This is a great set of shots. Having watched a ton of "Making of Star Wars" specials on PBS as a kid, I really thought I wasn't going to see anything new here. There were a couple of surprises:
I'm a little embarrassed to admit that until seeing the first photo just a few minutes ago, it never really occurred to me that they would have had to film the opening crawl that way.
Having seen the sequence where Luke falls from the catwalk a million times, it's quite jarring to see all those mattresses below him. Even though intuitively you're aware that they did not film that scene hanging above a thousand foot drop, the visual effects really do allow you to suspend disbelief.
"I'm a little embarrassed to admit that until seeing the first photo just a few minutes ago, it never really occurred to me that they would have had to film the opening crawl that way."
I recently discovered (from browsing around the bonus material on the DVD on a lazy Sunday, naturally) that the multi-layer CG starfield effects created by ILM for Star Trek III were put on film by pointing a camera at a computer monitor and recording the output.
Lucas is so scourged for Jar-Jar and those late 1990s remakes that I often lose sight of how innovative and influential he's been on special effects, movies, and our lives in general.
Lucasfilm and its subsidiaries (Pixar, ILM, THX) should be considered among the great start-ups of our time.
I remember watching Empire Strikes Back in a theater and being very disappointed -- I thought they should have flashed To Be Continued at the end -- I had to wait 3 years for the next episode.
I was really fine with the painted figures, cardboard sets and resin armors. I wonder why the saga of Star Wars could not continue and if it wouldn't maybe be cheaper to do the next without CGI (classic style). Maybe time for Indian Bollywood studios to show us what they can do to make us dream! ;-)
So why can't we get more films shot with awesome matte backgrounds like that anymore? Is it really that much cheaper to do a background via CGI than to have it painted?
Often the "CGI" background is a combination of "true" CGI, manipulated photos/footage, and digital "hand" painting (at least for the deep backgrounds). It's much more flexible than physical painting. For one thing, there's undo, and versioning, not having to wait for paint to dry, etc etc.
For example, if you want a castle in the mountains in the background, the mountains might be a composite of a photo, and some extra CG. A castle is then rendered "in the rough" ontop of the mountain, and then details hand painted in. And then the whole thing gets another CG/painting treatment to make sure everything fits in and to create more atmosphere. Every matte painting is different.
If you're interested, you can poke around cgsociety's (sorry it's blocked at work) forums in the digital matte painting section. It's really just a huge grab bag of techniques.
I read an article about the X-Files once where the author talked about how the show flipped the usual formula for television casting on its head. In most television shows, the female lead is hired primarily for her looks while the male lead is supposed to be the one the audience can identify with. In the X-Files, Duchovny was the tall, slim model-ish one while Gillian Anderson was short and basically normal looking. It seems like X-Files fans have a better gender balance than most sci-fi shows. I wonder if having a more normal female lead helped in that regard?
Something similar seems to have happened in Star Wars. It's easy to forget since they've been around for so long, but Harrison Ford and Billy Dee Williams were ridiculously good looking guys. Mark Hamill was a teen idol from his time on shows like Eight is Enough and The Texas Wheelers (I had to look that name up.) By looks alone, Carrie Fisher might be the least likely of the four to get a magazine cover. (Don't tell my twelve-year-old self, though.)
Don't get me wrong--Carrie Fisher is pretty. She could have easily been the homecoming queen at my high school. As long as she wasn't too busy doing coke with Tony Bennett or whatever children of famous actors did in the 70's. I'm just saying that she wasn't Daryl Hannah. (For those of you born after 1985, Daryl Hannah was the Megan Fox of the late 70's/early 80's.)
Though, of course, Anderson's looks certainly changed over the course of the show's run. By season 5-ish, she was much sexier, and wasn't afraid to use that.
That said, I agree with your general assessment of the gender balance in the X-Files.
Also, I agree with the other comment regarding how good Fisher looks in a few of those photos.
I'm a little embarrassed to admit that until seeing the first photo just a few minutes ago, it never really occurred to me that they would have had to film the opening crawl that way.
Having seen the sequence where Luke falls from the catwalk a million times, it's quite jarring to see all those mattresses below him. Even though intuitively you're aware that they did not film that scene hanging above a thousand foot drop, the visual effects really do allow you to suspend disbelief.