At First Glance

Now that digital technology has replaced several of the traditional techniques, Knoll and his team had a lot of flexibility in the preparation of the roll-up for Episode I. But the many variables involved in the classic roll-ups needed to be duplicated exactly before Knoll could start using computers to create the opening of the new Star Wars movie. Even though the technique has absolutely nothing to do with its predecessor, everything seen on screen needed to match what had appeared in the classic trilogy.

"The problem was that nobody took precise notes when they were shooting those sequences," says Knoll. "So it turned out that almost every element had to be matched by eye." Knoll started by solving the font enigma. "We knew that three different fonts had been used," he says, "the same trio for all three classic Trilogy movies: one font for 'A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...', another font for the title of the movie itself, at the top of the roll-up, and yet another one for the body of the text. But we had to identify those fonts." To achieve this, Knoll sent samples of the old roll-ups to the Art Department of Industrial Light & Magic, where resident typography experts started combing their manuals. The culprits were soon identified.

"But that's just one of the mysteries," comments Knoll. "The next step was to figure out what type of lens had been used to shoot the sequences." Using a different lens would change the aspect of the image. "Luck smiled at me on this one," continues Knoll. "I managed to get a hold of Peter Daulton, who had been Assistant Cameraman on Jedi. He believed what I was looking for was a 24 mm lens, and sure enough, my 24 mm computer lens matched the shots from the classic roll-ups."

The speed at which the text travels from the bottom to the top of the screen also needed to be an absolute match. "What I did for this one," says Knoll, "is watch one of the existing roll-ups, and count the frames between the moment when one line of text breaks the bottom edge of the frame, and the moment the next line does." This told Knoll exactly how fast the opening needed to flash by in Episode I.

Two more delicate adjustment had to be done "by eye", the first one being color. "We laid out several different color samples, and compared them to the old roll-ups," explains Knoll. "It was only a matter of choosing the one shade that was exactly like what they had used in the classic trilogy." The last variable, the tilt angle, was tracked down using a similar, old-fashioned technique. "I used a scanned frame from the Star Wars crawl as a background image, and simply tilted the camera until the perspective lines matched," Knoll says.