Dennis Muren

There was kind of this schism in visual effects, like in the '90s, not like a, a really negative one, but where people would, you know, some, some supervisors would wanna get everything in 3D, and that was really important.

And then other supervisors that I had the pleasure of working with, including George Murphy, they, you know, sometimes it was great to get it in 3D if you could, but a lot of times they'd be like, "Well, you know, we, we could probably pull that off in comp and get it in 2D, and it would look fine in the film." You know? Like, uh, Dennis Muren was like that, and I think George was like that.

And George used to say this thing that I, I tell my students this every, every, uh, class where we're teaching 3D.

George would always say, "Well, you know, in the end, it's all 2D." [laughs]

And then they'd make their shot list against the, the screenplay.

And there's great, there's great footage of Return of the Jedi Videomatics that were done by, um, Dennis Muren and others at, uh, Industrial Light & Magic planning out the speeder chase in, uh, the forest Endor.

So I think, um, that's just evolved to testing something out really fast, proving it can succeed or fail, and seeing where the problems lie prior to you being on the day you're actually shooting.

You've got film in the canister, and you have no idea what the plan is, so.

And I, you know, spent a lot of time working out and, you know, getting a bunch of rigs built and for Jurassic park.

It was really Dennis Muren that really pushed for building an input device that would allow stop-motion animators to go in.

And it was essentially a stop-motion puppet of, say, like the Raptors or the T-Rex that was about this big.

and that they each joint had an encoder on it and so when you move the thing it would move the wire frame because computers were so slow at that time you just had to work with a wire frame and you know build the performance that way and the technology guys at ilm were kind of going you just have to visualize what the thing is what its anatomy is and what its muscles would do as you move things along.

Compared to Star Wars, which had 360 effects shots, The Empire Strikes Back had 600.

The effects team, supervised by Richard Edlund and Brian Johnson, included Steve Gawley, Dennis Muren, Bruce Nicholson, Lorne Peterson, Nilo Rodis-Jamero, Tom St. Amand, and Phil Tippett.

Up to 100 people worked on the project daily, including Stuart Freeborn, who was responsible mainly for crafting the Yoda puppet.

Various techniques, including miniatures, map paintings, stop motion, articulated models, and full-size vehicles were used to create the many effects in The Empire Strikes Back.

So that must be ILM who were getting all that.

And ILM, the special effects supervisor was Dennis Muren.

Oh, okay.

So he had worked a lot with George Lucas and Spielberg.