February
7
VFX Pioneer Edlund Speaks
[Posted by David S. Cohen]
I dropped in Wednesday night at "An Evening with Richard Edlund," a tribute and discussion organized by UCLA and the Visual Effects Society. Edlund discussed creating the elaborate motion control systems for the original "Star Wars" and a handful of the many titles he's worked on since, from "Ghostbusters" to "Raiders of the Lost Ark" to "Charlie Wilson's War."
Edlund took questions about his long and eclectic career: he was a rock photographer ("Stone Soul Picnic" was his first album cover), an inventor (he created the Pignose amplifier), and most of all a visual effects mastermind -- with time out in between to drive cable cars in San Francisco.
One of the effects pioneers on the first "Star Wars," Edlund said that he knew as soon as he'd heard that Alec Guiness had been cast as Obi-Wan Kenobi that "this was the vehicle that would unseat the Shark" (i.e., knock off "Jaws" as box office champ). Once the movie came out, he said, "It was humbling to be involved in a movie where people would apologize if they hadn't seen it."
Of working on "Poltergiest" he said "One of the problems was who directed it, without saying." He added that there were worries of a DGA strike at the time, so "since Steven (Spielberg) was the producer, we could work on it with him even if the directors went on strike."
He noted that George Lucas had upstaged at least one of his own best scenes by adding CG characters to the background in his "Star Wars" re-release and observed that ILM in general tends to get "carried away" and put to much in the frame. Overall, he said, "There are things you shouldn't do (with visual effects), and one of them is creating actors. Unless it's something like Gollum. I think Gollum is the most important visual effect of the last ten years."
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