American Cinematographer - February 2008 - (Page 60) Forward Thinker Top: Edlund looks over the model for the Freelings’ home while working on Poltergeist. After destroying the model for the film’s climax, Edlund presented a large case of shards to producer Frank Marshall, who keeps it in his office to this day. Middle: Edlund refines a shot for Raiders of the Lost Ark. Bottom: Edlund adjusts a spacecraft’s position while filming a sequence for TV’s Battlestar Galactica. horn on our big P.A. system and said, ‘All right, you assholes, you’ve spent $1 million and we don’t have a single frame to show for it.’ [20th Century] Fox was very nervous and sent Lin Dunn to check us out, and he saw we were on the right track.” Dunn was encouraged by the team’s resurrection of VistaVision equipment to film effects, a step that enabled them to avoid deadly grain in composites, and by Edlund’s championing of old-fashioned bluescreen for the chosen matting process. Repeatability and accuracy were key to the team’s success. In fact, Dykstra named the fledgling outfit Industrial Light & Magic because of its development of com60 February 2008 puterized motion control; however, the device that enabled ILM to shoot multiple identical passes with perfectly reproduced camera moves wasn’t exactly a computer. “It was more of a programmable, repeatable, solid-state circuitry system that had a memory,” explains Edlund. “Al Miller came up with the electronics, and Dick Alexander, Bill Shourt, Don Trumbull and I machined countless mechanical doodads from my drawings. There was a lot of pretty fancy development going on. We had built a visual violin, and then we had to learn how to play it.” Edlund won his first Academy Award for his work on Star Wars. After finishing the picture, Dykstra, Edlund, future ASC member Dennis Muren and most of the members of their crew rented ILM’s equipment for Universal and formed a temporary company to create another round of groundbreaking visual effects for the TV series Battlestar Galactica. Then, when Gary Kurtz asked Edlund to work on The Empire Strikes Back, “I sold my house and moved up north, to Marin,” says Edlund. “It was an opportunity I just had to take, and I’m very happy I did. I was at ILM for the next four and a half years.” By 1979, when The Empire Strikes Back was in production (AC June ’80), real computers were driving ILM’s motion-control equipment, and this led to even more dynamic sequences — and, eventually, another Oscar for Edlund. Going into the project, which was set in part on an ice planet, he knew matte lines would be a problem. “We were no longer just holding out black starfields — we had to do white-on-white for the snow,” he notes. The solution was the Quad printer. “I came up with the idea of using telecentric optics, and David Grafton designed the entire, distortion-free, telecentric optical path from lamphouse to aerial-image relay lens to an anamorphic taking
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