One of the most heart-pumping and enthralling action set pieces in The Phantom Menace is the pod racing scene, which sees Anakin Skywalker demonstrate the full scope of his raw talent. The sequence remains one of the better-received aspects of the film, which is why fans might be surprised to learn just how challenging it was to execute.
John Knoll, the renowned visual effects supervisor who worked on the film, spoke about crafting the pod racing scene in The Phantom Menace. Knoll highlighted how ILM lacked the necessary technology and tools to execute the scene and had to come up with compelling solutions for the same. Here is what Knoll said about the creation of The Phantom Menace‘s pod racing scene.
John Knoll Talks Challenges of The Phantom Menace‘s Podracing Scene
John Knoll is a visual effects supervisor who serves as the chief creative officer at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). Knoll extensively worked on the visual effects of the prequel trilogy of Star Wars movies directed by George Lucas.
On the eve of the 25th anniversary of The Phantom Menace, Knoll spoke with the official Star Wars website, where he broke down several of the film’s action set pieces and the visual effects work involved with them. Knoll admitted that the film’s pod racing scene was one of the most challenging set pieces.
“It was exactly the kind of sequence that we’re really drawn to, in that it presented a bunch of challenges that you couldn’t really do with the tools that we had available at the time.”
Knoll made the above statement, explaining how the challenges posed by the scene became evident to the ILM crew after reading the script.
He added that the primary challenge before the crew was to generate the environments for the pod racing scene, which was nearly an impossible task with the tools they had at the time. Knoll explained that using some of the existing techniques such as models and matte paintings would not have allowed them to capture the speed and feel of the environment required for the scene.
John Knoll Explains How ILM Created the Tools to Shoot The Phantom Menace‘s Podracing Scene
Knoll further explained that after eliminating models and matte paintings, the only viable option left in front of the crew was to rely on computer graphics. However, Knoll admitted that the team had not used photorealistic CG renderings for terrains up until that point. He said:
“We’d done some tricks where we’d taken matte paintings and we’d projected them onto geometry to get some perspective change, and [model maker] Paul Huston and I had been experimenting with that technique of camera projection. So I thought, Well, maybe this is the way to do it.”
Thus, Knoll revealed that the pod racing scene was executed using a combination of models, matte paintings, and computer graphics. Huston’s models for the pods were digitized before Knoll took photographs of them from different angles and superimposed the photos with the digitized version.
After a further four to five weeks of work on the technique, the crew obtained the first properly rendered shot that showcased the fully synthetic terrain with a very high level of photographic realism and speed, which the crew had been hoping to achieve for properly executing the scene. Ultimately, Knoll and his team relied on three-dimensional matte paintings and some other tricks to pull off the pod racing scene.
The Phantom Menace is streaming on Disney+.
