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Larry Cuba's work on Star Wars

The Sequence

The Rebel Alliance, having finally retrieved R2-D2,

Behind the Scenes

Larry Cuba created the 3D wireframe animation of the Star Wars Death Star Trench Run. 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). Cuba showed George Lucas his first CG film First Fig. “Computer graphics was advanced enough back then to even show shaded models,” said EVL Director Jason Leigh. “But, in looking at, what we were able to provide back then for computer graphics, 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."

The animation was created in the Circle Graphics Habitat in the University of Illinois, Chicago. Cuba 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. The system he used incorporated a Vector General computer, CRT monitor, DEC PDP-11 minicomputer, along with various cameras and recorders. “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 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.”

The computer would make one frame, Cuba would shoot it on film, then repeat the process for 2000 exposures. "I couldn't get he computer to run continuously to make the shot—it kept crashing," he said. The finished animation is then rear-projected onto the screen in the film.

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.

Backlash (American Beauty)

American Beauty has received a considerable blowback in critical opinion over the last decade. It was featured in Premiere's list of the 25 most overrated films of all time. Michael Phillips, in his very negative review to the 2006 film The Quiet on At The Movies, said that American Beauty "has a lot to answer for because that's the kind of film The Quiet is going for."

The Echo Times (College of Marin)

The Echo Times is a student run newspaper at College of Marin in Kentfield, California. The paper focuses on student issues, but likes to focus on stories that have a global context as well as local.

List of film reviews of The Deer Hunter

• N.Y. Film Critics: "Best Picture of the Year"
• Kathleen Carrol N.Y. Daily News: "! An emotionally stirring movie that demonstrates real originality."