George Lucas's personal toy chest, Industrial Light & Magic Inc., is abuzz over early testing for the new Star Wars trilogy. Lucas, in an industry first, will lens all three films simultaneously. The three films are expected to boast dazzling new special-effects technologies, the result of Lucas's pioneering work in digital imaging. "I have available to me now a lot of things that I never had, so my imagination can go a little wilder than in the past," says the filmmaker. ILM President Jim Morris estimates that the original trilogy relied on computers for 1 percent of its effects, while the new films' effects will be 99 percent digital.
Creatures created for the first trilogy were made using foam costumes and go-motion models. The new beasties will be spawned inside 50 newly installed Industrial Light & Magic character-animation workstations. "There were a lot of not-very-mobile creatures in the first Star Wars series that, we hope, we'll be able to move around a lot better. Jabba the Hut couldn't go anywhere before. Now he'll be going places," Lucas notes.
Since the prequel scripts have yet to be written, the new trilogy's ETA is fuzzy, though Lucas is hoping to have the first installment out in the latter half of the decade. Until then, restless space travelers can sate themselves with the remastered laserdisc set from FoxVideo/Image Entertainment (US$249.95) and possibly a theatrical re-release of the original Star Wars, with new special-effects footage.
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