The 1970s psychology experiment behind 'Star Wars' special effects (2023) • Hacker News Board

Re: The 1970s psychology experiment behind 'Star Wars' special effects (2023)

#11

Post by ahartmetz » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 6:43 PM UTC

sliken wrote: post #6

One problem with minatures, positioning the camera for each photo, then turning the result into special effects shot for a movie is that it can take days to record a scene, get the film developed, and view the result. Only when played back at full speed (24fps) the result might not be believable or lack the dramatic flare they were hoping for. To fix this they looked for the fastest display they could find to do real…

Did that pre-vis system give them the idea (and hardware!) for the few in-universe computer-generated images? I remember death star schematics and a targeting computer.

Re: The 1970s psychology experiment behind 'Star Wars' special effects (2023)

#12

Post by currymj » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 6:48 PM UTC

ahartmetz wrote: post #11

sliken wrote: post #6

One problem with minatures, positioning the camera for each photo, then turning the result into special effects shot for a movie is that it can take days to record a scene, get the film developed, and view the result. Only when played back at full speed (24fps) the result might not be believable or lack the dramatic flare they were hoping for. To fix this they looked for the fastest display they could find to do real…

Did that pre-vis system give them the idea (and hardware!) for the few in-universe computer-generated images? I remember death star schematics and a targeting computer.

Those came from Larry Cuba, who worked at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois Chicago.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2017/05/23/blueprints-for-sta...

Re: The 1970s psychology experiment behind 'Star Wars' special effects (2023)

#13

Post by sliken » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 7:07 PM UTC

ahartmetz wrote: post #11

sliken wrote: post #6

One problem with minatures, positioning the camera for each photo, then turning the result into special effects shot for a movie is that it can take days to record a scene, get the film developed, and view the result. Only when played back at full speed (24fps) the result might not be believable or lack the dramatic flare they were hoping for. To fix this they looked for the fastest display they could find to do real…

Did that pre-vis system give them the idea (and hardware!) for the few in-universe computer-generated images? I remember death star schematics and a targeting computer.

I did use the screen a bit, it was connected to the unibus interface (which provides memory access) to read vector data straight out of the PDP-11's memory. One oddity of the vector screen is that if you drew long diagonal lines from A to B then B to A they wouldn't overlap perfectly, I believe the earth's magnetic field made a small difference.

My memory of the original star wars was that the schematic and targeting computer was pretty crude. The graphics wonder/GDP/2A Graphics Display processor display was accurate enough for quite small fonts. The fonts did look vectorized, and I believe the end points of each line were slightly brighter. The tube display was very deep to allow the magnetic fields to have high slew rates.

I'll have to take a look again at star wars to double check, but I don't think so based on memory.

Re: The 1970s psychology experiment behind 'Star Wars' special effects (2023)

#14

Post by sliken » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 7:18 PM UTC

currymj wrote: post #12

ahartmetz wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did that pre-vis system give them the idea (and hardware!) for the few in-universe computer-generated images? I remember death star schematics and a targeting computer.

Those came from Larry Cuba, who worked at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois Chicago. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2017/05/23/blueprints-for-sta...

Ah, yes, vector general. I think that was a bit earlier, but much slower. I think most of the footage was rendered a frame a time then a camera took a photo.