Not Everything Was Done With Computers
"When we are pre-planing, we are looking at expense, but we are also looking for a balanced crew. It doesn't service us very well to give all the work to the computer graphics department. We don't have the manpower to handle it, and we have very talented people over in the model shop." He says that Episodes I and II have more miniature models in them than there were in the original Star Wars features.

Physical models (real, not virtual) "were used in the Queen's city on the planet Naboo in Episode I. On this film, there was some model work used in the city of Coruscant, in the droid factory, and in the sections of the big arena battle supervised by John Knoll. There was an enormous arena built that might have been 14 feet high and possibly 65 feet wide. It was huge. We even joked, 'When is a miniature not a miniature?' That miniature was representing an arena that held 100,000 creatures. Then, we put CGI characters in those stands."

Another miniature set was created at the last moment for "part of the battle that we call the Dune Sea, a sand dune sea. That was a miniature set shot on one of the huge stages here at ILM. That section was added so late in the film that the decision was made to create that as a real miniature because there wasn't time to create a digital version of it."

ILM does a lot of work where they combine several techniques in a single shot. They may have a matte painting, miniatures in the background and can add digital actors along with real actors shot against blue screen. The era of glass mattes is ancient history as the computer can do the same work.

"Some people in the digital matte department have been with us for 15 or 20 years. Paul Huston has been with us 25 years. He made the transition from traditional matte painter to digital matte painter many years ago. They still use some of the old techniques. For example, they still shoot miniatures as elements that are going to go into the matte painting and then blend them in. Another thing Paul and some of the other artists do now is what we call 3D matte paintings. They are matte paintings that allow you to do compound camera moves in them. There is some 3D geometry in them that allows you to have parallax on a building. Now you can pan around a building a little bit or dolly into a shot better. It is a modern version of what Disney created with his multi-plane camera stand."

Is C3PO a digital image or a hard surface model here? With ILM's mastery in both CGI, puppet and model making, it's hard to tell. © Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All rights reserved. Digital work by Industrial Light & Magic.

Mechanical Puppets Or Animatronics
In Episodes I and II, there are people wearing masks that have radio controlled puppet operators running them. In the new film, there is "a bad guy who wears a rubber head that has radio controlled eyes and mouth articulation while the actor walks around and can move his arms." These devices were not operated by ILM crews. Nick Dugman operated this type of system in Episode I and Simon Williams from England, controlled them in this film. They were shot in Sydney.

R2D2 and C3PO are what ILM calls hard surface models. The models have radio controlled features as well as actors inside the suits. In Episode II, there were a couple of scenes where it was either impossible for R2D2 to be operated by radio control and/or for Kenny Baker to move safely inside the model. Coleman says, "There are 2 scenes I can think of right off right away that were impossible or too dangerous to do. One was a scene of R2 walking up stairs. The prop could never do that. The other one is R2 flying. It made sense to do a digital version of him as he was going to be flying through a digital environment. It is totally photo-realistic. You'd never know it was a digital model. We even fooled George. He thought we photographed it!"

Similarly, there are some scenes where C3PO had to do dangerous stunts. "We had two concerns. One was hurting Anthony Daniels, the man inside, and the other was hurting his suit. He might end up breaking his skull if he fell over. That is always a concern as Anthony can hardly see out of that head. There are always people around to catch him if he ever tripped. There are a couple of scenes where C3PO is in some pretty elaborate stunt situations that were really dangerous, so it made sense to create a digital version."

ILM refers to both of those characters as hard surface models as "they don't have any flexible clothing. C3PO has some soft material between the joints, but that's pretty limited. In both cases, we have beautiful reference frames as you can photograph the suit from every angle under ideal lighting. We give the information to what we call our 'view painters,' the people who create the texture maps." Coleman asserts that one can't tell the difference between the computer generated image and the footage of the model: "You just cannot tell."