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How a handful of desperate innovators took special effects to new heights in two 1977 movies--Star Wars and Close Encounters

By Christopher Mims | Aug 30, 2007 12:00 AM

You probably recognize this shot... ...because it's the opening shot of the most famous science fiction film ever created. That shot almost never happened. Indeed, it was so difficult to get that the man who realized it--Richard Edlund, who did visual effects for Star Wars--procrastinated shooting it until the very end of production, when there wasn't enough money left to create this scene using a gigantic, building-wide model of the star destroyer, as he'd hoped. Instead, he took the biggest model star destroyer he had, which was three feet long, stuck a 24mm lens on the front of his camera, and got it to within 1/32nd of an inch of the bottom of the model, almost scraping off the bottom as his motion-control rig played out the scene.
It may be hard to believe now, but immediately before 1977, the watershed year that witnessed the release of both Lucas's Star Wars and Steven Spielberg's UFO epic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, big-budget effects-laden movies were incredibly rare.
Via an exhaustive history of special effects at Invention and Technology.

More News Blog: Next: Busted: PR Flacks who ran afoul of the science blogosphere, including a brand new flack for Stuart Pivar who showed up right here on this blog Previous: WIRED scoops Scientific American on SciAm's own birthday -- happy 162nd to us!

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