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tiefighters · 5 years

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20 Facts About the Making of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace

Twenty years ago, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace graced movie theaters with an excitement level that’s still talked about today. But it wasn’t an easy path to get there. From developing film techniques & technology that seem common now, to a massive storm wiping out most of the Mos Espa set in Tunisia, there’s more to the story of making of Episode I than you probably know.

The Making of Episode I: The Phantom Menace, written by Laurent Bouzereau and Jody Duncan, was also released in 1999 and features candid tales of the production direct from writer and director George Lucas, the cast, and the crew of one of the most anticipated films in history. In addition, Lucasfilm produced a number of behind-the-scenes features that explored the making of the movie.

Check below for 20 behind-the-scenes facts and anecdotes straight from the people who were there.

1. George Lucas wrote the Episode I script by hand with just pencil and notebook paper. In fact, he writes all of his scripts this way.

2. One of the biggest influences on the making of The Phantom Menace was The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Not only did a significant number of the television series’ crew and production team later work on The Phantom Menace, some of the techniques they perfected while filming the series were then used on Episode I. Rick McCallum, producer of the prequel trilogy, called the show a “testing bed to learn a new way of making films.”

3. Jar Jar Binks was originally designed with green skin. The design team later realized that most aquatic creatures on our own planet don’t sport green hues, so they changed his skin tone to orange instead.

4. Yaddle is actually an early “young Yoda” design. Concept artist Iain McCaig began designing the Jedi Master’s younger look as an eight-year-old version of the character. “That concept eventually became another Jedi in the film, Yaddle,” he revealed.

5. The moving mechanism inside Threepio’s head is a missile gyroscope. Chief Model Maker Lorne Peterson had found it and let the effects team borrow it, he said in the making-of featurette “Discoveries from Inside: Models & Miniatures.”

6. The design of the heavy troop transport in The Phantom Menace, the MTT, was inspired by elephants. In the featurette “Conversations: Doug Chiang Looks Back,” the concept artist talked about using familiar shapes to help the audience understand a design on a basic level. “If you look at the front of the MTT, the tiny little slits represent the elephant’s eyes and his forehead,” said Chiang. “And the trunk, I turned into the door, and the tusks actually become the two guns on the sides. “

7. Costume colors are specific to the planets of the galaxy far, far away. Iain McCaig and costume designer Trisha Biggar worked together to create the palettes: gray, brown, and black for Coruscant, green and gold for Naboo, and sun-bleached sandy colors for Tatooine.

8. Ewan McGregor had dialogue coaching to prepare for his role. He worked hard to capture the calming tones and inflections of Sir Alec Guinness to best play the character, which he called “quite tricky.”

9. Samuel L. Jackson got the role of Mace Windu in part through an appearance on the British talk show TFI Friday to promote a different movie. The casting director for The Phantom Menace, Robin Gurland, heard that Jackson made his wish to be in the new Star Wars known while chatting on the talk show, and the rest is history.

10. Ahmed Best was discovered through his performance in the theater show Stomp. Gurland happened to catch the show and spotted Best in the cast. His energy and performance made her realize, “He’s Jar Jar!”

11. Greg Proops and Scott Capurro recorded their podracing commentary in prosthetics and makeup. The footage would later be used as reference for their digital characters, Fode and Beed.

12. Plo Koon was named after the son of creature effects supervisor Nick Dudman. “I decided to call one of the Jedi Plonkoon, because we called my son that during his first year of life,” he said. “I wrote down Plonkoon, George crossed out the n and Plo Koon was born!”

13. The three Wookiees in the Galactic Senate all wore the same Chewbacca costume from the Lucasfilm archive. The actor in the old suit was filmed three different times with slight adjustments made to the hair. “When the shots were put together, we ended up with three different Wookiees out of one suit,” said Dudman.

14. The very first scene of The Phantom Menace that was filmed featured Darth Sidious and Darth Maul. Their balcony chat on Coruscant marked the beginning of production in 1997.

15. After a monstrous storm destroyed almost everything on the Mos Espa set, the Tunisian army helped rebuild it. Thanks to the fact that one set was luckily left in one piece — the landing ramp of the Naboo Royal Starship — plus the efforts of the entire crew and local helpers, production continued without delay.

16. The Jedi and Sith went through three hundred aluminum lightsaber blades while filming The Phantom Menace. Stunt coordinator Nick Gillard helped build the new lightsabers for the physically and mentally intensive duels.

17. Watto only has one full tusk so the audience can see his mouth move accurately when he speaks. The Toydarian was originally designed with two large tusks on either side of his trunk-like nose, but they would have prevented his lips from fully shaping words with an m or a b. One tusk was broken off and his lopsided smile was born.

18. Watto was also the first CG character that the effects team went to work on. Through his design and motions, the team quickly learned how to achieve what they wanted on featured digital characters. Even just the cord on his tool belt had to have its own computer program written to simulate its movement properly. (The same program would later be used for Jar Jar’s flapping ears.)

19. Some of the audience members at the Boonta Eve Classic podrace crowd are colorful cotton swabs. Sometimes practical effects work best to achieve just the right three-dimensional look for faraway shots, and a model maker had the creative idea to use the swabs in the arena models.

20. Some of the cheers and jeers emanating from the audience at the podrace are from a San Francisco 49ers game. Sound designer Ben Burtt recorded crowd reactions at the football game himself.

#star wars #the phantom menace #star wars: the phantom menace #facts

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imjustthemechanic · 6 years

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The Stone Knight

Part 1/? - Two Statues Part 2/? - A Curious Interview Part 3/? - John Doe Part 4/? - Escape Attempt Part 5/? - Making the News Part 6/? - Fallout Part 7/? - More Impossible Part 8/? - The Shield Thieves Part 9/? - Reality Sinks In Part 10/? - Preparing a Quest Part 11/? - The Marvelous History of Sir Stephen Part 12/? - Uninvited Guests Part 13/? - So That’s What It Does Part 14/? - The What and the Where Part 15/? - Gearing Up Part 16/? - Just Passing Through Part 17/? - Dinner with Druids Part 18/? - Kracness Henge Part 19/? - A Task Interrupted Part 20/? - The Red Death Part 21/? - Aphelion Part 22/? - The Stone Giants Part 23/? - Nat the Giant Killer Part 24/? - An Interrogation Part 25/? - Guilt Part 26/? - Rushman’s Brilliant Idea Part 27/? - Hunter in Hiding Part 28/? - Ridiculous Part 29/? - The Guy from Barton Part 30/? - Sherwood Forest Part 31/? - Buckeye’s Fall Part 32/? - Robin Hood Part 33/? - Fantasies and Consequences Part 34/? - Swords of Damocles Part 35/? - The Road to London Part 36/? - View from the Top Part 37/? - Storming the Castle Part 38/? - Beneath the Chapel Floor

At last - the Grail!

There were a lot of doors and windows in the White Tower – it would have been impractical to try to close off each and every one. The chapel basement, however, only had two: the single entrance doorway and the one tiny window. So while Natasha took her pictures, the others put up horseshoes and wreathed both apertures with ivy. Nat’s phone buzzed as Allen kept them updated, and she pulled it out to look at his last few texts.

“He says somebody’s called the cops,” she said. “We’d better get going.”

Nat put her camera away, and chose the stone tile right at the focus of the apse – that would be directly beneath the altar above. Everybody else waited while she got out a crowbar and worked the end of it under a chipped corner. She didn’t know why, and she suspected that none of the others did either, but it seemed important somehow that she was the one who did the first damage. Maybe it was just because she was supposedly the archaeologist. For a moment she still couldn’t bring herself to do it, but then she gritted her teeth, summoned up her courage, and pried.

It didn’t move at first. Even after a thousand years, the mortar holding the tiles in place was still pretty solid, and after a couple of tries Nat gave up on getting the piece out whole and just hit it with the curved end of the crowbar. The tile broke, and she was able to pull the pieces up one by one, with the mortar still clinging to them.

“Right,” she said. “No going back now.”

They got to work, taking up the tiles one by one and piling them on top of a tarpaulin so the mess could be easily cleaned up. Under the stone tile was an older terracotta layer, and beneath that they started finding bluish basalt.

There was a brief pause in the work when Allen texted again to warm them that the cops were searching for intruders, and appeared to have found one of Robin’s arrows. Shovels and picks had to be set down while everybody crouched in silence out of view of the window, watching shadows pass across the slash of light it shed on the floor. After thirty minutes during which Nat was sure somebody was going to come bursting into the room any moment, her phone buzzed again. The cops were re-grouping outside the Waterloo Block. Perhaps they’d decided the whole thing was a prank. With the danger of discovery past, they got back to work again.

“Question,” said Sam, stacking terracotta tiles – some of these were decorated with engraved designs, and Nat didn’t want any more broken. “What do we think this thing looks like? I’m pretty sure we’re all picturing something like the sparkly cup from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but the nuns told Sir Steve it wasn’t a cup, and the Red Death said it was a drop of the blood of Odin or something.”

Nat looked at Sir Stephen, whom she figured would be the most likely to know, but he didn’t have an answer for them. “I was given no description of it,” he said. “The prioress suggested that I would know it when I saw it, for it could be nothing but what it is.”

“I’ve been thinking about that, too,” said Sharon, chipping at the edge of the layer of mortar as if at ice on the driveway. “I’m pretty sure it’s a gem. Probably not cut, because they didn’t back then, and it’ll have bits knocked off where they set them into the fragments. According to Wikipedia the Grail is described sometimes as a stone, and a big ruby or something could be poetically described as a drop of crystallized blood, or Odin’s gouged-out eye.”

“I was picturing a cup of red glitter, myself,” said Nat, “but yeah, that sounds about right.” She honestly hadn’t stopped to wonder what the Grail looked like – like Sir Stephen, she’d assumed they’d know it when they found it.

They were now closing in. As they cleared away more and more of what lay on top of it, it began to look as if the deepest layer of floor was made of a single huge slab of dolerite. Exactly what this was and what it was doing here did not become clear until they found the apse end of it, which was not nice and straight like a block of building stone ought to be, but sharply angled, like a shard of glass. The image of a body impaled on such a stone flashed before Nat’s eyes, and she had a revelation.

“It’s one of the missing stones from Kracness Henge!” she exclaimed.

“I think you’re right,” said Sam thoughtfully. “It’s the right shape and size… why would they use that, though?”

“Probably because they knew it was somehow sacred, even if they weren’t sure how,” said Nat. “Peoples in Britain have been re-using each other’s archaeology for a very long time. William the Conqueror probably figured it was already protecting the Grail somehow, and he didn’t want to take any chances.”

“I wonder how much it weighs,” said Sam.

He had a point there – another reason for using this stone would simply be because it was very heavy and therefore very difficult for any would-be thief to move. “Let’s find the rest of the edges,” she said. “Then we can estimate.”

The sky outside was getting worryingly pink as they worked their way down the slab, and at the end nearest the door they found something else – a piece of dense, dark sandstone with some text carved into it. Luckily the mortar had not adhered to this particularly well, and they were able to pry most of it away in one big chunk, leaving the inscription bare for Nat to read. She brushed mortar grit out of the O’s and smiled as she realized the writing on it was in Norman French. Obviously it was, she thought, because this was a part of the story that Natasha herself had made up, not somebody who thought people in the eleventh century had talked like Hamlet.

“It says, William, son of Robert, caused this stone to be set in place in the year of our Lord 1079,” she read, running a finger across the words. “Only by the blood of a living Saint can the chamber below be opened, because only a living Saint do I trust with what lies beneath.”

“Don’t you have to be dead to be a saint?” asked Sharon.

“Usually,” said Nat. She stood up and brushed her hands off on her trousers. “Sir Stephen? Come here.”

Sir Stephen looked surprised. “I am no saint!” he protested.

“Actually, you were informally considered one for a very long time,” said Nat. “There was a guy just last year who thought he’d found a chapel dedicated to you on the Isle of Man, but I wrote a paper in which I argued that the star in the altar painting actually represented Saint Dominic, because your star always appeared on a shield.” She gestured to the stone. “Just humour me… let’s see if we can get our miracle.”

With a dubious expression on his face, Sir Stephen pulled out one of the knives he carried and, without so much as a flinch, cut his arm with the blade. Blood smeared on the bright metal. Nat expected him to hold out his arm and let the blood drip on the stone, the way characters did in movies, but instead Sir Stephen got down on one knee and thrust the knife into the basalt.

It should have stopped with the tip blunted, because the slab was stone and the knife mere steel. Instead, it went in right to the hilt. The phrase like a knife through butter, over-used as it was, was the only thing that came to mind.

The slab didn’t behave like butter, though. Instead of letting Sir Stephen cut it, it began to glow around where the knife had entered, and then to curl and blacken, like burning paper. Sir Stephen dropped his knife into the growing hole and scurried backwards. The others followed his lead, crowding back into the apse as the entire stone slowly burned away. A number of the tiles around it also crumbled and fell in until nearly the entire floor was gone, and the chapel basement filled with the dull red glow of what had been revealed beneath it.

It was safe to say that this was not what anybody had expected.

It was not Sam’s jewelled chalice, nor Nat’s cup of red glitter, nor even Sharon’s uncut ruby. Worse, it wasn’t something they were going to be able to carry out in a sports bag, or put in an old Soviet rocket to shoot into space. It was huge.

The cavity they’d revealed was about twelve feet long and eight feet deep, and as wide as the entire room. Filling almost this entire space were two giant slabs of what looked like haematite, with its metallic sheen and slightly bubbly surface texture. These were arranged one on top of each other like a layer cake, and the upper surface was carved with snaking lines of symbols that resembled Futhark runes or Anglo-Saxon, but far more complicated, as if they were also a form of hieroglyphics. Natasha couldn’t read it, and suspected there was nobody alive on earth who could.

Rather than sitting directly atop the other as gravity might be expected to dictate, the upper slab was floating about three inches above its partner, and in between them was… Nat didn’t know what it was, and could barely find words to describe it. A glistening fluid that somehow glowed red, like coals in a furnace or bricks in a kiln, despite its inky black surface. It would seep a little ways out of the gap and then recoil back into it, as if it were trying to escape confinement but could not do so. She could definitely understand how this had been interpreted as sang real – the blood of a god.

And now they had a problem, because they weren’t going to be able to move this thing, let alone use or dispose of it. William the Conqueror probably had the right idea all along by simply hiding it but now they’d exposed it for all the world to see, and had neither the time nor the means to cover it up again.

Eye contact was made and broken between several members of the group as everybody looked to see if anybody else had any ideas. Nobody did. With most of the floor gone and what was left probably not very stable, they couldn’t even leave the room themselves, much less take this enormous thing with them.

“You didn’t know what you were going to do when you found it,” Natasha said to Sir Stephen.

He shook his head, but did not take his eyes off the Grail, which he was staring at in mesmerized terror. “I hadn’t any idea it would be so big,” he said. Apparently Sir Stephen, too, had been picturing something he could put in his pocket.

Natasha’s phone vibrated again. She took it out to look at Allen’s text message: it’s almost dawn, kids. Are you finished yet? How could she reply?

Then they heard the shout from outside, audible through the basement’s little window. “In there! Under the chapel!”

Nat stiffened. They’d been discovered – they had to get out of here, but they couldn’t. They couldn’t leave the Grail uncovered, but even if they could, they were trapped on the little half-moon of remaining floor in the apse. The hole in the floor spanned from wall to wall, and the vaulted ceiling had no rafters that they could cling to or climb across. Maybe Sir Stephen could leap the gap if he had a running start, but there was no room left to run. The only obvious way across would be to jump onto the upper haematite block and walk across that, but nobody wanted to try. The Grail didn’t look like something it would be safe to touch.

Sir Stephen lifted his shield and pulled out his other knife. Sharon drew her revolver. Nat had the gun she’d taken from the security guard, and Sam gripped a crowbar in both hands, prepared to use it as a club if he had to. Robin Hood fitted an arrow to his bow and stood ready.

Footsteps echoed in the empty stone building, making it difficult to tell how many people were coming – especially when they were all but drowned out by the thumping of Natasha’s heart in her ears. It turned out to be three security guards and an elderly Yeoman who must have arrived early to work that morning, already dressed in his ridiculous uniform. He hung back in the doorway while the guards rushed in, and then stopped dead when they saw what was in front of them.

For the first few seconds it was clear that none of the three even knew where to look. Five armed people, a giant hole in the floor, and this bizarre and inexplicable object in the hole, bubbling ominously away. The guards – a middle-aged white man with a shaved head, a younger man with shaggy brown hair and freckles, and a muscular black woman with her hair in a tight bun – were so surprised and confused that they didn’t even draw their guns.

Finally, the older man’s brain seemed to catch up with the situation. He belatedly pulled out his weapon and asked the reasonable question.

“What the hell is this?” he demanded. He didn’t sound angry or intimidating, and probably wasn’t even trying to. He was frightened and confused, and desperately hoping one of these people in the apse would have some kind of explanation.

“The Holy Grail,” Natasha replied calmly, because she figured this man was equally likely to believe just about anything she might tell him – she might as well tell him the truth.

The three guards glanced nervously down into the hole again, while the Yeoman loitered just outside the doorway, checking his watch as if wondering if this would interfere with his work schedule for the day. Nat wondered if they thought the Grail were likely to reach up and grab them.

“And who are you?” the bald guard asked.

Nat looked over her shoulder at her companions, then turned back to the guards. She could only think of one answer that would be both reasonably true and acceptably short. “We’re archaeologists.”

#fanfic #natasha romanov #black widow #steve rogers #captain america #sam wilson #falcon #sharon carter #agent 13 #clint barton #hawkeye

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