Returning to work at ILM on December 2nd 1979 after a
month's break from having completed the Walker
animation, Doug Beswick creates the notorious space slug creature from which the
Falcon breathlessly emerges. Beswick would recall to CINEFEX in
December 1980: “It worked like a hand puppet -- a
return spring mechanism would close the jaws. You
could stick your hand through the neck and grab it like a
handgun or pistol grip. It was pretty heavy.”
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| Views of the armature puppet slug. |
More than
fifty takes are shot of the creature over a week, giving it
record status for a such a short scene in the film. Phil
Tippett covers the slug armature with an exterior of his
own design and Jon Berg puppeteers for the first version
in a number of takes, with the puppet filmed in high
speed by Richard Edlund. The footage is then slowed
down in post to make the creature more realistic looking
in its actions. In one space slug filming take the creature
bursts into song courtesy of Tippett! Great pains had to be taken that the interior of the slug
didn’t look like the inside of a creature and spoil the
viewers surprise, and yet, at the same time, it had to resemble believable organic creature innards. The
cave structure was ultimately ten-foot long and
constructed from five-foot-tall segments supported by
carved ribs.
Joe Johnston
created a
technique in
which strands
of glue were
littered over
the model to
look like
cobwebs.
Lorne
Peterson built
the hinged
slug jaws
which were
four-and-a
half-feet
across, with
the first five
teeth (and others to follow) cast in
clay.
The ILM model shop team
would cast additional teeth and give them as gifts to
visitors who came to see them at the time of
Empire’s
filming.
Ken Ralston recalls some of the fun had during the
intense bout of filming effects scenes on the audio commentary for the
Star Wars: The Definitive Edition Laserdisc Collection release in 1993: “On
Empire, I shot a lot of gag
footage... I built my own space slug out of an old sock.
and made a terrible stupid-looking puppet. So there's
this shot looking down, it's in the movie, where you're
looking at the surface of the asteroid and there's a
couple of TIE ships above it...What's not in there is the
very last moment when you get to the last crater, this
gigantic stupid sock puppet comes out and attacks one
of the ships...we were on the night shift so we spent
nine months six nights a week on
Empire.”
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| Lorne Peterson at work on the bottom row of space slug teeth at ILM. |
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| Inside the slug tunnel! |
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| Ken Ralston preparing to film the view inside out. |
Of the final completed effects sequence, George Lucas
would recall in his 2004 DVD audio commentary for The Empire Strikes Back: “This scene in the snake's
mouth worked better on the page than how it finally
turned out. It's a very hard concept to pull off. I think it
works, but I always expected it would get a laugh when
the ship flies out of the creature's mouth. As it turns out,
most people are astonished, and slightly confused, I
think. We never really got the reaction we were looking
for at the end of this scene. It was based on a
mythological motif...”
