I was very surprised at how many people and time it took to make just 1 minute of film for Star Wars Episode III. I have seen all of the star wars movies and I knew that they involved a lot of work, but I truly was taken aback by the actual number of people that the movie required for one 60 second scene. I heard in the clip that this was one of the most important scenes from this film, but still could not believe what it took put it together. The amount of people working on the shot where the camera is watching the lava flow through the mountainous landscape on the planet Mustafar was amazing. There were 47 “practical modelers” who worked on building the set for that one shot. They had to find a good material, carve it down to look the way that George Lucas envisioned it, paint it, and figure out a way to have lava flow over it to make it look perfect. They built the set on a large platform that could be tilted in order to control the speed of the lava flow, which was very smart. They also not only had to decide what to use as lava, which they used Methacil for because of its color and viscosity; but then how to make it light up to match the ominous glow that real lava has.

After they had finished the shot and disassembled the set, George Lucas looked at the footage and was not happy with what he saw. He envisioned the shot going against the flow of the lava, and up the landscape of Mustafar. This in turn took even more manpower to figure out how to fix this problem. It went into the hands of a different department, who then realized that they could flip the “pan” and rewind the footage to make the shot that lasted only about five seconds. This took two departments with nearly one hundred people to make a five second clip, which is truly astonishing.