Of Galaxies Far, Far Away, And Battlestars Of Yesterday

Hollywood VFX Master, Richard Edlund, Talks About His Work On The Original Battlestar Galactica

By Robert Falconer, HNR Senior Editor

If ever there was a motion picture that ushered in a whole new paradigm in filmmaking technology, Star Wars was it. Before the advent of computer generated imagery (CGI), commonplace in today’s extravagant Hollywood blockbusters—and on new television series such as Battlestar Galactica—photorealistic visual effects relied exclusively on a complex combination of optical techniques such as rotoscoping, motion control, and bluescreen matte photography.

Visual effects maestro, Richard Edlund, was instrumental in developing the latter two—computerized motion control and the bluescreen matting process—to solve the complex visual effects problems that the first Star Wars opus presented. He subsequently used these techniques on many other film projects, and, for the first time in history, brought those same techniques to television for the original Battlestar Galactica series.

Along with Douglas Trumbull and John Dykstra, Richard is a legend in the annals of visual effects development. He received a shared Oscar® for his innovative work on Star Wars, then went on to receive the same honor several more times while working on the rest of the Star Wars Trilogy, as well as other George Lucas projects, including Raiders of the Lost Ark. He has also received two BAFTA® awards for Poltergeist and Return of the Jedi, and an Emmy Award® for Battlestar Galactica.

In 1983, Richard took over a facility formerly used by Douglas Trumbull, and named it Boss Film Corp. With a newly assembled team, he created visual effects for many notable productions, including Ghostbusters, 2010, Die Hard, Alien3, Cliffhanger, Species, True Lies and Air Force One. More recently, Richard’s talents have been employed on projects such as HBO’s miniseries, Angels in America, and the upcoming remake of The Stepford Wives.

He is an eight-year governor of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences® and has been the chairman of the Visual Effects Branch since its inception in 1995. He is also chairman of its Scientific and Technical Awards Committee.

Richard enjoys a diversified background in motion picture and special effects photography. Born in Fargo, North Dakota, Richard’s foray into visual arts began when he became a keen photographer in junior high school. He augmented his knowledge of photographic technology and technique during a four year hitch in the U.S. Navy—where he started up a movie department at the U.S. Naval Air Base in Atsugi, Japan—and later, at the University of Southern California. He spent four ensuing years working for his mentor, Joseph Westheimer, rotoscoping and hand-lettering titles for shows such as Star Trek, The Outer Limits and The Wild, Wild West. After leaving Westheimer, he segued back into conventional photography for a while, shooting promotional stills and films for notable rock bands such as The Fifth Dimension. In 1974, he joined Robert Abel and Associates, and for about a year-and-a-half was shooting animated graphics for television commercials using complicated motion control photography.

In 1975, Richard was hired by John Dykstra to serve as Chief Miniature and Optical Cameraman for Star Wars. When the first Star Wars film was completed, the ILM visual effects team and their facility remained largely intact, and were retained by producer Glen Larson—under the new name of MCA-57—to film the first three Galactica MOWs ordered by ABC: Saga of a Star World, Lost Planet of the Gods and The Lost Warrior. MCA-57 also worked on portions of The Gun on Ice Planet Zero and The Long Patrol. After producing seven hours of programming, Dykstra and Edlund withdrew when the network decided to plug Galactica into a weekly time slot. Universal subsequently set up it’s own in-house effects facility known as Universal Hartland. This facility produced the effects for the rest of the series run. In the meantime, John Dykstra and his associates formed a VFX company known as Apogee, Inc., which went on to work on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, while Richard Edlund returned to the Star Wars universe—at the behest of George Lucas—to serve as Special Effects Supervisor for The Empire Strikes Back.

Robert: How did you first hear of Battlestar Galactica, and what were the circumstances surrounding your involvement?

Richard Edlund: Once Star Wars was released, and was such a monstrous hit, I was busy shooting title sequences for the French and German releases. During that time I caught wind that George was planning Empire Strikes Back, but I had not been approached yet to do that project. At the end of Star Wars, several of our crew, including myself, John Dykstra, Grant McCune and Dick Alexander, were kicking around the idea of creating a visual effects company—a company which would later become known as Apogee.

At this point, John Dykstra got a call from Glen Larson. Glen had contacted either George Lucas or Gary Kurtz to find out if he and Universal could lease the ILM Van Nuys facility we had used to create the VFX for Star Wars, in order to shoot Battlestar Galactica. And apparently, George agreed to it. So our main team, minus Robby Blalack, signed on to do the Galactica visual effects.

Robert: And at some point Ralph McQuarrie entered the picture to handle Galactica’s conceptual art. Richard Edlund: Yeah, I believe Glen Larson made a deal with Ralph as well. Ralph had actually done about six or seven conceptual paintings that formed the basis of the art direction on Star Wars. He was a very talented artist who had formerly worked for Boeing, I believe. Robert: How did you begin prepping for Galactica?

Richard Edlund: Well, first of all, after talking to Glen and Universal, we decided that because we were doing this for television, we would need to simplify certain aspects. One of the problems with the first Star Wars was that we had shot the visual effects using VistaVision—a motion picture camera system that achieves its wider image by running the negative through the camera horizontally at a width of eight 35mm perforations, as opposed to the normal, vertical four—and we only had a small number of these specialized cameras.

We therefore decided to shoot Galactica in standard 35mm, and we converted the optical department to accommodate this, which took a while to do. We didn’t really get it cranking properly until after the first MOW, Saga of a Star World—which to my eye has a lot of effects problems.

Robert: Was there any discussion of releasing Galactica as a feature film?

Richard Edlund: No, not in the beginning. Our original deal was that we would prep effects for three two-hour MOWs. And our understanding was that they were not going to do a feature, which was another reason we went to 35mm. Had we known they were going to release it theatrically, we would have stayed in VistaVision because it’s much higher quality. But because we thought it was to be strictly for television, we didn’t consider the requirements to be as stringent.

Robert: Had the Galactica pilot script called for any specific types of visual sequences?

Richard Edlund: The production team for Galactica didn’t know anything about visual effects. They really didn’t know what kinds of shots they wanted, so we basically designed them. That gave us the freedom to design and composite shots that we thought would be good. We’d send them to the producers and they’d cut them in.

Robert: Were you able to incorporate lessons learned shooting Star Wars to improve certain techniques on Galactica, and what sort of new techniques—if any—did you develop?

Richard Edlund: On Star Wars, George was very specific about what he wanted. In a lot of cases, we felt we could have designed more interesting shots, but that wasn’t necessarily what he wanted…and of course, we gave him what he wanted. This isn’t grumbling at all, it’s just how George envisioned the sequences. But, to use my old metaphor about building a violin and then having to learn how to play it, once we had done Star Wars, we could basically “play the scales.” With Galactica—and later projects like Empire Strikes Back—we started getting into concertos, if you will.

Robert: So you’re no longer just building the instruments, now you’ve also become proficient in using them.

Richard Edlund: Exactly. For example, something I came up with for the Galactica project was a snorkel lens that enabled me to get really close to the models without bumping into them with the camera. There was one shot we did from Starbuck’s POV, where he’s coming in to land in the Galactica hangar bay. We started way back, twenty or thirty feet from the model, then came in closer and closer to where we see Andy Probert’s highly detailed two inch wide painting of the interior landing bay, and at this point, the lens is almost touching the model. We then cut from that to an interior of the landing bay where Starbuck’s Viper is landing.

There was another interesting shot where we had tiny little Cylon Raiders that were a couple of inches in length that we used to fly over the Galactica. (You see, with a forty-foot camera track, you can only get a certain distance away from the larger models.) We added animated shadows—cast from the Raiders onto the surface of the Galactica—which were tricks to help the audience believe that the Galactica is really a mile long. We never got into shadows and stuff like that on Star Wars.

Robert: Talk a little about the “jet blast” effect emitted from the Vipers. Richard Edlund: Well, John had the brainstorm—which was a real nightmare—to use liquid nitrogen so that the rear of the Vipers didn’t just have glowing engines, but a kind of vapor trail coming out the back of them. The way we shot that was with multiple passes of motion control.

We would shoot the first sequence by designing and programming the Viper’s beauty pass, then we turned all the lights out on the stage and shot the engine pass with a diffusion filter on the camera to give a glow to the engine ports. Finally, we plumbed the model with eight inch copper tubing and a rear nozzle so that it actually emitted liquid nitrogen from the engine ports, and lit that separately for a final motion control pass. Keep in mind that these Viper models were only a foot-and-a-half long.

We went through quite a few tanks of liquid nitrogen, and occasionally the apparatus would freeze up, which m eant we had to shoot another pass. It was difficult to do, but it was another visual departure fro m Star Wars that we wanted to create.

Robert: Now, I understand you used a laser to shoot one particular sequence.

Eventually we did wear goggles, but they were annoying because it took about a week or two to shoot this particular sequence.

Anyway, I had won a Saturn Award—for my work on Star Wars, if I remember correctly—which was essentially this trophy-sized doorstop [laughs]. For those who’ve never seen one, they’re shaped like the planet Saturn with a ring around them. We were looking for things that would get the laser beam to spread out and cause the light to shard, and that trophy had certain surfaces on it that when hit by the laser would splay the light perfectly in our smoke filled stage. We’d then move the thing on a motion control rig, which gave us these very interesting red backgrounds. Then we composited the ships into that background.

Robert: So the Saturn award itself literally became an instrument in the actual film making process. That’s a great story.

Richard Edlund: [Laughs] Yeah. That’s how we created the nebula effect.

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Robert: All joking aside, I always felt that was one of the most effective sequences in the pilot.

Richard Edlund: I agree. But I have to tell you that the other shot I’m perhaps most proud of, was the avalanche sequence we did for The Gun on Ice Planet Zero, which I always refer to as The Guns of Navarone episode. It was also the episode where we had the Viper and Shuttle landing in the snow.

Grant McCune had discovered this material called microballoons, which came in bags. To this day, I don’t know how the hell they make this stuff, but they’re tiny hollow spheres of glass with the consistency of powder, and if you violently disturb them, they produce a cloud of dust or smoke. They look white because of the way they reflect light, and were thus perfect for miniature snow. We used them for all the snow banks, the landings on the ice planet, and then ultimately, later on, for the miniature mountain Grant built.

The miniature mountain was about three feet tall, and built on a square platform. We covered it with these microballoons and sprayed a fine solution of alcohol and water on them, which gave them just enough adhesion to hold them in place on the “mountain.” We then employed the high-tech approach of smacking the table with a sledgehammer in order to cause the avalanche.

I shot it outside, using 5247 interior tungsten film (ASA 100), and a No. 85 warming filter that color corrects the tungsten emulsion for daylight shooting, by cutting down the blue light. We shot the sequence at about 1/15 normal speed; 360 frames per second at f/4, which doesn’t provide much depth of field with miniatures, but was necessary due to the high shutter speed. Normally you shoot miniatures like that at f/22, because if anything’s out of focus, it blows your shot. So I used a tilting lens board where I could tilt the focus plane the way you do on a view camera. I just barely got everything in focus for that shot. In the final shot, the mountain looked huge, and the avalanche took about twenty or twenty-five seconds. In reality, the microballoons took about three or four seconds to fall when we hit the table. But the whole thing really worked quite well—in fact, I would cut in as a shot today—and remarkably, we did the entire sequence in one take.

Robert: Were the producers happy with the results of all your efforts?

Richard Edlund: Actually, nothing ever got kicked back to us; they loved everything we shot.

Robert: I understand there was some “covert intelligence gathering” going on when you were prepping the VFX for Galactica. Tell us a little about that.

Richard Edlund: During production, personnel from Universal were hanging around our facility, taking pictures of all our specialized optical equipment and making copies of our engineering drawings. Essentially, I suppose you could say that ILM—and the technology we developed for ILM—was owned by George Lucas. We had invented so much stuff for Star Wars and had been so busy with the movie that we hadn’t patented anything. We complained. But with all the work we had to do, and since Universal was leasing the facility along with our expertise, there wasn’t much we could do about it. Ultimately, Universal built the Hartland facility to later employ our technology for the series. I went out there one time and was amazed to see that it looked like a virtual clone of our facility.

Robert: What were your thoughts on the lawsuit that Lucas and Fox filed over Galactica’s alleged similarities?

Richard Edlund: Well, basically George brought a lawsuit against Glen for plagiarism. I wound up having to give deposition: “The Cylons were reminiscent of the stormtroopers, and this looks like that,” etc. But when you’re using “like technology,” it’s inevitable that certain things are going to start looking the same. Both the Cylons and the stormtroopers used vacuuform technology, for example. Creature designers now can hardly keep from plagiarizing H.R. Giger. So it’s hard to get certain things out of your mindset once they’re established. And everybody borrows from each other. If you look at C3PO, he’s a dead ringer for the robot in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

At the end of the day, it’s not really where you get it, it’s what you do with it. Moreover, the techniques that myself, Dennis Muren and Ken Ralston developed on Galactica, really aided and abetted George in the long run, because we all ended up back at Lucasfilm’s new facility north of San Francisco to work on The Empire Strikes Back. So George got the benefit of this extended experience we’d picked up while working on Galactica.

Robert: Your advancement of bluescreen and motion control technology for the original Star Wars trilogy and for the original Battlestar Galactica was nothing short of astounding at the time. What have been some of the biggest VFX hurdles and concomitant solutions over the past forty years?

Richard Edlund: Back in the photochemical, analog age, we were limited by physical events we could create and make look like something else. So we were constantly experimenting with new materials…and high speed…and motion control…and all these sorts of things to make the audience think that they were seeing what you wanted them to see. It was trick photography taken to the ultimate extreme.

Throughout filmmaking history, there have been searches for the various holy grails of visual effects. In the 1970s, one of them was creating a bluescreen matting process that would yield reliable mattes. We largely solved this problem on Star Wars, and then perfected the technique on The Empire Strikes Back.

Another holy grail of visual effects is water. Until quite recently, water in miniatures was a problem because water drops are always a certain size. You could float alcohol on the top of it to yield smaller drops, which would create the illusion of scale to some degree, but until the advent of CGI, used on breakthrough films like The Abyss and The Perfect Storm, we simply had too many physical limitations.

Then there’s hair. They tried to get it right on Jumanji, but Mighty Joe Young was probably the first successful recreation of CG hair in film. But getting it to the point where it was completely authentic was incredibly processing-intensive.

Most recently, we have a technique we use in CGI called sub-surface scattering, which gives a more realistic look to skin. One of the most exciting breakthroughs using this technology is Gollum from The Lord of the Rings.

Robert: Speaking of CGI humanoids such as Gollum and the Hulk, how close are we to recreating “virtual humans” like Humphrey Bogart or Marilyn Monroe on the big screen?

Richard Edlund: The problem with recreating individuals that everybody knows and loves—and who have passed on—is in precisely duplicating their personalities, subtle mannerisms, voice, etc. The essence of the person is still in their personality. I think that how this is ultimately going to be done—and it will be done—is to first find actors who can precisely duplicate the mannerisms of the person in question, and then use facial motion-capture techniques to transfer their performance to an accurate CG likeness of the person you’re trying to recreate. Ultimately, I think that using upcoming artificial intelligence techniques will make it possible to catalogue and control enough variables to create a reasonable CG likeness of people like Humphrey Bogart or Marilyn Monroe.

Robert: How far away are we from seeing this realized?

Richard Edlund: It’s really an A.I. question. I think we’re a few years away.

Robert: Years, or decades?

Richard Edlund: Not decades. Keep in mind that you can go out and buy five hundred gigabytes of memory storage for an SG workstation for about five hundred dollars. I remember when I used to pay fifteen thousand dollars for nine gigs of memory, and that was only about seven years ago.

The technology is advancing exponentially. About five years ago, Ray Kurzweil wrote a book called The Age of the Spiritual Machines. In the book, he talks about how by the year 2020 your laptop will have the same memory capability as a human being. And by 2060, your laptop will have the same memory capacity as all human beings on earth. With A.I. moving ahead by leaps and bounds, at a certain point, your PC will be pondering things for you, and then, the spiritual argument becomes: Will it be illegal to unplug your computer?

Robert: Which, ironically, brings us full circle to a theme explored in the new Galactica: the perils of A.I.. Do you believe this technology is coming sooner than we think?

Richard Edlund: All I’ll say is that there are guys at MIT—who you don’t hear anything about—who are Einsteins in the world of artificial intelligence development and technology.

Robert: Last question: Could you have predicted back in 1977 the point to which visual effects technology has advanced today?

Richard Edlund: I think if you’d laid back and smoked something [laughs], you probably could have come up with some postulations. But specifically? Probably not.

I’ve always been a Marshall McLuhan fan. He used to say that it’s fruitless to predict anything beyond five years.

Robert: Well, in that case, we’ll have to come back and talk to you in another five years!

Richard, on behalf of FLIGHT DECK, thank you for taking us back in time to discuss the visual effects for the original Battlestar Galactica. And thank you for giving our readers a glimpse into the greater world of visual effects technology.

Richard Edlund: You’re quite welcome.

All content and images from Battlestar Galactica copyright © Universal Television
Behind the scenes images courtesy of Richard Edlund