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.
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.