It’s worth remembering that 2022 is still the 20th anniversary of Attack of the Clones and to continue the celebrations, the official site catch up with prequel trilogy post-supervisor and technical supervisor (nowadays Lucasfilm’s vice president of post-production) Mike Blanchard to discuss the giant leaps the first prequel trilogy sequel made back at the turn of the century.
StarWars.com: Earlier you touched on the fact that Sony cameras used for Attack of the Clones were “beta” versions with a lot of testing and development still required. These cameras arrived quite late in the process, roughly a week before the start of shooting. What do you recall about that final week and the last-minute tests that were happening?
Mike Blanchard: That actually brings up a terrible memory. It was very late in the build-up to the first day of shooting. We’d received a film-out test back from the lab, and it was awful. It didn’t look right. We managed to sort it out, but it caused a lot of stress. That was definitely a low point because it was so late and we’d done so much work. Fred and I were frantically trying to sort it out. You just don’t want to have anything like that at the 11th hour to shake the confidence of the team. There was so much at stake and many people in the business were actively rooting against us.
Somewhere along the way, something went wrong with this test, but we’d seen enough to know the system was okay. But it was hard not to wonder what we might have missed. There’s a lot of excitement and anxiety right before production starts. This was just another hiccup that you forget about after the fact, but in the moment, it’s dozens of phone calls back and forth and lots of waiting for the lab to re-process everything again.
[lasso box=”1368023495″ id=”169655″ link_id=”43567″ ref=”amzn-star-wars-padawan-2″]
