AN 'EMPIRE' AT 40: FIRST STEPS, BIG STEPS FOR THE 'WALKERS'!

Early development begins for the Walker, with Jon Berg, Phil Tippett and Joe Johnston at ILM.

Returned to ILM via its new locale in San Francisco in December 1978, stop motion animator Jon Berg, seeing production paintings for Empire in Gary Kurtz's office, wonders how they’ll do the upcoming, hugely ambitious snow battle launching the movie. With an early idea of using a marionette system to depict the walking war machines, Phil Tippett and Tom St. Arnaud spend three weeks developing a way to depict the movement that the still-in-flux design of the Imperial AT-AT's will have (Kurtz thinks of them as looking like dogs trotting along rather than the elephant-style creatures they will eventually become). Since the creatures, developed from a tank to a creature-like assault transport by Joe Johnston and Ralph McQuarrie, are depicted as mechanical, and without very much personality, the pair creates a personality-less walk cycle that can be used over and over again with only a few modifications. Dennis Muren, with his background in stop motion animation, decides that this format is indeed going to be the best way forward for their shooting (photographed against blue screen-the plan being that the footage will then be optically composited onto the Norway footage, though this changes to painted backgrounds). 

A test cardboard mock-up for reference.

Ease Owyeung with the early mock-up.

Joe Johnston films test footage of the Walker mock-up.

Frame development for one of the first models. 

Articulation tests begin on the metal framed and jointed model. 

Another scale reference test of one of the mock-up Walkers.

Recalls Muren from an interview with journalist Ron Magid: "It would have been neat (animating the Walkers using motion-control), but I don't know if they ever would have worked. It would've taken forever just to do it, so I introduced stop-motion back into the movie series with the Walkers. That was something the technical group didn't want to do. But stop-motion was tried-and-true and George thought it was a good idea because it made everything look more mechanical, it helped us get the movie done. The tech guys wanted to do it all blue screen, I thought the technology we'd developed for Star Wars should not be applied to those scenes because blue screen doesn't work well in the day-time. So I managed to wrangle it in the other direction, the idea being that looking through the camera we could see what was wrong with the shot, and once it was shot, it was virtually finished." 

The various model parts needed to create the Walker models.

Lucas, feeling that the Walkers mechanical design, with its animal like movements, will have a very ominous effect on screen, is surprised by this old method being resurrected, but Muren knows that the combination is much faster and more economical. Lucas and ILM even early-on invite the legendary master of the process, Ray Harryhausen, to the effects facility and offer him the sequence to realize, but he ultimately proves too busy with commitments on the eventually made Clash of the Titans. 

For reference purposes, photographing the movement of animals (including horses) is an idea suggested by Jon Berg and Phil Tippet, with Muren and a crew visiting Marine World Africa USA, San Diego and additionally filming Indian elephant Mardji, previously used as a Bantha in Star Wars additional US-based 1977 photography, and capturing her movements on camera  (at the same time, prototype models are also videotaped in order to study their various movement problems) - the animalistic walking of the Walkers working well in later tests.

The 'small' Walker!

The core ILM team responsible for the Walkers onscreen realisation.

Joe Johnston adding finishing details in the ILM model shop.

Jon Berg and Phil Tippett in a special publicity image with their stop motion marvels.

Even with all the pre-planning, however, it would be the finished models themselves (which varied in size from eighteen inches to four-and-a-half feet tall (the latter of which, when photographed, would look fifty foot tall)) that would eventually determine their style of locomotion.