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Star Wars Visual Effects, from AT-ATs to Tauntauns

This featurette explains how ILM’s Dennis Muren and Phil Tippett used stop-motion to animate the tauntaun and AT-AT walker sequences in The Empire Strikes Back, a process that took roughly one hour per second of finished film. It also covers the nine months spent designing and building the AT-AT miniatures and the matte-painting and bluescreen work used elsewhere in the original trilogy.

Star Wars · 11 min · Intermediate · STM · Stop Motion · 2020

What you take away

Understand the real time cost behind a minute of frame-by-frame miniature animation.

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