Mike Blanchard, Lucasfilm’s vice president of post-production has retired after almost three decades at the company and Lucasfilm take a look at those action-packed years and the projects he worked on.
Beginning with the Star Wars Special Edition (1997) releases, then Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999) and Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (2002) as the first all-digital blockbuster, Blanchard manned the front lines (read more about his work on Clones specifically at StarWars.com). He haunted industry conventions to recruit partner companies to help develop individual tools. Among countless projects, he collaborated with Sony, Panavision, and the Lucasfilm onset crew to devise a new camera system and workflow that would soon become standard-operating-procedure on movie productions around the world. Blanchard partnered with his former colleagues at ILM to enhance their digital dailies process and helped create fully digital masters of The Phantom Menace to be screened with some of the first DLP cinema projectors made by Texas Instruments.
From one new challenge to the next, Blanchard had little time to reflect on it all. Looking back now, he explains that what got him through those pioneering days was “loyalty” to George Lucas. “Don’t get me wrong. It was hard,” he says. “We had a small team. What George asked for was difficult because he was so far ahead of everything. But there was no confusion about what we were supposed to do. We had a clarity of purpose that came straight from George. We didn’t want to let him down. For me that was it. Once we knew what he wanted, we had to do everything we could to get it done.”
Throughout the intrepid adventure that was the prequel trilogy, Blanchard remained faithful but cautious, with the ever-present thought that something would go irretrievably wrong and foil Lucas’ vision. But their tireless efforts paid off, and Lucas’ example continues to inspire the diverse approaches to filmmaking methods today.