Empire Strikes Back recording sessions footage

[Faleel 5,336]

17 years later.... (from 2005)

[Manakin Skywalker 4,891]

[Groovygoth666 650]

"It wasn't until nearly 15 years after the release of Return Of The Jedi  that the special boxed set for the Classic Trilogy was released. I doubt we'll have to wait nearly that long to hear the full saga in all it's sonic glory"

 

And here we are 20 years later 

[Tallguy 3,365]

10 hours ago, Groovygoth666 said:

It wasn't until nearly 15 years after the release of Return Of The Jedi  that the special boxed set for the Classic Trilogy was released. I doubt we'll have to wait nearly that long to hear the full saga in all it's sonic glory

 

1983 to 1993? (Wow, imagine if we had something as cool as the Arista set for the PT in 2015?)

[Groovygoth666 650]

3 hours ago, Tallguy said:

 

1983 to 1993? (Wow, imagine if we had something as cool as the Arista set for the PT in 2015?)

That's what I thought, but that's what Steve Sansweet said ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. That would have been awesome, but we'd probably still be complaining about stuff that had been left off it till today 

[Tallguy 3,365]

That Arista set was such a miracle that while I wished for some of the missing material I certainly never "complained".

 

I suppose I did complain that I had to keep my original Empire CD for the space slug. But that's different, right?

[Brando 1,856]

Maybe its better it happened this way. MM's relationship with Williams grows stronger each new release/project, so he trusts him more and more as the years have gone by. Thats how I look at it.

[Manakin Skywalker 4,891]

In retrospect I'm glad it didn't happen back in the early 2000's/2010's. We surely would've had another UE situation on our hands with all the terrible micro-edits, missing music, etc.

[Tallguy 3,365]

59 minutes ago, Brando said:

Maybe its better it happened this way. MM's relationship with Williams grows stronger each new release/project, so he trusts him more and more as the years have gone by. Thats how I look at it.

 

Don't give me hope! New OR old!

[enderdrag64 624]

On 27/06/2022 at 5:00 PM, enderdrag64 said:

Hmm maybe that footage wasn't all filmed by the BBC after all. I just learned of the existence of this other documentary by French cameraman Michel Parbot which most people thought never existed until it made its way onto the internet in 2018:

 

At 55:40 here you can see a lot of the same recording sessions footage, but without any voiceover. There's some footage here that isn't in the other documentary and vice versa

 

I found even more of this footage! In much better quality too. This comes from the Enhanced Edition ebook of J.W. Rinzler's "The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back":

 

 

Interestingly, even though the audio is largely the same, lots of the accompanying shots are different (especially in the first half), making me think that one of the two sources is edited, if not both of them. There's definitely footage edited out of this clip because there's an obvious jump cut at 0:18

[enderdrag64 624]

Okay I've determined the recording session footage in Empire of Dreams is actually fake. They just took some of the existing footage from the Empire sessions and digitally replaced what was on the projector with ANH footage. You can tell because all of the orchestra players are wearing the same clothes as the Empire sessions, the camera angle is the same, and you can sort of see a border on the projector where they made their digital alterations

[Holko 9,499]

19 minutes ago, enderdrag64 said:

and you can sort of see a border on the projector where they made their digital alterations

Huh, pretty dang obvious actually. Colour footage with finished effects, higher resolution/cleaner than the rest of the picture, perfectly filling in the screen...

 

 

[Manakin Skywalker 4,891]

Yeah I thought that would've been obvious to everyone. Also note the massive resolution different between the footage on screen and the session footage itself. The footage on screen is quite sharp, whereas the session footage is very blurry.

[enderdrag64 624]

Yeah I don't know how I didn't realize that, I guess I just didn't look too hard at it the first time I saw it

[TownerFan 4,983]

14 hours ago, enderdrag64 said:

Okay I've determined the recording session footage in Empire of Dreams is actually fake. They just took some of the existing footage from the Empire sessions and digitally replaced what was on the projector with ANH footage. You can tell because all of the orchestra players are wearing the same clothes as the Empire sessions, the camera angle is the same, and you can sort of see a border on the projector where they made their digital alterations

 

No film crew or cameras were present at the 1977 recording sessions of Star Wars at Denham. Lots of pictures were taken though, you can see quite a few of them printed as contact sheets in the booklet of the 1993 Arista anthology boxset. You can find several of them online as well.