Headline : ‘Star Wars’ Was Possible Thanks to This ‘Revolutionary’ Motion Control Camera, Now on Display at the Academy Museum

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A half-century ago when George Lucas decided to make “Star Wars,” a core visual effects team was handed a sizable challenge: Figure out a believable way to transport audiences to a galaxy far, far away. Essential to that goal was the development of a new type of motion control camera system: built in a Van Nuys warehouse where the production filmed space-set scenes such as the climatic trench run.

Now fans in Southern California can see the historic Dykstraflex camera system, newly restored and in working order, on display at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures starting Saturday in recognition of May the 4th, aka Star Wars day. The system weighs 1,500 lbs. and will be demonstrated by VFX vets with a 14-foot track and studio scale replicas of the Millennium Falcon, which is five-feet long, and a 20-inch X-Wing fighter.

Looking back, Richard Edlund, a member of the core VFX team that won an Oscar for the Lucasfilm classic, remembers the reaction of Lucas and members of the crew after an early test demonstrated what was possible with the camera system: “Everybody was agog because it worked and we knew that we could get there.” 

Visual effects historian Gene Kozicki notes that the “revolutionary” system not only changed what was possible with visual effects, but with filmic storytelling. The Dykstraflex was effectively a computer-controlled film camera on a boom and a track that allowed the VFX team to film models and miniatures of space crafts with precise camera moves, such as panning and tilting — moves that looked like they were filmed by a cinematographer, while making them repeatable and recordable.

Read more from the original article on here at variety.com.

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