How The Star Wars Intro Text Was Created

Let’s revisit the old for a second. Let’s crawl in all the retro we can muster while still feeling squeaky clean afterwards. I would like us to embark on an adventure into the marvelous land of the movies back in the ’70s. Yeah, it was that long ago that the first Star Wars movie was released. Sheeech! No wonder they keep cleaning up the movie like every year or so. I mean, it’s a pretty iconic movie in movie history, but at what point will it actually become a whole new movie? Nah, what I mean is that things were just so much different back then, especially when it comes to how movies were made. What is now only used to get that retro feeling, like using miniatures for example, was on the edge of movie making back then.

I know for a fact I am not the only one who has watched the first movie’s intro text and wondered how the heck they were able to do that back in 1977. I mean, it looks insanely smooth and surely they could not have been using computers for that since the pixel rate was no where near that smooth back in the ’70s. So how the heck did they manage to accomplish that? It just so happens that I have found a pretty epic picture of how that intro text was actually created (even though the whole process seems to have been the same all though the series).

It turns out that they used a pretty neat trick called “depth” when they shot that intro. They simply shot the whole intro rolling from the bottom to the top from a slight angle, meaning the camera was located at the bottom of the screen which made the text appear larger and going off into the horizon. It’s pretty cool what some small tricks can do. Well, this particular trick actually created movie history.

Via: [Blissful Cat]