Special Effects questions

I know how most of the effects in the OT were done, but to this day there are still some effects that amaze me, and some effects that I've always wondered how they did it.

Does anyone know how they did the stars streaking when the ships jumped into hyperspace?

Coolest.Effect.Ever.

 

That's a good question... they could have moved a paper by the camera really fast and made it blurry and look like it's streaking.

 

If I remember correctly, it had something to do with over-exposing a star field image, while zooming in on it or something. Dang, I wish I could remember where I read this information...

 

Here's a webpage I found on the Hyperspace effect. I've always wondered how they did that as well. This site has some very interesting info.

http://www.geocities.com/special_effect.geo/hyperspace.html

 

Yeah, his description on the link page of the site is pretty close. Not sure about the macro lens reference though, or if it was the tilting follow focus lens (used for the crawl and the star destroyer open), though.

BTW, Dennis Muren shot the streak photography jump to hyperspace as a camera test, but it wound up being judged as the best of a couple different later tries and wound up in the final film.

I think it was done on one of the other camera systems, not the Dykstraflex (early on, Muren was supposed to be shooting starfields and background elements, but progressed to doing hero spaceships later in production ... you can get more info about this from his interviews in FANTASCENE #4 and the CFQ SW double issue from a quarter-century back and from the piece I did for Cinefex #65 ... only the CFQ is still available from the publisher, but the others turn up on ebay all the time.)

The effect wasn't exactly original-looking, as DARK STAR had some stuff that looked a lot like it a few years before SW (plus a deliberately funny-looking side-view of a hyperspace jump.) Jon Wash did some display graphic animation for both pictures.

I always like the hyperspace tunnel effect that is seen briefly when the ship is already going FTL, which is glimpsed for a couple seconds later on in the film, and again for about a second in JEDI. That was shot by Richard Edlund, utilizing a mylar tube and an array of lights and filters, and seemed infinitely more cool to me than the jump to lightspeed.

I've always been surprised they didn't do a battle IN hyperspace, since they always want to come up with something new-looking, but then again, there haven't been much in the way of space scenes in the new films. Only B5 seems to have done that kind of thing, though.

BTW, John Knoll told me a streak-looking lightspeed jump was planned for Ep1 but dropped before he could execute it, which disappointed him at the time.