April 14 2026
By BARBARA ROBERTSON
Images courtesy of Industrial Light & Magic.
Magic can occur when the proper group of individuals come collectively on the proper time to work on the proper undertaking. That was true for the younger visible results crew working in a Van Nuys, California warehouse for the fledgling studio Industrial Light & Magic. The results they created for the 1977 breakout movie, Star Wars, made historical past. The movie received six Academy awards in 1978 together with Best Visual Effects, made tons of of tens of millions of {dollars} and set the stage for visible effects-driven blockbuster movies to come back.
As we commemorate ILM’s fiftieth anniversary, it’s becoming to rejoice an invention that made the visible results in Star Wars potential. The dramatic opening scene and iconic area battles couldn’t have occurred with out the Dykstraflex, the handmade, home-brewed movement management digicam system the crew constructed for the movie. Nothing fairly just like the Dykstraflex had existed earlier than. ILM’s crew named the system after John Dykstra, the “Special Photographic Effects Supervisor” – aka Visual Effects Supervisor, and constructed it fully from scratch.
“It was a huge effort,” Dykstra says. “We had to make the assumption that all the interactive pieces, the motion control system, the speed, the scale of the models, would integrate and support one another based on the ability of the guys at ILM to collaborate, and their willingness to put the project in the fore rather than individual promotion.” In 1978, Dykstra, Electronics Designer Al Miller and Electronic Systems Designer Jerry Jeffress acquired the Academy’s “Scientific and Technical Award” to acknowledge their achievement. The plaque learn: “To John C. Dykstra for the event of a facility uniquely oriented towards visible results images, and to Alvah J. Miller and Jerry Jeffress for the engineering of the Electronic Motion Control System used in live performance for a number of publicity visible results movement image images.
“I remember when the first Star Wars came out and I couldn’t figure out how the shots were done,” says John Knoll, Executive Creative Director at ILM, who was then a pupil and avid Cinefantastique reader. “There’s the famous shot of the TIE fighter diving down into the Death Star. It curves, drops, levels out and zooms down into the trench. I knew it wasn’t stop-motion because there’s motion blur, but it carried depth of field the whole way. I didn’t know how they did it.” They did it, in fact, utilizing the Dykstraflex, or D-Flex as ILMers typically discuss with the system. “The D-Flex was a real revolution,” Knoll says. “Before, there were often stylistic boundaries – live action would end and suddenly there would be a visual effect. The D-Flex was the first to break that boundary. The camera wasn’t restricted to shots with only simple moves and ones that had to be locked off. What we imagined could be executed. A whole world became doable.” Knoll joined ILM in 1986 and was a movement management digicam operator utilizing the D-Flex, its upgrades and revisions for 3 years earlier than transitioning to the digital world.
THE SYSTEM
The 1,500-pound Dykstraflex system was constructed with stepper motors, a VistaImaginative and prescient digicam on a increase, and usually a 40-foot observe. Camera operators used joysticks or potentiometers to program digicam strikes that might be recorded and repeated exactly. Simultaneous management of various axes, similar to roll, pan, tilt, swing, increase, traverse and observe, meant spaceships might financial institution, dive, fly and curve. One cross might need an X-wing starfighter curve towards the viewer, a second would possibly ship a second ship curving away. Additional passes might add lighting and the star discipline. Each cross can be considered in black and white on a Movieola and composited optically earlier than being filmed in colour and optically composited to create ultimate pictures. Although the system was revolutionary, John Dykstra and his merry band of artists and engineers didn’t invent the Dykstraflex out of a void. Visual results crews and others had used movement management techniques for years. “In the early days, visual effects for the most part relied on stop-motion animation,” Dykstra says. “With these incremental still frames, there is no motion blur. People understand if something has a jittery motion without motion blur that it’s not real.”
For Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey Douglas Trumbull, VES, and his workforce devised a movement management system that moved a digicam down a observe previous a mannequin, panning in a linear means, which stored element and depth of discipline. Multiple synchronized passes recorded and composited collectively produced stunning ultimate pictures with prime quality, stately movement. But even utilizing an improve for Silent Running, a digicam operator couldn’t speed up or decelerate the transferring digicam. Dykstra labored on Silent Running – his title was “Special Photographic Effects” – and that helped him land a job on a scientific undertaking funded by the National Science Foundation on the University of California Berkeley’s Environmental Simulation Laboratory. Researchers there wished to judge whether or not simulated environments might extra precisely convey how individuals would possibly expertise a proposed plan than static fashions and drawings. The objective was to find out what made photos plausible.
For the simulation, they constructed an in depth mannequin of a suburb and populated it with landscaping, streetlights, automobiles, homes, even gasoline stations. Each inch represented 30 ft of streets and terrain. A transferring gantry above the mannequin had a 16mm digicam hanging down and an optical system that offered an eye-level view. A PDP-11 laptop managed the rig, permitting a path to be exactly repeated. Of the 800 individuals who considered the simulation, many refused to imagine that fashions have been used. And it was only when it simulated one thing by no means earlier than seen by the viewers.
Dykstra’s subsequent undertaking can be Star Wars. George Lucas offered the chance, imaginative and prescient and wish. Dykstra and the younger crew he employed offered the MacGyver vitality and willingness. “I think George wanted the audience to be a participant, to become engaged at a personal level, to have the engagement that 2001 was able to generate,” Dykstra says. “The whole premise of the movie screen being a portal into which you are drawn had a lot to do with George’s vision of having visuals that supported his reality. But one of the difficult things to do is to find out what the cues are.”
“People have subliminal survival systems,” Dykstra explains. “They’re able to evaluate speed, how much energy something traveling carries; whether that rock coming toward you has the same sense of mass and trajectory as in real life. Does it bring you out of your seat and into the movie?” That, he says, was the premise behind the dogfight battles that have been intrinsic within the Star Wars films; behind capturing the vitality of handheld cameras in the course of the motion identical to World War II films, with ships flying by. “That was something I was totally involved in,” Dykstra says. “Creating that sense of momentum and personal involvement. That is what the Dykstraflex was involved in, to get all the subtle cues you have in real life.”
miniature for Star Wars: A New Hope (1977).
THE KEY
“The key was to figure out a way to integrate the motion of the camera in multiple axes and to have the camera in the same position more than one time,” Dykstra notes. “What we did was control the camera moves with a computer, which gave us the ability to synchronize several axes with the motion of the camera and repeat them. We could generate multiple elements with the same camera move.” Knoll states, “To put all that into a package that was cameraman-friendly, with a conventional-like camera crane that could shoot any move, was transformative.” First cameraman Richard Edlund, VES, and his digicam operators might movie one cross and the system would exactly replicate the movement for a second cross. A increase arm let the underslung digicam transfer near a mannequin. The VistaImaginative and prescient digicam gave them large-format movie. But there was one thing extra.
“I had precision accuracy of the camera in all axes of motion and could vary the speed,” Dykstra says. “To move with acceleration with the motion control system was something no other system could do. Then, to enhance that sense of speed change, we could move close to the miniatures.” That flexibility proved to be important for Star Wars’ spaceship dogfights. In the tv documentary Light and Magic, George Lucas says, “Movies are kinetic. It’s about movement. Forget the actors, forget the story. It’s all about movement.” No different system offered digicam strikes with acceleration and deceleration.
“John [Dykstra] must have recognized that we needed to be able to slow things down and speed them up, and he was absolutely right,” says Dennis Muren, VES, who was a second cameraman at ILM again in 1977 on A New Hope and went on to win eight Academy Awards for finest visible results at ILM earlier than semi-retiring. “If you’re going to have a curve, one motion is going to need to slow down, and then you have to go back and put in the other motion of speeding up to get the curve.”
After New Hope, Muren moved north with ILM from Los Angeles to Marin County and was a cameraman on Close Encounters. “That system was all linear, nothing like the same situation at all; it was easy,” Muren says. “New Hope had been so hard I was just thinking about getting the shots done. It took a long time to figure out mechanically how to use the D-Flex. Each motor controlled one axis, so trying to do two things at once, like pan and tilt, was like working an Etch A Sketch. And you’re doing the layers all one at a time, so you can’t really see them together until you play it back. But, during that time I worked on Close Encounters, I thought about what I had learned on Star Wars. I thought about all the dynamics you can have in a three-dimensional space.” Muren envisioned these new shot designs realizing the Dykstraflex would give him the management he wanted.
BEYOND A NEW HOPE
“If you can formulate three dimensions and fluidity in your mind, you can design shots that you’ve never seen before that are completely different from storyboards,” Muren says. “You may find a frame that’s like the storyboard, but the dynamics give it power. We used to take storyboards more literally,” he provides. “But you know, even previs today is done with cheating. If you have something go off in the distance, they’ll just scale it down. They think it’s the same thing, but it’s not. It’s not going to have the reality that the rest of the film has with actors walking around and living in that world.”
the motion-control digicam system and Razor Crest miniature created for The Mandalorian Season 1 (2019).
Muren tried out his new shot design concepts on Battlestar Galactica in 1978 utilizing the Dykstraflex. He describes a storyboard with tiny Cylon ships off within the distance strafing the Galactica ship, capturing at it, getting farther and farther away. “I thought what if you start the Cylon close to the camera with the Galactica way down there,” he says. “You start going with the Cylon as it goes faster and farther, and it ends up reversed with the Galactica huge and the Cylon small. I realized recently that it’s a Vertigo shot. It was one long shot, but sadly they cut it into three shots for the film. That’s what the Dykstraflex gave me. The possibility. I could previsualize something in my head spatially with multiple objects moving at various speeds and put them in a way that it creates something dynamic at the level needed for a major motion picture – not just moving around, but with pacing – and then get it on film.”
After Galactica, Muren grew to become Effects Director of Photography for The Empire Strikes Back and acquired an Oscar for finest visible results, as did VFX Supervisor Richard Edlund, who had moved to Northern California with ILM. They each earned Oscars once more for Return of the Jedi.
“I would never have conceived a tool that complicated,” Muren says of the Dykstraflex. “And yet once you figured it out, you could do anything. I took shot design further because I had a tool that could do it. And, I applied what I learned to later films, even to Jurassic Park, even though there’s no motion control in Jurassic. I’m very glad John built the Dykstraflex and that George let him build this crazy thing. It gave us a level of wonder that would not otherwise have been there. It opened up something for me.”
It affected others, as properly. Take animator Peter Daulton, for instance. “I learned how to be a camera assistant and motion control camera operator on the D-Flex,” says Daulton, who labored at ILM from 1983 till 2019. “Those skills came in handy when I made the switch to CG in 1993 as an animator. The Dykstraflex made my dream career possible.” Daulton is now writing, producing, directing and filming quick documentary movies. The final thing he remembers capturing on the Dykstraflex was a miniature gothic mansion for Death Becomes Her. “Soon after that, I switched to computer graphics. As a motion control operator, I had learned how to smooth curves, to modify our curves. That was a step toward CG.”
“The D-Flex was pivotal in spawning a significant era in visual effects,” says Jim Morris, Pixar’s General Manager, who was at ILM from 1987 to 2005 as a producer, Executive in Charge of Production, then General Manager. “It was a piece of mechanical equipment able to do a job because it was connected to a computer, which made the repeatability possible. It was a transitional link between the photochemical and mechanical technologies used for years and the digital worlds now.”
Motion management camerawork fell out of favor when miniatures tended to develop into costlier than CG fashions, and when laptop graphics grew to become extra versatile – a digital mannequin might be utilized in an infinite variety of concurrent pictures, whereas a bodily mannequin might solely be used to movie a single shot at any given time. But just lately, John Knoll returned to the world of movement management camerawork to create some pictures for the tv collection Mandalorian. “[Producer, writer, director] Jon Favreau became interested in using miniatures,” Knoll says. “We showed him a couple of [CG] shots of the Razor Crest flying through space, and he said that something didn’t feel right. Shouldn’t it be more reflective? He thought we should build a model and shoot reference.” Knoll took it on as a problem and constructed a movement management system in his storage, together with all of the electronics, that he used to movie 16 pictures of a mannequin constructed by modelmakers John Goodson and Dan Patrascu. “Even though we used the miniature for only 16 shots, they made all the other shots look better,” he says. “We can get a look with a miniature physical object and lighting that’s surprisingly hard to do with computer graphics. We retooled the look of the CG model.”
It’s straightforward to consider the Dykstraflex as merely the system that gave George Lucas his WWII canine fights in area, though that’s accomplishment sufficient. But individuals utilizing it achieved one thing deep and lengthy lasting that modified visible results past Star Wars. It opened concepts for shot design that undoubtedly helped Dennis Muren win eight Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects. It helped foster new careers for artists like Peter Daulton. It was a transitional hyperlink. And, a modern-day model of the Dykstraflex is getting used as we speak at ILM. It has given visible results artists the opportunity of photos by no means seen earlier than. And the revolution continues to today.
“At their core, that’s what all these tools should be about,” Morris says. “They should extend our artistic reach, to be creative and make better stuff.” And then magic occurs.
Dystraflex on the Academy
The D-Flex moved to Northern California with ILM in 1978, and digicam operators continued utilizing it and up to date variations of it till round 1992, and it was put aside. People fortunate sufficient to be in L.A. in 2024 had a chance to see the legendary digicam system in motion throughout an exhibition on the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
“The Dykstraflex is part of the Academy Collection and a revolutionary camera system that fundamentally changed how special effects were filmed in the original [Star Wars] trilogy and transformed cinematic visual effects worldwide,” says Museum Director and President Amy Homma.
Working in partnership with the Science and Technology Council on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Academy Foundation Vice President and VFX Branch Governor Brooke Breton, VES, together with Visual Effects Producer and Historian Gene Kozicki, VES, helped spearhead the hassle.
It took about six months to plan and one week to cobble collectively and set up the Dykstraflex and a mannequin of the Millennium Falcon. Scheduled to run from May 4 to July 8, the exhibition was so in style the museum prolonged it to July 28. Live demonstrations occurred all through.
“The turnout exceeded our expectations,” Homma says. “Especially during weekend demonstrations in May. It was standing room only for each of our sessions, and we reached our maximum capacity in our gallery.” Special company included Richard Edlund and John Dykstra, each of whom acquired Oscars for the Best Visual Effects in A New Hope, as did with Jon Erland, VES, and Alvah Miller, the electronics and digital techniques designers.