Found this great article with amazing pictures from Behind-the-Scenes Photos of ILM’s Greats: Jurassic Park, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., and Beyond.
Check out the pictures and hope you agree with me on how awesome they are, lets just hope you enjoy it!

Eight-time Oscar winner Dennis Muren is the first visual-effects artist to earn a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Ahead of Encore’s November 12 documentary about Industrial Light & Magic—the visual-effects arm of Lucasfilm where he is creative director—Muren shares behind-the-scenes photos from five of his famous projects: Terminator 2, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back, Jurassic Park, and E.T.

“Here, stop-motion master animator Phil Tippett [center], Mike Pangrazio [right], and I stand between two incredible matte paintings used to depict the windswept snowscape of Hoth. Pangrazio, a legendary I.L.M. artist, painted many such paintings during the production of The Empire Strike Back to allow for scenic vistas, practical sets to be extended, or, in this case, a stop-motion puppet of a Tauntaun and rider to be inserted for a story point.”

“While a number of complex approaches were considered and tested to realize the ghosts that appear at the climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark, in the end, it was model-maker Steve Gawley’s idea to shoot the silken ghost puppets in a tank of water that yielded the haunting realism that Steven [Spielberg] was after.”

“Photographing E.T.’s ship posed a considerable challenge. Due to budgetary constraints, we were limited in the scale at which we could build the ship so it ended up being quite small. Adding to that, Steven wanted the ship to be highly reflective so we had to use huge cards to reflect the warm sky into the ship. We also filmed the miniature at 120 frames per second to give the ship a sense of mass.”

“In this shot, E.T. is on a hilltop overlooking the city. We realized the shot using a combination of a miniature set in the foreground and a matte painting in the background for the city. E.T. was a small puppet mounted to a rod that slid down a track, which gave the appearance that he was walking down the hillside toward the city. A lot of what makes this shot successful is the lighting and composition. The foreground looks a bit foreboding, whereas the cityscape has an almost magical quality about it. Hundreds of twinkling lights beckon him. In a way, it reflects what E.T. is feeling at this point in the story.”

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