So I found the exercise with the red bull we did in class to be very interesting. I thought the posts about the entourage and the pacific openings were very interesting. So I tried to think of examples of movies that had blatant or known additions. After a few minutes of thought it hit me that Star Wars obviously had been through the most. Growing up watching the movies I had seen slight changes throughout the movies. Especially from seeing one of the films on VHS and then buying a DVD copy of the movie years later and seeing CGI aliens added in the background of certain scenes. However the scene that stuck out to me was one in Star Wars: New Hope, the first movie. The movie was on television a week ago or so and I watched several minutes, including a scene where Han Solo is talking to Jabba the Hutt. I didn’t remember the scene very well since I hadn’t seen the movie since I was little, watching it on VHS. I did some research and it turns out that originally the scene was shot with a person acting as “Jabba” in 1977, but it was then left out. Later they added a CGI addition of “Jabba” in 1997, this is the same CGI Jabba from all the future star wars movies. It turns out that they then went back in and “sharpened” and changed the CGI version of Jabba in 2004. I just thought it was interesting that the scene went from having a person in it, to then adding a CGI creature over that person. Even more so they then added details to that creature.
Here is the first deleted scene from 1977..
Here is the video with the addition of a CGI Jabba
Here is a video comparing the CGI addition of Jabba from 1997 and 2004. It is a little disorientating but shows the differences quite well.
Those are some interesting comparisons. You can see that the Jabba character is still based on the original actor; compare frames 0:39, 0:46 and 0:37 of the respective 3 examples. Specially the first two show a good resemblance but it was still considered that Jabba was too much of a "cute" character and needed a darker, more menacing appearance. What makes these changes possible without much re-working, is the use of green screen use in the original material. Otherwise it would have been a very involved rotoscoping operation.
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