When I Was on Extra! Extra!

Here's a clip that ran on the entertainment show "Extra" back in 2005, in the days leading up to the release of "Star Wars: Episode III."


Did you miss me? Did you blink? Like these things usually go, the reporter from "Extra" and I talked for well over an hour, and really got into the nitty gritty of that particular shot... and it was all boiled down to two lines. At least they got to show my breakdown of the shot, which featured some sweet footage of actual lava blasts from Mt. Aetna in Sicily, photographed in HD by Ron Fricke (director of "Baraka") in late 2004. I placed most of the elements in 3D space in After Effects, but rendered out those passes and comped the shot in our in-house compositing tool, CompTime.

The entire Mustafar sequence was a real joy to help create - we had an amazing team comprised of visual effects supervisor Roger Guyett, compositing supervisor Pat Tubach, and comp sequence supervisor Mike Conte, all of whom were extremely generous.