Around the Web – Original Death Star FX on YouTube

Every now and then a real gem stands out from the mixed bag of internet content, worthy of sharing. The above YouTube video comes from the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), a research group established in 1973 in the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Its relationship to Star Wars? …EVL is perhaps best known for the computer graphics featured in the Rebel briefing room scenes at the end of A New Hope. The clip is 10 minutes long, and has Larry Cuba describing how he animated the Death Star vector graphics for ANH – painstakingly, manually digitising the surface of the Death Star’s equatorial trench in order to have it correspond to the actual tiles that made up the filming miniatures. A beautiful piece of work!