Lucas was a mechanically inclined artist, but a bit of an untested autodidact when he set out to make “Star Wars.” As he told J.W. Rinzler in the author’s definitive “The Making of Star Wars:”
“I learned everything I could about special effects in school. I got the books and read everybody. But I hadn’t worked very extensively with special effects and optical problems, and there aren’t that many people around who know this kind of stuff anymore.”
With Trumbull out of the picture, Lucas turned to Dykstra and conveyed his vision of a rollicking mainstream entertainment featuring state-of-the-art space skirmishes. “More than anything else, he wanted to get fluidity of motion,” said Dykstra, “The ability to move the camera around so that you could create the illusion of actually photographing spaceships from a camera platform in space.” Lucas gave Dykstra a visual illustration of what he wanted by showing him an eight-minute clip reel (cut down from 20-plus hours of footage) of aerial combat from black-and-white war flicks. “I would have the plane going from right to left,” said Lucas, “And a plane coming toward us and flying away from us, to see if the movement would generate excitement.”
Dykstra knew exactly how to do this. He just needed the go-ahead to build the camera that could pull it off. The technology was called “motion control,” and the Death Star trench run wouldn’t exist without it. Bringing it into existence was the trick.
Lucas is both a control freak and a homebody. Given his druthers, he’d probably never leave the San Francisco Bay Area. Unfortunately, Dykstra couldn’t envision getting his motion control camera up to speed outside of Southern California. Lucas reluctantly trusted his newfound collaborator, and let him set up a laboratory in an abandoned Van Nuys warehouse.
Source From: www.slashfilm.com
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