CALLING THE SHOTS; `PHANTOM MENACE' VISUAL-EFFECTS SPECIALISTS REVEAL THEIR SECRETS (INCLUDING A HIDDEN E.T.).

Byline: David Bloom Daily News Staff Writer

They put the sizzle in the lightsabers, the juke in Jar Jar, the bang in the battle droids and the wiles in Watto.

Pumping out a record 2,000 digital-effects shots in just 18 months for ``Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace,'' they were the true Jedi knights, the ones who sliced through technical challenges of all sorts to give the exacting George Lucas the sleek digital sheen and jaw-dropping effects that drive his latest space epic.

And finally, after two years of tight-lipped labor at Skywalker Ranch, the top visual-effects men at Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic could reveal some of the little secrets they tucked into ``The Phantom Menace.''

The event was the Visual Effects Society's first-ever Festival of Visual Effects, held last weekend in North Hollywood. Among the embarrassment of riches were key visual-effects and animation leaders from ILM. Among their secrets:

Now we know what E.T. did after ending his movie career.

As the film neared its completion, Lucas showed a rough cut to buddy Steven Spielberg, whose own directorial credits include the beloved alien-in-Chatsworth tale, ``E.T. The Extraterrestrial.''

Spielberg and Lucas decided it might be fun to have E.T. in the Galactic Senate, so in March, just two months before the film was supposed to hit theaters, the effects guys got a call.

``So we put E.T. in one shot and Steven said, `I couldn't see it,' so we added him bigger in another shot,'' said visual-effects supervisor Scott Squires, winner of an Oscar for technical achievement and twice nominated for other Oscars on ``Dragonheart'' and ``The Mask.''

Want to spot the former Valley alien now that he's made it to the big time? Look lower left in the wide shots. But it may take a magnifying glass and the jog-shuttle control on your DVD months from now to get a good look.

Talk about space odysseys. Another little background joke involves the scene where Liam Neeson's Jedi knight Qui-Gon Jinn tries to buy replacement parts for the damaged space ship in which he, the queen and others escaped from Naboo.

As the pugnacious parts dealer Watto and Qui-Gon walk through the outdoor back area of Watto's shop, look between them. In the background is the pod, minus one dead astronaut, from the late Stanley Kubrick's ``2001: A Space Odyssey.''

As Queen Amidala and some of her troops storm through the palace hallway, trying to capture the viceroy, look over their shoulders.

``There's a portrait in the hallway, and it's (of) George Lucas,'' said Greg Maloney, who oversaw two-dimensional compositing duties in the film.

Did you happen to notice those lovely, cascading waterfalls in the long shots of the queen's home planet, Naboo? That's not water, it's salt, cascading down models that were 12 to 14 feet high.

The crew shot the cascading salt with extremely fast cameras, running at 96 or 120 frames per second, four or five times the normal film speed. Who needs particle effects in your computer-animation package when you've got a mess of Morton's to pour?

Creating many shots was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, as it flashes by at 24 frames per second. Backgrounds would be pieced in from 1/30th scale models shot at various distances, full-size props and digital creations ``blue-screened'' onto the shot, while many key characters in each scene didn't exist. They, too, were digital and had to be pieced in around everyone else, along with their shadows and reflections.

``When you first saw this (raw film footage from live-action shooting), you'd just scratch your head and say, `How are we going to make this a movie?' '' said Maloney.

Six effects shots that were ``finaled'' - having gone through the entire creation process until they literally had Lucas' personal stamp of approval - were later edited out of the final version of the movie that hit the screen. Can you say ``special edition''?

Jar Jar's father didn't like him initially either.

Rob Coleman was the film's animation director, ``responsible for basically everything with a head on it,'' creating characters for all three crews of special-effects artists who worked on the film.

In all, 45 animators labored over 810 of those 2,000 shots, or about an hour of the film, creating and breathing life into 66 different kinds of characters, including four speaking parts, Coleman said.

The most controversial of those animated characters has been Jar Jar Binks, the goofball gungan who provides pratfalls and patois in near equal amounts throughout about 30 minutes of screen time.

``When I speak to kids, I talk about Jar Jar. When I speak to you (adults), I talk about Watto,'' Coleman said. ``I read the Internet.''

Coleman acknowledged, however, that ``when I read the script for the first time, I had the same (negative) reaction to Jar Jar. But I really felt like my little brain shouldn't be asking these questions.''

More recently, he feels better about Jar Jar, in part because of the reception it gets from children.

``When you talk to the people that George thinks should be the focus of the movie, kids between 9 and 15, they love Jar Jar,'' Coleman said. ``And what I've noticed is when people see the movie a second time, they're willing to give Jar Jar a second chance. But I've stopped watching the (Internet) news groups.''

There's a reason Jar Jar doesn't walk like a human. He isn't one.

``He actually can't walk like us; it comes out of his bone structure,'' which the computer modeled and is very different from a human's hips and knees, Coleman said. ``I actually grew to love it. I think it adds to his character.''

Actually, Jar Jar has five different gaits, including ``the hot sand walk,'' the ``gungan shuffle,'' and the ``walking in leaves'' walk, Coleman said.

Watto was first.

Coleman said he ``fell in love with him from the first time I read the script. I've been very pleased with the reaction to Watto.''

Also, because Watto has very little hard-to-animate clothing, he was the first character the animators tackled.

When Qui-Gon asks the gungan leader what would happen to Jar Jar after the Jedis left, the original dialogue said he would be ``bounded unto death.'' The sentence was later struck from the film, to the chagrin of Jar Jar haters everywhere.

Coleman, who had worked at ILM on such films as ``Men in Black'' for four years before ``Phantom Menace,'' had never actually met Lucas before being named head of the film's animation unit.

So when the call came telling him of the important assignment, ``I was terrified,'' Coleman said.

Even more terrifying: being handed the initial scene drawings for the hugely complicated battle scene between the gungans and battle droids during the film's climax.

``I can't even tell you what it's like to get handed a storyboard like this,'' Coleman said. ``I love this scene, but it's almost impossible to tell you how many things are moving around on here.''

Lucas did what he could to ease Coleman into his task. During a two-week stint while shooting was going on in London, Coleman and Lucas talked endlessly during breaks in filming about Lucas' vision of the characters, their backgrounds and looks.

``Would Watto be from Tattoine? Would he be wiping his brow?'' Coleman said of the kinds of questions they were kicking back and forth.

The digital-effects guys wouldn't have used the new, extremely fast Kodak film stock chosen for ``Phantom Menace'' by the director of photography. Its relatively large grain, particularly in its blue register, may have looked fabulous on screen, but it made melding blue-screened digital shots and blue uniforms even more of a pain, said Squires.

``Ideally, you would shoot on the slowest stock you can get away with, with the finest grain possible,'' Squires said.

Of course, Lucas will sidestep all that in Episode II: He plans to shoot it all on high-definition digital video, one of the first films to be made that way. He's already begun the process, sneaking five high-definition digital video shots into Episode I. Squires wasn't saying which ones.

Testing has already begun on how best to use the HD video cameras for the next film, and Squires said, ``There'll be another set of issues to deal with.''

The next episode is less than three years away and work has already begun.

During the recent Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, ``Star Wars'' producers said they had already begun pre-production meetings on Episode II, days before Episode I had opened.

And for the ILM jedis waving their digital swords over all this, they'll be back at the computers by next February, angling for a release date of May 19, 2002. May the Force be with them.

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2 Photos

Photo: (1) The battle between the droids and gungans was so complicated, it terrified the film's animation director.

(2) A pod from ``2001: A Space Odyssey'' hides in the background as Qui-Gon Jinn and Anakin Skywalker pay a visit to Watto's shop.