Star Wars is perhaps the film franchise that launched the era of blockbuster effects. What the team that George Lucas assembled in the late 1970s accomplished was nothing short of miraculous. Over the course of the first three Star Wars films, we were shown something truly astounding.
The other side of the coin is that Star Wars is both a high point in the early days of blockbuster effects and a cautionary tale. The prequels, made in the late 90s and early 00s, were heavily reliant on CGI and green screen work. This will forever be seen as a period in which filmmakers such as George Lucas fell too deeply in love with what could be accomplished in post-production, creating worlds and scenes that just didn’t feel authentic. That’s one of the more prominent reasons why the Star Wars prequels get a bad rep.
For Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the team assembled by LucasFilm chief Kathleen Kennedy and director J.J. Abrams fused the best of both worlds. As we see in the VFX reel that helped them promote the film for Oscar consideration, they used practical effects to return us to the lived-in world of Star Wars and a vast array of modern digital effects to astound us with spectacle. The result is a wholly satisfying bit of visual poetry, one that has brought audiences back again and again to the tune of almost $2 billion dollars in worldwide box office in under a month of release.
Will this mix of practical and CGI be enough to put the VFX team of Roger Guyett, Patrick Tubach, Neal Scanlan and Chris Corbould on stage on Oscar night? Possibly. Although this year’s competition is stiff, with Ex Machina, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Martian and The Revenant nominated alongside it.
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