![]() Unlike the rest of this set, this hallway was built with forced perspective – rather than following an actual circular path like it appears to, it’s scrunched up toward the back to look longer than it actually is. The most recent step was to start the last major area of the set: the curved hallway seen behind Luke as we watch Vader approach him from over the Sith Lord’s shoulder. Notice how they increase in height, like I described. I angled the camera so you can see the tops of the set walls. That’s the (incomplete) mouth of the aluminum tube near the center. But I’ll do you one better – here’s a shot approximating the unused angle I described above! Gives some sense of what the area would have looked like, I think. Sadly, I can’t find any behind-the-scenes shots of this area or anything, so all I have to go off of is the above shot and the technical drawings. It would have been an angle perpendicular to this one, looking down the passageway toward the left side of this shot. This indicates that the filmmakers intended to get footage of Luke from that camera rostrum. But the technical drawings depict this area as a (section of a) circular passageway with a camera rostrum at one end and walls that increase in height as they get further away from the camera. Just a little bit of dark, greebly wall outside the mouth of the tube. This is all we’re ever given in the final cut: But then I hopped up to the other rostrum to work on the area beneath the carbon freezing chamber, and I got a surprise: there was more to that area than you can see in the film. (The lighting is too bright it’s since been dialed down to match the film.)īelow, you can see more progress on various areas of the set, including a large, grayish-blue backdrop that in real life was painted to look like the immense reactor shaft outside the window:Īll the work here was on the lower area of the set where most of this scene takes place. ![]() I was trying to roughly match the angle from which we see Luke enter the tube. I never realized from watching the film that it was angled downward! (Fun fact: it’s a 13-degree angle, which comes out to 77 degrees from vertical…now, where have I heard the number 77 in Star Wars history before?) You can see the aluminum tunnel or tube that connects the two main areas of the set. You can also see that I’d already started working on the walls of the set by this point, and the progress continued pretty quickly: ![]() (They had to build the set elevated above the floor to accommodate the grates that slide shut after Luke passes through the tunnel these were a practical effect, so the bottom grate had to fit below the set.) The larger 10-foot-high rostrum below was for the area with the big circular window and the hallways. The L-shaped rostrum on the left was 16 feet above the studio floor and it supported the area beneath the carbon freezing chamber that Luke drops into after Vader falls. From there, I was able to begin building the rostrums (platforms) upon which the set…sat. Kind of a mess, but it’s just the kind of mess I needed to bring this thing to life. ![]() In Blender’s viewport, that looked something like this: I took a best guess, taking comfort in the fact that the drawings would at least all be the right sizes and they’d be positioned correctly relative to each other. Unfortunately, I don’t know exactly where this set was situated inside Stage 1, or at what angle. The first step in recreating this set was to bring all those technical drawings into 3D space together with the correct scale and orientation and location. And thank the maker – Star Wars: The Blueprints documents this set pretty thoroughly with plans, elevations, and details. I love how quietly eerie these areas are as Luke creeps through, searching for Vader. But right in the middle lies another Cloud City location, one of my favorites: the reactor control room.īuilt around this time 40 years ago in Stage 1 at Elstree Studios, this set comprised the underbelly of the carbon freezing chamber, the hallway where Luke flies out the big circular window, and a metallic tunnel that connects those two areas. Of course, the duel starts in the carbon freezing chamber and ends on the reactor shaft gantry where Vader reveals the horrible truth of Luke’s parentage. It’s got the best fight choreography and stunt work of any fight in the original trilogy, not to mention the beautiful cinematography and perfect pacing. The whole Vader/Luke duel in The Empire Strikes Back is fantastic, if you ask me.
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