- #HOW BEN BURRT CREATES THE LIGHTSABER SOUND EFFECT MOVIE#
- #HOW BEN BURRT CREATES THE LIGHTSABER SOUND EFFECT FULL#
#HOW BEN BURRT CREATES THE LIGHTSABER SOUND EFFECT MOVIE#
The first line in this movie is one of Darth Vader's henchmen in his shuttle asking to board the Death Star. Three of Darth Vader's scenes in this movie parallel scenes with Qui-Gon Jinn in Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999). Progress on the opticals was severely slow for a time, due to Industrial Light & Magic rejecting about one hundred thousand feet (30,480 meters) of film when the film perforations failed image registration and steadiness tests. Of about nine hundred visual effects shots, all VistaVision optical effects remained in-house, since Industrial Light & Magic was the only company capable of using the format, while about four hundred 4-perf opticals were subcontracted to outside effects houses. Instead, as soon as production began, the entire company found it necessary to remain, running twenty hours a day on six-day weeks in order to meet their goals by April 1, 1983. A compounding factor was the intention of several departments of Industrial Light & Magic to either take on other movie work or decrease staff during slow cycles. While the research and development work and experience gained from the previous two movies in the trilogy allowed for increased efficiency, this was off-set by the desire to have the closing movie raise the bar set by each of those movies. Visual effects work at Industrial Light & Magic quickly stretched the company to its operational limits. It's unclear exactly why the women were cut, but it's been speculated there were concerns that audiences would be made uncomfortable by the thought of women being killed during a battle sequence.
Footage of her in the cockpit of her X-wing recently resurfaced, indicating she was amongst the pilots to assault the Death Star, and her dialogue (in which she makes a distress call about a fatally-damaged stabilizer) suggests she would have been killed after crashing, much like Red Leader had in Star Wars (1977).
#HOW BEN BURRT CREATES THE LIGHTSABER SOUND EFFECT FULL#
What made her cut surprising was that it appeared that she would have played a significant role in the battle, as she recorded over a full page of dialogue.
The most significant cut was French model and actress Vivienne Chandler, who played an unnamed female X-wing pilot (later named Dorovio Bold). One of these actresses did survive into the final cut: one of the A-wing pilots is actually a woman redubbed by a male actor. There are several women amongst the rebel pilots seen during the briefing aboard Home One (one can be seen just behind Lando's shoulder in his conversation with Han), who never appear in the actual sequence, though at least three were known to have filmed cockpit scenes for the battle.