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Larry Cuba's work on Star Wars

The Sequence

The Rebel Alliance, having finally retrieved R2-D2,

Production

Ben Burtt, the film's sound designer, was assigned the task of getting word around town that George Lucas needed someone to create a Death Star simulation and track down bids for the work. Larry Cuba competed against a couple of other burgeoning computer effects teams to propose how he could accomplish the 3D animation. Cuba had made some pioneering films in this field, including his then-most-recent work on John Whitney Sr.'s Arabesque (1975). Lucas was impressed by Cuba's association with Whitney, as well as Cuba's first CG film First Fig, to give him the job.

“Computer graphics was advanced enough back then to even show shaded models,” said Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) Director Jason Leigh. “[…] George said, ‘Actually we want to take it a step back’ because the general public wasn't fully aware of what computer graphics was yet, so he wanted a more iconic image of computer graphics as opposed to a polished version of it. So, what you saw in the film was actually three generations back of software that we had already developed." Larry Cuba added, "When George Lucas specified the kind of animation he wanted for the scene, he knew enough about computer animation to ask for a true perspective without the 'hidden' lines removed. He wanted the trench and the Death Star to appear as wire cage figures with all the lines and vertices visible. George thought that this sort of image would suggest 'computer animation' by having a very mechanical look." Lucas' recalls it differently on the Star Wars commentary, saying that computer animation in general was at "[the] sort of the level that it was at that point, when I made this movie."

Cuba designed storyboards from the description of the scene in the script as well as photographs given to him by Lucas and associates. “A lot of what Larry did was give them photographs, because a lot of the set pieces weren't actually built yet. They had line drawings or they had photographs of things they were going to do, or they had architectural drawings of what they were going to build,” said Steve Heminover, a former UIC student from the 1970s. “And he sat down with these photographs, and he measured them, and then we put them on a digitizing tablet, and actually traced over the actual photograph, and he had to assume what the third dimension was. Or sometimes we had side shots. But some of these were set pieces that were built, some of them weren't built.”

Cuba worked on the animation in the Circle Graphics Habitat in the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC). Cuba designed modified a 2D drawing program that used a vector graphics scripting language called GRASS (GRAphics Symbiosis System), written by Tom DeFanti for his 1974 Ph.D. thesis at Ohio State University in 1974, to allow for the input of a third Z-axis for every point entered on the digitizing tablet, creating a 3D representation of the Death Star surface. The system he used incorporated a Vector General computer with CRT monitor, DEC PDP-11 minicomputer (specifically the PDP 1145), along with a standard Mitchell 35mm camera rigged with an animation motor.

Cuba worked night and day for 12 weeks to produce 2 minutes of film, of which 40 seconds appeared in the final film sequence. The computer would make one frame, Cuba would shoot it on film, then repeat the process for roughly 2000 exposures. "I couldn't get the computer to run continuously to make the shot—it kept crashing," he said.

The finished animation was rear-projected onto the screen during the May 1976 shoots.

Legacy

One original Death Star set piece that was built for the trench sequence hangs on the wall in the lab at UIC today. “So, in this shot, from the original Star Wars, you can see four copies of our piece of the Death Star, making up the surface of the Death Star, flying across it during the film,” said Andrew Johnson, Associate Professor of Computer Science at UIC and member of the EVL. “At the time when we received it, of course, it really wasn't worth anything because no one knew that George Lucas was going to be that famous, and you know after the special effects were done they left it behind, and they promptly left and they forgot all about it,” said Leigh. “It has been here for over 30 years.”

Another piece of cinematic history that stayed in Chicago is the actual Vector General computer that was used to produce the Death Star animation. For over 25 years, Heminover has kept it housed in his South Side workshop.The disk pack actually holds the Death Star plans from the 1970s. It holds about 2.5 megabytes of data which was a lot for back then. Heminover said a lot of special effects for movies were done on those computers. “We did effects for several movies. Some sciencefiction, some regular, and a lot of the times the movies didn't go anywhere,” he said. “And then the Star Wars script came in and we looked at it, and ‘OK, this could just be another one,’ and Larry Cuba went and did all the work, and all of a sudden bam! We had a blockbuster on our hands.”

And, the lab that was responsible for creating one of the most pivotal Star Wars special effects ever, continues to inspire computer scientists today. “What I did was, you just put a palm, a big touch, a palm on the screen, and then this menu pops up, and I can press and drag, and bring ships into the battle,” said UIC graduate student Arthur Nishimoto. Nishimoto developed a touch screen strategy game called Fleet Commander, using ships and sound effects from one of his favorite sci-fi franchises: Star Wars. He even got an invite to visit Lucasfilm in California.

“We posted a video of it online, and within a week, it was getting upwards of 700,000 hits on YouTube,” said Nishimoto. “And, as a matter of fact, the following day, I had received two separate e-mails from guys: one from Lucasfilm that had seen the video and basically was like, ‘Hey, could we talk?’”

Peter Kirn of Create Digital Motion writes of Cuba's Death Star animation, "[…] to me, these graphics don’t look primitive; they look elemental, much in the same way that you don’t get tired of ancient Egyptian art. (And in the timeline of computer graphics, it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine thousands of years of art history happening in a few decades.)".

Cuba's animation was at once innovative, prophetic, and superbly effective as storytelling. It was the first extensive use of 3D animation to be seen in a major motion picture. It predicted the future of films that would be created completely in the computer, especially so in light of the Star Wars prequels. The sequence also effectively sets up the final climax of the 1977 film so that audience are never disoriented during the frenetic space dogfights.