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Filming the famous truck stunt in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.
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Category: George
Ed Catmull, Pixar-Disney President, on George Lucas & impact of Star Wars in filmmaking tech – Star Wars became the most impactful film in the history of filmmaking, and it was George’s vision to make it happen
Star Wars From Puppets To Pixels: Digital Characters In Episode II Documentary – and one more reason not to ever give up on what you love
My original vision for star wars was to have a lot of epic scale to it .. and at the same time have space ships and have creatures.. and all kind of fantastic things going on in it..
..Imagine a grown adult says this, and then probably repeats it in a boardroom because at some point George certainly did say this to a money guy, everyone laughs and then he goes on to make this vision and more and makes four billion dollars at the end.
There are probably homes in the suburbs where parents still tell their kids to stop dreaming.. but at the end of the day if you didn’t get enough of dreaming as a kid – you should know it is a great way to do adulting too.
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and of course a little tiny subversive essay by Paul Graham.. on performing certain tests to try and see what is it that you love :
Gifts from George, And The Importance of Being Stupid
George was one of the most generous employers I have had – in addition to a six figure compensation and having my dream job, free life drawing and sculpture classes, cafeteria with sushi chefs, costume parties complete with indoor luna park, George regularly dispatched gifts to employees. I know for certain that anyone that has ever worked for George, for the most part, has had the time of their lives. The decision to leave Lucasfilm was probably the stupidest thing I have ever done but I had to go and pursue a war of my own, do my own battles and do a Star Wars of my own making.
Speaking of stupid things – being stupid is one of the most important things that will ever happen to you. If you sense that you were somewhat a stupid child – make sure to retain and hold onto that quality. I was personally a stupid child, and lived almost entirely in my head. Later on, when i had to work and create imaginary environments and worlds for large corporations – I felt at home and had no problem inhabiting imaginary worlds for hours on end and could conjure silly and stupid things on the fly. It turned out that was very profitable.
After all Star Wars was a stupid popcorn movie, wasn’t it? It was so much full on silly we didn’t see it coming – and all of a sudden fell in love with it.
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When I first moved to the States I lived in Ohio and had to buy a car. Now, for starters, I had only been in a driver’s seat about three times previously while getting my driver’s license in Europe ( i wouldn’t call that driving ) – my knowledge of cars was limited to general knowledge about a car – front, back and wheels below. With very limited resources and had to buy anything that moved really for around a thousand dollars. Had I not been stupid about it – i would never have bought an adorable, stick shift Audi Quattro 1997 that had the windows fall down while I was driving mid-winter on the highway. If I were smart about it – I would have taken the bus and would have skipped the part with trying to hold the middle of the lane ( not hitting nearby cars ), crying my eyes out while trying to merge into traffic on a bridge between Ohio and Kentucky.
Until this day I cannot touch stick shift with a ten foot pole. So what happened to the silly Audi? Well, owing to the fact that I lived on the border between the good and the bad parts of town – someone slammed into it with full force and then run away ( they never found the culprit, obviously drunk driving in the early hours of the morning ). The Audi got totaled and State Farm gave me three thousand dollars compensation, which i used to move to California and start my career as a digital artist there.
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Speaking of stupid – there is a theory in Japanese and Korean aesthetics where imperfections, accidental damage ( like cracks in pottery ), roughness and irregularity are highly valued. There is the art of Kintsugi and Wabi-sabi.
If you look at the Star Wars universe – it is a well-used world, with cracks and scratches and battle damage. In Wabi-sabi it is called the “appreciation of the ingenuous integrity of natural objects and processes”.. Leonard Koren says wabi-sabi is “the most conspicuous and characteristic feature of traditional Japanese beauty and it occupies roughly the same position in the Japanese pantheon of aesthetic values as do the Greek ideals of beauty and perfection in the West.”
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Stupid is the other side of the Mastery coin. When you are stupid you act without having made the necessary calculations, which is exactly what you do when you have mastered a craft, an art or a process.
This is what Sadhguru says intuition does – allows you to skip the calculations because, in case of mastery, you have accumulated enough information and skills that will enable you to enter a state of flow. Often times you do not have all the data – you do not have all the information available to you. You will need to make decision based on very little information. At the same time you may have not enough time to do the calculations. this is when intuition steps in. Not enough information, and not enough time – ( short of course of hurting yourself of others ) I have always relied on being stupid.
A picnic set !
George Lucas: To feel the true force of ‘Star Wars,’ he had to learn to let it go
As with everything – read between the lines of this article – it is in the”lifestyle” section after all. But the truth is here is George who made billions of dollars empire… that enthralls half of the planet including myself. It started with a one page treatment – grew into a full-scale space opera, which grew into a fledging company that started a whole new world of computer graphics, which snowballed into what we have today where everything is in one way or another “touched” by CG. Although a lot of quality filmmakers no longer employ computer graphics and digital visual effects – computer generated imagery has changed us forever. The rooms we walk into have probably been first designed on a computer, the cups we drink from are probably a result from a digital design process, the screens and paper we look at are transformed most likely digitally. George was a pioneer in all of this and a lot of what is in star Wars was a “first ever”. When I occasionally read on forums .. complaints about Star Wars or George.. I am like – really, i am sorry what is the issue here? lots of people don’t get Picasso either and a lot of my painter friends think Van Gogh was a lousy painter. yet – I go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and into one of my favorite rooms and i see adults of all shapes and sizes pondering the paintings of Van Gogh, reveling in the simple flowers – it is one of the most crowded rooms and it is never empty.
Are we Happy and Effective? We are now programmed for perfect happiness
Just run into the latter movie and immediately thought of one of my favorite movies, George’s THX 1138. George wins here big time because he doesn’t try too hard, you don’t have to try too hard when you are inventing a genre. Movies today do not hold back as they have the genre worked out already for them and all they have to do is fit the script with an appropriate visual.
Here is the original trailer and clips from George’s movie which i find superior in every respect:
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A new attempt at the same themes – the movie is Equals (2015), with bigger smart screens but much less subtlety. A trailer ( can’t stand trailers to be honest but whatever ) and a clip:
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Which reminds me to share with you my favorite sci-fi movie of recent –
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Even if you are not fond of their grandiose schemes – you must admit the Wachowskis are a visual institution, the Matrix started the 21st century culturally and put whatever was in their minds – in the minds of millions of people. The blue and red pills, the streaky hallways, the bullet time – these grandmasters made the geeky weird mainstream. If you have ever sat in front of a computer 16+ hours you must know that feeling – my setup at Lucasfilm consisted of 3 computer screens and 3 televisions, 3 consoles, 2 computers and several other devices, including a Wacom tablet and various controllers. When I get off at the end heading to Chestnut street – I would see polygons and wireframe triangles everywhere, my brain would process and dismember all into visual components and put it back together in the next frame.