I absolutely bought into the shot with the plough and the stone.

The inside front cover shows a helicopter lifting the model capsule’s full-scale counterpart out of the ocean after splashdown. Inside this issue are three articles spanning the more-or-less standard 72 pages.

• Low-Tech Effects – The Right Stuff (article by Adam Eisenberg)
• Brainstorm – Getting the Cookie at the End (article by Brad Munson)
• Twilight Zone: The Movie – Shadows and Substance (article by Don Shay and Paul Sammon)

In Cinefex issue #13, we learned about the remarkable variety of techniques developed by Industrial Light & Magic for Return of the Jedi. Issue #14, with its trio of dramatically different behind-the-scenes stories, proves there was at least as much diversity going on outside the walls of ILM as within.

With The Right Stuff, we find ourselves in the company of a VFX team that actively turned its back on the ‘ILM way’, abandoning motion control and travelling mattes in favour of seat-of-the-pants techniques that included hurling model rocket-planes out of windows. Brainstorm took a more cerebral approach, using what might be the most complex animation camera ever built to paint extraordinary images of the afterlife using pure light. Then there’s Twilight Zone: The Movie, in which the animatronic monsters more or less took over the asylum.

The visual effects for The Right Stuff were created by the newly-formed USFX, an off-shoot of animation specialists Colossal Pictures. At the helm was Gary Gutierrez. While director Philip Kaufman was shooting first unit photography, USFX started producing footage using motion control equipment rented from Richard Edlund. But Kaufman didn’t like the overly-choreographed results and pulled the plug. ’Gary [did] what he was supposed to do – hire the best people in the field,’ Kaufman says. ‘That was his first mistake … he had become trapped in the state of the art.’

Kaufman’s vision was clear and uncompromising: he wanted things to look real. ‘The work done by … ILM is the best that can be done,’ he explains, ‘but even so the ships have a certain lightness about them. Real planes … just don’t act that way.’ Gutierrez took the temporary shut-down on the chin; he was in fact glad of the opportunity to ‘start listening to my own reflexes and to ignore what had become a classical motion control approach.’

It was at this point that USFX started experimenting. Really experimenting.

Eisenberg’s article takes great delight in describing the ‘variety of unconventional approaches’ explored by Gutierrez and his team, including ‘riding a wheelchair past the models at different speeds’, suspending model aircraft from helium balloons and, yes, throwing those same models out of top floor windows. To recreate the effect of a space capsule’s heat-shield melting during re-entry, they considered casting the metallic surface using frozen mercury, then warming it back to room temperature. When they realised how toxic mercury was, there was a suggestion they use ice cream instead! ‘The amount of delight [Kaufman] got from the success of any shot,’ Gutierrez remarks, ‘was directly proportional to how funky the method that accomplished it.’

For the flying sequences, in-camera effects were the order of the day. Planes ran on wires and cameras were worked by hand using telephoto lenses to accentuate the shake. However, for some shots – like views of the Earth from space – the team had to resort to opticals. Even here, USFX kept pushing the envelope … and having a sly dig at ILM. ‘When you go to Star Wars and look at their planet paintings,’ remarks artist Jena Holman, ‘they’re dead.’

The Right Stuff‘s planetscapes were eventually farmed out to experimental filmmaker Jordan Belson. Kaufman likens Belson’s studio to ‘a medieval alchemist’s laboratory.’ All we get from Belson himself is the rather vague comment that he uses ‘mechanical and optical effects’ on an ‘optical bench.’ It was at this point in the article that I experienced a rare occurrence: Cinefex failing to deliver the details I craved (due not to any failing in Eisenberg’s journalism, I’m sure, but to Belson’s insistence on keeping his secrets).

The Right Stuff was well-received critically and won four technical Oscars. Although it was released theatrically in the UK, it came and went fairly quickly, so that I ended up watching it for the first time on TV some years later (recut as a two-part mini-series as I recall). Maybe the British public was less than enthralled by this epic chapter of quintessentially American history. Me, I loved it.

Much of Brad Munson’s Brainstorm article is devoted to the centrepiece ‘Death Tape’ sequence – a recording made by a revolutionary new brain-scanning device that shows the transcendental journey taken by Lillian Reynolds (played by Louise Fletcher) after her death. The techniques used to create the sequence were highly technical – almost the antithesis of the gritty effects Kaufman and Gutierrez had worked so hard to achieve. The article does still mention grit, however – namely that displayed by director Douglas Trumbull in finally bringing to the screen a film that seemed doomed from the start.

Initially, Trumbull saw Brainstorm as the perfect vehicle for his new Showscan process, which involved upping the frame-rate of motion picture film from the standard 24 to 60 frames per second. According to Munson, test reels of the process ‘suggested a sense of dimensionality and viewer involvement that was altogether extraordinary’. Trumbull’s concept was to shoot most of the film at regular speed, switching to 60-fps for any shots representing the POV of a character wearing the futuristic brain-recording device.

Unfortunately, Paramount balked at the cost of equipping theatres with new projection equipment, prompting a move to MGM and the abandonment of Showscan altogether (the novel POV concept remained intact, but would now be executed by switching from flat 35mm to 70mm widescreen at the appropriate moments). Worse was to come when, near the end of principal photography, the film’s star Natalie Wood died suddenly in a boating accident. Munson chronicles the extraordinary progress of the film from this nadir to the moment when, a whole year after MGM called a halt on the project, insurers Lloyds of London actually put up an extra $3.5 million to see the film finished.

The film was back on track, but visual effects supervisor Alison Yerxa still had her work cut out realising the pivotal Death Tape sequence. As director, Trumbull had taken a step back from his usual effects role, but he was still the source of all the ideas. ‘It was all in Doug’s head,’ comments effects cameraman Don Baker. And Trumbull himself laments the difficulty of communicating his concepts: ‘Drawings were always inadequate … Verbal explanations were also difficult … When you get into the zone where nothing makes sense – nothing makes sense.’

Luckily for us, Cinefex is here to bring order to the confusion. That means a detailed study of Compsy (Computerised Multiplane System). This horizontal automated animation stand, first used to create the V’ger cloud sequence for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, was upgraded and worked almost to death to create Brainstorm’s ground-breaking effects.

For the final ‘heaven’ scenes, for example, Compsy was used to create in-camera composites of ‘four to six streams of angels each … comprised of at least 120 separate images.’ The workloads described here are staggering. Not to mention the maths. Richard Hollander describes how ‘each angel had its own individual motion, and then we’d have a total move on top of that.’ It’s reassuring to know that, for all the high technology and number crunching, Compsy only survived its ordeal thanks to ‘a bit of double-sided tape on the bottom of the camera’s inner casing to catch all the film dust.’

It wasn’t all Compsy, of course. Brainstorm also featured Trumbull’s trademark slit-scan photography, some blink-and-you-miss-them matte paintings, and a gruesome organic representation of hell featuring tortured souls and calves’ brains, all of which are covered by the article. We also learn about Jerry Morawski’s stunning light sculpture techniques, which provided the ethereal glowing backgrounds to the heaven sequence.

It’s this use of light I remember most clearly about the effects in Brainstorm. For all the science involved, there’s a real sense of Trumbull and his team as artists working not with paint on canvas but with light on the motion picture screen. The results, combined with James Horner’s fabulous score, create real movie magic. There’s no doubt the film isn’t what it might have been (no surprise given its troubled history) but it’s testament to Trumbull’s determination that it’s as good as it is. And, in the moments when it really takes off, it’s nothing short of dazzling.

Much of this issue’s final article - Twilight Zone: The Movie - is devoted to the film’s two effects-heavy stories: Joe Dante’s It’s a Good Life and George Miller’s Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.

Rob Bottin was responsible for the creature effects in the Good Life segment. When discussing with Bottin how to tell the story of a boy with psychic powers whose cartoon obsession literally comes to life, Dante asked, ‘Do you have any bizarre things you’d like to do?’ Bottin duly came up with a ton of outlandish gags inspired by Tex Avery cartoons. Cue a stream of anecdotes about Bottin’s animatronic marvels, the best of which relates to the monstrous rabbit-out-of-a-hat trick, the first incarnation of which was filled with helium gas. Thanks to an adhesive malfunction, the giant inflatable was last seen ‘drifting away over Van Nuys.’ (For all I know, there may still be a reward for its return, so if anybody out there’s seen it …)

There’s something deliciously unrestrained about Bottin’s imagination, and about the way it’s realised. Yes, there are complex mechanics inside his cartoon creatures, but he’s not afraid to resort to low-tech solutions like ‘wires on fishing poles.’ He also understands how the camera can help: the rabbit effect exploited multiple frame rates in a single shot – ‘[actor] Kevin McCarthy did a good job compensating for the speed changes’) – and the manic shot of a Tasmanian Devil-inspired character spinning through – and tearing apart – a living room is so effective that, as Bottin says, ‘Everyone thinks it’s an optical,’ even though it was achieved entirely in-camera.

The Nightmare segment features another kind of creature: an airborne gremlin created by Craig Reardon. We get good detail about the construction and mechanics of the monster – more in-depth than in the Bottin section. There are also the familiar stories of on-set circumstances contriving to undermine the effects artist’s work – specifically George Miller’s decision to shoot his segment in a rainstorm. Despite Miller’s early promise that the monster wouldn’t get wet – which gave Reardon the confidence to use foam rubber flesh – when it came to the shoot ‘it was fire hoses and Ritter fans just soaking this suit every time you saw it.’

Choice trivia from the article: Reardon hired his mum for the arduous job of individually Supergluing quills on to the gremlin’s head; and (my favourite) Miller had enormous fun shooting an ‘inflatable eyeball’ appliance for a subliminal cut of actor John Lithgow’s eyes literally popping out of his head. ‘On several takes,’ says Reardon, ‘the eyes got as big as baseballs! People were dying with laughter on the set.’

There are plenty of eye-popping pictures in Cinefex #14. Stand-outs for me include the shot of Gary Gutierrez’s crew filming a model X-1 suspended on wires from a crane outdoors. Off to the side, a bunch of guys are up a ladder using a PT boat fogger to direct a jet of vapour past the plane. The Brainstorm article is full of stunning frame enlargements showing angels and memory bubbles, but the one I’m picking out is a discarded shot of Louise Fletcher that’s been distorted by an optical effect resembling a Fresnel lens (Trumbull judged it ‘too confusing’ and it never made the final cut). And from Twilight Zone, it has to be the quintessential behind-the-scenes creature photo showing Rob Bottin with his arm planted firmly in the nether regions of one of his bizarre animatronic creations, while his cable-controlling crew wait hunched in the background, ready to bring the monster to life.

This whole business of revisiting Cinefex is inevitably full of nostalgia. This issue in particular made me very aware of the passage of time. As I write, only a few months have passed since the media started talking about Natalie Wood’s death again, thirty years on. And, while Showscan never made it to the theatres, we’ll soon be watching Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit running at 48 frames per second. Digital technology has finally made Douglas Trumbull’s dream a reality.

The films covered here are all solid affairs, crewed by filmmakers committed to retaining their integrity against all the odds: industry preconceptions, financial challenges, studio politics and, yes, even death. Despite everything, on these particular productions it seems that nobody sold out. It’s a shame, therefore, that the three films under discussion seem to have drifted into that shadowy part of the collective memory where, if you ask the average Joe about them, the best you’ll get is a quizzical look and a remark like, ‘Yeah, I think I might have seen that once.’

However, for the fans (and if you’re reading this you’re probably in that category), these films continue to burn as bright as a Compsy animation effect. Mind you, nobody’s perfect: in preparing this review, I had to consult my oracular buddy Phil Guest about whether the UK release of Brainstorm really did feature that aspect ratio switcheroo (it did, by the way) or whether my mind was just playing tricks on me. Memory, like celluloid, is prone to crumbling away.

• Cinefex
• Gary Gutierrez
• Douglas Trumbull
• Alison Yerxa
• Rob Bottin
• Craig Reardon

All this talk of building blocks got me thinking about DNA. When you break it down, all life on Earth is made of just a few basic proteins. Yet its variety is staggering. It’s the same with stories. Are writers really just recycling the same plots over and over again? I don’t know for certain. Even if they are, there’s no denying the resulting smorgasbord of stories resembles the biosphere of a rainforest in its complexity and diversity.

What really interests me is how these theories help the writer. It’s possible to take, for example, Campbell’s blueprints and use them to construct a myth of your very own. If George Lucas is to be believed, that’s exactly what he did when writing the original Star Wars.

But can it really be as simple as that? Well, yes and no. Constructing stories in this fashion is all very well. But the line between blueprint and cookie-cutter is a fine one. Rely on theories like this too much and all your stories will start coming out the same.

“But wait,” I hear you cry. “Isn’t this exactly what happens with popular music? There are only so many chords, but there are still plenty of songs.” Yes indeed, it’s a good analogy, one that Damien makes in his post (it’s also illustrated to hilarious effect in Axis of Awesome’s Four Chord Song which is, well, awesome).

All well and good. But I’d argue that you can no more use a blueprint to imagine a story than you can study a test tube full of proteins to imagine a Venus fly-trap or a Colobus monkey. The key word here is imagine. Creative writing isn’t about putting building blocks one on top of the other. It’s about heading out into the great beyond and seeing things that nobody’s ever seen before.

So do I think all these theories on fundamental story structure are nonsense? Not at all. I think they’re fascinating and highly relevant. I just see them as a way of studying stories rather than writing them. Granted, it can be pleasing when, as you’re writing, you realise your narrative is chiming with something out of Campbell. But that’s just an echo. You still have to rely on your own voice to make the originating sound.

One final thought. If stories, like life, really are made up of protein, we can consider them an essential food group. Consumption of literature, therefore, is vital for our continued existence. Now that’s a theory I can get behind. Feeling peckish anyone?

Talking of electricity, in this latest story, my wise-cracking gumshoe comes up the business tycoon who runs String City’s power plants. You don’t want to know what he uses for fuel. There’s also a beautiful woman who happens to be half-bird. When she sings, for the sake of your everlasting soul you’d better hope you’ve got your earplugs in. It’s a tricky case, mostly because it hinges on that most mysterious of things.

Love.

Syren is published by 40k Books.

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• Jedi Journal (edited by Don Shay)

When I first set out on this retrospective odyssey through my back-issues of Cinefex, I remarked on the journal’s clutter-free format: no editorial, no advertising (not in the early days at least), just the facts, ma’am. It’s a simple concept, and a versatile one too. In the issues I’ve reviewed so far there’s been a creditable mix of articles ranging from coverage of then-current blockbusters, to retrospectives on prominent practitioners, to reports on the growing impact of computer technology on Hollywood. The single extensive article in issue #13 rings the changes yet again in that, although edited by publisher Don Shay, it hands over the actual writing reins to the VFX artists themselves.

The artists in question are ILM’s Richard Edlund, Dennis Muren and Ken Ralston, each of whom supervised a more or less equal share of Return of the Jedi‘s visual effects. According to this issue’s introduction, they each ‘recorded a month-by-month account of the work as it developed and changed.’ I don’t know if the journals were written exclusively for Cinefex, or if Shay negotiated access to material that was already being produced; either way, the format promises an intriguing insight into what really went on behind the Star Wars scenes. Does the resulting article live up to that promise? Let’s find out.

It’s Richard Edlund who kicks things off with his initial round-up from February 1982, before ILM had really got going on the project. Edlund – who summarises his role at ILM as ‘architect of the whole photographic system’ – gives us a technical run-down of all the equipment upgrades that have been made ready for Jedi. These include tuning up the quad printer that was built for The Empire Strikes Back, revamping the motion control system and refining the field motion control technology used briefly on Raiders of the Lost Ark and more extensively on Poltergeist. He’s particularly excited about the new multiplane matte camera, which he describes as ‘a real locomotive.’ Edlund’s descriptions are a little like those exploded diagrams you get in technical manuals: precise, in-depth and ever-so-slightly obsessive. If you were handy with a spanner, you could probably build a complete visual effects facility just using his notes.

Edlund goes on to discuss videomatics (an early form of pre-vis using crude models and hand-held video cameras) and muses on whether they’ll get to do the lasers and light sabers with CG (they didn’t). There’s a real sense of anticipation here, of an experienced team building up both resources and energy for a big push. And a sense too that Star Wars is something special. As Edlund puts it, ‘the real raison d’etre [for ILM] is Star Wars‘ – the implication being that all those recent little projects like Raiders and E.T. and Poltergeist were just warm-ups for the main event.

As the article progresses, Edlund’s reports are interleaved with those of Muren and Ralston, creating an overlapping narrative of the pressure-cooker environment that ILM became through the course of the production. As well as detailing their own work, the three men refer frequently to what their colleagues are up to. Occasionally this leads to repetition – the only flaw in this otherwise effective format – but that’s more than made up for by the immediacy of the text.

One of the things I enjoyed about this issue was the number of times I read about problems that had never really occurred to me before – for example, establishing and maintaining the relative sizes of the various spaceships, particularly as they fly through the Death Star tunnels. The models are all built to different scales, and there are variants within each type (the X-Wing variants, for example, range in size from eighteen inches to four feet). The tunnels themselves are different again. It’s all about trajectories and angles and focal distances and, according to Edlund, it takes ‘a certain amount of schoolboy math’ to calculate the correct size ratios. ‘You’d think that there’d be a mathematical relationship,’ Edlund adds, ‘but it’s just too subjective for that.’

The development of the speeder bike sequence makes for a good read too. Using puppets for the bikes and figures was an early decision, inspired in part by the success of the E.T. flying sequences. But the team’s plans to use a miniature forest for the background plates (more learning from E.T.) soon proved unworkable. Dennis Muren lists the various ideas they considered and discarded. ‘We even looked into a jet-pack – one of those things you strap on and it takes off,’ he says. How cool would that have looked on the ‘making of’ documentary?

Eventually they found a way of generating high-speed footage in the Eureka woods using an undercranked camera on a Steadicam. Muren describes the process of plotting the inevitable bumps in the resulting plates frame by frame on a Moviola, then programming those imperfections into the motion control camera, so that ‘the bikes didn’t look they were just pasted onto the scene.’ He also notes that the speeder bike shots in the trailer ‘just don’t work without sound effects,’ and cites this observation as the reason why in the final film the soundtrack makes extensive use of effects and is devoid of music.

But it’s not just opticals; there’s plenty about the various animation effects too. Actually, it struck me how comprehensively ILM had left stop-motion behind at this point. Puppetry and go-motion were very much the order of the day, and it’s clear that this was not only a conscious decision for those concerned, but an exciting one too. Talking about the Rancor sequence, Muren says, ‘The footage we’re getting is just amazing … I’ve never seen anything like this before.’

Three men talking about one of the biggest effects films ever made cover a lot of ground, and I’m only here to scratch the surface. Needless to say, through the course of the article we learn all about the production of those big matte shots Edlund was craving, and the long, long shifts spent by Ken Ralston and his crew filming endless spaceship elements for the final space battle – and going stir crazy enough to replace some of the tiniest, most distant craft with ‘tennis shoes, wads of gum – things like that.’ There are horror stories of processing labs chewing up film and frequent references to the ILM facility being a ‘nuthouse’, especially as the final deadlines loom. And there’s a name that keeps cropping up: George Lucas.

In the documentary From Star Wars to Jedi – The Making of a Saga, Mark Hamill comments at one point that, during the production of Jedi, ‘George was everywhere.’ That’s true of this article too. ‘George … knows every frame of the picture,’ says Edlund, ‘and he’s over here at least twice a day for dailies.’ Referring to the space battle, Ralston remarks that, ‘George has really been working himself to death on this film.’ And Muren tells us that, ‘by the time he’s through, the whole film will have a very definite rhythm that’s all George’s.’ It’s telling that the film’s credited director, Richard Marquand, gets barely a mention, while George’s name is on pretty much every page.

(I’m going to take a quick aside here and note that I’m writing this article in the same week that George Lucas has claimed to be retiring from big-budget movie-making (I say ‘claimed’ because people with his level of fame say this kind of thing all the time). In fact, he seems a bit jaded with the whole business. In an interview with The New York Times, he’s quoted as saying, ‘my movie, with my name on it, that says I did it, needs to be the way I want it.’ The remark is his response to all the bad press he’s had over recent years regarding his persistent tweaking of the Star Wars films. I’m going to stick my head above the parapet and say I’m on George’s side. Do I agree with all the changes he’s made? Of course not. Do I defend his right to make them? Absolutely. Nor should we be surprised by his actions, when the very commitment which made the original trilogy so popular (strike that, which enabled him to make the films at all) was evident from day one – and nowhere more evident than in this issue of Cinefex. The truth is, Lucas has been badly served by many of his so-called fans … but, wait, I’ve just caught myself heading badly off topic, so I’ll save the rest of my thoughts on all things Star Wars for a future post. For now, back to Jedi!)

By and large, the tripartite approach to Jedi’s effects seems to have been a smart move. It certainly got the work done. And by all accounts the three supervisors responded well to the arrangement: in his entry from 16 February 1983, Ralston comments that ‘it’s neat at this point … seeing how Dennis’s sequences cut to mine, mine to Richard’s, and so on.’ Later he notes that ‘there’s been a nice kind of competitiveness on this film.’ When planning the production, was George aware that such a healthy rivalry would develop at ILM, no doubt to the benefit of the film? I’m sure of it.

The pictures that accompany the article are no less compelling than the text. I like the spread on pages 16 and 17, which show the Rancor puppet in its miniature set. It’s a classic set of images showing large numbers of grown men crowded round a cramped model under blazing lights. As always, animator/puppeteer Phil Tippett somehow manages to look simultaneously uncomfortable and serene. And there are some great shots of the matte painters at work on some of those grand vistas, including the Death Star docking bay and the Ewok village.

As for my own memories of Return of the Jedi … well, I saw it in London within a week or two of its first release. I’d heroically avoided reading the novelisation so, although I’d seen a heap of stills and trailers, I came to it quite fresh. I loved the Tatooine scenes, felt it slumped in the middle, tolerated the Ewoks and was totally wrapped up in the grand finale. As for the effects, I remember being more than satisfied, particularly with the forest battle and the chase through the Death Star. Most of the original effects still hold up well today, proving that ILM had reached the peak of the photochemical art. At the beginning of his first journal entry, Edlund says, ‘an effects facility is like a Stradivarius … Once you’ve come up with a design … you’ve got to learn how to play it real well.’ The difference is that Edlund, Muren and Ralston are not only the fabricators of the instrument, but also the musicians who play it. When faced with the monumental challenge of Return of the Jedi, that particular trio made a hell of a lot of sweet music.

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