Details on George Lucas’ “Consultant” job are a basically a breathing encyclopedia? Although the “Godfather” of Star Wars will be working on Episode VII, we will be assisting in a very limited capacity. Access Hollywood caught up with Lucas at the Governor’s Awards on Saturday and asked what his duties on Episode VII were. His response..
“[If the filmmakers ask],’Who’s this guy?’ I can tell them,” he told Access at the event in Los Angeles. “I mean, they have a hundred encyclopedias and things, but I actually know a lot. I can say, ‘This is this and this is that.'”
“Basically I’m not — I don’t really have much to do,” he said.
Although vague it does support the rumors that Episode VII will take place past the lives of the Humanoid characters at least.
The second bit of news is that Rick Baker has expressed interest in returning to work in the Star Wars universe. For the casual Star Wars fan, Rick Baker worked on the Star Wars : A New Hope. More specifically the infamous Mos Eisley Cantina (Chalmun’s Cantina to be specific).
“So much of the stuff I did in the first Star Wars was very quickly done. Nobody knew that Star Wars was going to be Star Wars. I think the problem that people have with the digital stuff is the problem I have: Just because you can do anything doesn’t mean that you should. Instead of having a spaceship battle with three spaceships, they have 3,000 spaceships. Everything is so big and there’s so much going on, you lose reality. It takes you out of it.”
And man does he have a point. I believe that buildings, landscapes and many other large-scale special effects look great in a digital form, but the life forms do not. Although digital animation has made a substantial amount of progress since the original Star Wars movie, when put by a real actor most often the digital character looks a bit out-of-place. The Mos Eisley Cantina scene was done on a low-budget, actually the entire movie had a budget of only 11 million dollars, a little over 10% of Episode III’s budget. But it is one of the most memorable scenes in A New Hope. Rick Baker has since gone on to work on many more blockbusters, received seven Academy Awards for his work, and has received a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Thank you for reading and while your here, kick back and take a look at some of my other articles and photographs.
Bert
To read more about Rick Baker click here
To read more about George Lucas’ “Consultant” job click here
A group in Nashville, Tenn have undertaken the grueling task of recreating the ship that made the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs. Yes, the Millennium Falcon!! Headed up by Chris Lee they have plans to build a 1:1 scale Millennium Falcon that will be 114 feet in length. Their site is already loaded with pics of turrets, panels among other things. I can’t wait to see this pop up on Google Earth. Go over to their site to learn more about their project. The Full Scale Millennium Falcon Project
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