Production - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 289

The start of the fi lm is an effects feast, starting with stop motion Tauntauns, and then ending with the
Imperial AT-AT attack. The sequence opens with some wonderful panoramic long shots of the giant four-
legged AT-AT walkers in the far distance, a brooding dark menace on the horizon. We mover closer and
see them in all their glorious detail, feet adjusting as they place on the snow, hydraulics pistons moving
in time with the legs, all framed by the amazing snowy mountain scenic paintings of matte painter Mike
Pangrazio. Stop motion works particularly well here, giving the AT-ATs a defi nite mechanical presence,
and one must wonder, if the fi lm had been made recently with digital effects, would their movement now
be too fl uid and perfect and somewhat lacking in reality? As well as the AT-ATs there's Luke's climb up to
the underside of one of the AT-ATs which was also a tiny stop motion puppet, and teasing glimpses of the
two-legged stop motion animated imperial 'chickenwalkers', that would later feature in Return of the Jedi .
This sequence had a huge impact on my desire to work in fi lm special effects. I researched the
AT-ATs and snowspeeders, and eventually built my own versions from plastic models.
The AT-AT was meticulously detailed (I had aspirations to work in the fi lm special effects industry as a
model-maker) with panels missing to reveal circuitry beneath, battle damage and snow-covered feet.
It had tiny lights in the front head turret which lit up a coloured windscreen as in the fi lms, and tiny
fi bre-optic lights in the cannons, all powered from a battery in the wooden display base of the model.
The model won an award at a national model-making competition and I still have both the AT-AT
and snowspeeder models gathering dust. The snowspeeder model was later used as reference for my
friend Richard Chasemore to illustrate a snowspeeder in the Star Wars Incredible Cross Sections topics.
The talented (and in my mind incredibly lucky to be able to do that for a living) artists who created the
sequence were my own personal heroes, and now several decades later I've been lucky enough to have
worked for Phil Tippett in San Francisco, and with Mike Pangrazio on the visual effects for several fi lms.
King Kong
Every frame of the 1933 King Kong should be essential study for an animation course. Peter
Jackson's dazzling remake is, many students' i rst contact with Kong. Of course, the 1933
i lm can look technically raw, but more than seven decades later the i lm is still an amazing,
emotional, complex experience. You are swept along by the story and Kong himself is
remarkably credible. I was at a screening with a reluctant audience of cynical hi-tech special
ef ects artists, some of whom were about to start work on the remake. Sure enough, there were
giggles at the dialogue, at Fay Wray emoting and at Carl Denham barking his orders, but once
at Skull Island, there was silence. A hard audience found themselves won over. Why shouldn't
they be? The i lm is a masterpiece.
I cannot believe that this superbly constructed i lm was as casually put together as history
suggests, but that was, perhaps, Cooper being amazingly modest. The tight script has delicious
symmetry, split into halves, both involving boat journeys to an island. The i rst sees Man in Kong's
country, and the second sees Kong in Man's country. It is two takes on Nature versus
Man. But it is Schoedsack and Cooper's direction and visualisation of these two
halves that are beautifully thought through with meticulous detail, and belie the
shoot-and-run techniques of their animal documentaries. The parallels and contrasts
between the halves are eloquently made, with Kong being part of the natives' show,
doing battle with l ying creatures and long snake creatures, taking Ann up to the
highest point on the island in the i rst half. In the second he is part of the natives'