Concept art from Episode III hints at the wonder within the trilogy. All images © & ™ Lucasfilm Ltd. All rights reserved. Digital work by ILM. Artwork by Ryan Church.

George Lucas reiterated the belief recently that he never would’ve attempted the Star Wars prequels without the ascendance of digital technology. In fact, the determining factor was the extraordinary CG dinosaurs in both Jurassic Park (1993) and Dragonheart (1996). Credit Lucas and his dedicated staff at Industrial Light & Magic, therefore, with reinvigorating the industry with their digital revolution. With today’s eventful release of Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith (through Twentieth Century Fox), that revolution has set a new benchmark, witness the stunning CGI on display, comprising 2,151 vfx shots (of which 1,269 are animated). That compares with 2,000 vfx shots in Attack of the Clones and 1,980 vfx shots in The Phantom Menace. In terms of overall animation, Revenge of the Sith contains 90 minutes vs. 70 minutes in Attack of the Clones and 60 minutes in The Phantom Menace. With nearly 800 CGI characters and 50 3D environments, that’s more than most animated features!

The results of Revenge of the Sith are magnificent eye candy that will be studied for years to come, such as the massive opening battle high above Coruscant, the long-awaited duel between Obi-Wan and Anakin on the volcano planet Mustafar, the Vietnam-inspired battle on the lush Wookie planet Kashyyyk, the exciting chase and hand-to-hand fight between Obi-Wan and the Droid Leader General Grievous on the sinkhole planet Utapau, the improved CG work on Yoda and the stunning environmental shots of all the other exotic planets, including Felucia and the more familiar Alderaan, Naboo and Tatooine.

In looking back at all of the technical achievements of Episodes I-III, visual effects supervisor John Knoll (who has written a book on the digital environments, to be published by Abrams in the fall) and animation director Rob Coleman suggest that technology has finally caught up with Lucas’ vast imagination on Revenge of the Sith.

“One of the things I’ve liked is that George writes what he wants and it’s pretty much up to us to figure out how to do it,” Knoll says. “What’s typical around here is that technology is developed for one show and you need more of it for the next one. But the general tendency is to build minimal changes for the next project. Once in a while, something comes through that’s so much bigger that you can’t suffer through a scale up of the previous technology. An example of this from Episode I is where there were scenes with hundreds of thousands of characters. Prior to that the largest crowd scene we handled was in Mars Attacks!, where we had 18 aliens and that was the bare limit of what you could load up in Softimage and be able to manage. Adding more characters just wasn’t going to work.

“We rethought the problem [utilizing motion capture and more advanced simulation] and came up with a new way, which is what the Star Wars pictures do: they break the system and force a new way of thinking and we end of being better for it in the end. Look at Jar Jar from Episode I. He's computer-generated and interacts with real people. And now it’s kind of taken for granted. Certainly Gollum is a good example of the next-generation of that. Other filmmakers realized they could do it too.”

Episode I was a breakthrough in CG characters and other digital creations, which the follow-ups only improved upon.

Matchmoving in three-dimensional space was another breakthrough in Episodes I and II. “On Episode I, we had a pan/tilt matchmove system that was semi automated. That got us through most of the shots. Episode II was kind of the opposite: George had a super technocrane on set, so almost all the cameras were moving, translating through space, so we needed a way of solving these six-degree of freedom problems and sometimes seven-degree of freedom problems, where we’d be moving all axes and the camera would be zooming all the time. We implemented a full 3D motion tracking system, which was the first of its kind. It enabled a lot of things and now all matchmoves are done that way. It gets better and faster. You could take real high quality images without worrying about it.”