A Thousand Stars: Episode IV, Part 17
Jan. 2nd, 2025 09:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
matrilHappy New Year! We're over halfway through this series. How many more years do you suppose it will take to finish?
So how do you portray a place populated by utterly alien beings, a seedy location where a callow human boy will be fully out of his depth? Well, first you film a lot of actors in funny rubber masks, then look at the footage and get very disappointed by the underwhelming effect. So you arrange for a second shoot, get even more weird masks and prosthetics and and costumes and create lots more footage, then cleverly edit it all together so that the scene looks seamless.
From the first shot of an alien, accompanied by the other-worldly jazz courtesy of John Williams's genius, we know this is a long way from the quiet moisture farm where Luke was raised. Myriads of strange creatures, intercut with stunned reaction shots of Luke. It's all dimly-lit and grimy as well, and the bartender is surly and unpleasant. We also get a bit of bizarre humor with the notion that amid this wide panoply of races, droids are absolutely not wanted.
Can you tell which bits came from principle photography and which came later? I can't. That's part of the magic of filmmaking.
Next time, a non-hero slouches into the story...
So how do you portray a place populated by utterly alien beings, a seedy location where a callow human boy will be fully out of his depth? Well, first you film a lot of actors in funny rubber masks, then look at the footage and get very disappointed by the underwhelming effect. So you arrange for a second shoot, get even more weird masks and prosthetics and and costumes and create lots more footage, then cleverly edit it all together so that the scene looks seamless.
From the first shot of an alien, accompanied by the other-worldly jazz courtesy of John Williams's genius, we know this is a long way from the quiet moisture farm where Luke was raised. Myriads of strange creatures, intercut with stunned reaction shots of Luke. It's all dimly-lit and grimy as well, and the bartender is surly and unpleasant. We also get a bit of bizarre humor with the notion that amid this wide panoply of races, droids are absolutely not wanted.
Can you tell which bits came from principle photography and which came later? I can't. That's part of the magic of filmmaking.
Next time, a non-hero slouches into the story...
no subject
Date: 2025-01-03 12:55 am (UTC)I'd also been thinking a bit about the cantina sequence and how it was "sweetened" with the reshoots. I can also remember a few back-in-the-day comments I've seen over the years talking about how much of an impact it made on people; maybe that had something to do with packing so many aliens into one scene, although the Jawas and Sandpeople had already appeared and a few aliens show up elsewhere in Mos Eisley. Sometimes I do wonder about all of the aliens having been assigned detailed biologies and biographies in spinoff books by the 1990s...