Empire Strikes Back recording sessions footage

[Meredith McKay 7,071]

17 years later.... (from 2005)

[Manakin Skywalker 5,510]

[Groovygoth666 1,057]

"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 4,740]

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 1,057]

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 4,740]

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 2,235]

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 5,510]

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 4,740]

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 1,010]

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 1,010]

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 10,749]

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 5,510]

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 1,010]

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 5,418]

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.

[enderdrag64 1,010]

curious if anyone knows the original source of this ESB sessions photo:

 

 

I found it in the Chris Malone pdf and reverse image searched it, but it just found reuploads on social media. I'm curious where it was originally published. It wasn't the JW Rinzler book because that wasn't out yet, and it also doesn't include this image. It instead has a different image showing Through the Window instead:

 

 

 

Funnily enough you can tell they were both taken the same day cuz they're all wearing the same clothes

EDIT: I also found this pic from the same day on a random fan blog, all these pics had to come from somewhere right?

[karelm 3,126]

9 hours ago, enderdrag64 said:

 

Funnily enough you can tell they were both taken the same day cuz they're all wearing the same clothes

EDIT: I also found this pic from the same day on a random fan blog, all these pics had to come from somewhere right?

 

 

You can tell they were both taken the same day cuz Williams has a turtleneck in both.   I'd say those pics came from Lucasfilm LTD.  Google says the first use was from Chris Malone's ebook of recording the Star Wars Saga from 2009 before Lucasfilm was sold to Disney.

[TownerFan 5,418]

10 hours ago, enderdrag64 said:

curious if anyone knows the original source of this ESB sessions photo:

 

 

I found it in the Chris Malone pdf and reverse image searched it, but it just found reuploads on social media. I'm curious where it was originally published. It wasn't the JW Rinzler book because that wasn't out yet, and it also doesn't include this image. It instead has a different image showing Through the Window instead:

 

 

 

Funnily enough you can tell they were both taken the same day cuz they're all wearing the same clothes

EDIT: I also found this pic from the same day on a random fan blog, all these pics had to come from somewhere right?

 

There's a ton of photos from the OT scoring sessions in the LFL archives (now property of TWDC, of course). I still hope some day a lavish coffee table book on JW featuring many of those will be published.

[SyncMan 340]

1 hour ago, TownerFan said:

 

There's a ton of photos from the OT scoring sessions in the LFL archives (now property of TWDC, of course). I still hope some day a lavish coffee table book on JW featuring many of those will be published.

One would think that when Disney's JW documentary got released, such a coffee-table book would have been out, now, to either promote the documentary or as a companion-piece for a home-video gift set.

[Manakin Skywalker 5,510]

2 hours ago, TownerFan said:

I still hope some day a lavish coffee table book on JW featuring many of those will be published.

 

[Marian Schedenig 9,385]

And if you don't have a John Williams, it turns into a John Williams? What does it do? Can it conduct?

[BachSkywalker 34]

2 hours ago, SyncMan said:

One would think that when Disney's JW documentary got released, such a coffee-table book would have been out, now, to either promote the documentary or as a companion-piece for a home-video gift set.

YES.

[Brando 2,235]

On 29/6/2022 at 9:57 PM, Brando said:

I think we need a documentary series compiling all of this footage together and in the highest definition possible.

I called it!!….sort of😂