Lost for decades , the sword - and - sorcery little film that showed before Star Wars : The Empire Strikes Back is finally being show again at the Mill Valley Film Festival . And it grow out the most innovative matter about Black Angel , a proficiency for slack down the fight scenes , was purely to pad out the length .
Black Angel , directed by Star Wars / foreign prowess film director Roger Christian ( who later directed Battlefield Earth ) was famous for pioneering the use of “ footprint - printing ” to slow down the activeness in the fight picture . George Lucas was so impressed with this technique , he used it in Empire Strikes Back , as well .
But asChristian explicate to Ars Technica , the reason for slack down the competitiveness scenes was n’t to make them reckon cool — it was to make the curt film long enough :
There was n’t enough initial cloth for Black Angel to fill the required 25 - moment runtime . “ So we slowed down fight prospect in it to work up up the time , ” Christian said . They did this through a technique calledstep - printing process . Strategic scenes are shot at a slower flick speed so natural action is cannonball along up , then frame are printed at a slower swiftness onto the ruined film . Action becomes very fluid , with item-by-item moments on the face of it smearing together with the next .
“ I ’m just felicitous Alan show me how to step print in those twenty-four hour period . I have it away the look ; it just transmute into some mythologic area , ” he read . “ But literally that was because we did n’t have enough photographic film to up the time to the 25 minutes it had to be . All this was running through my head during the first screening , but Lucas absolutely loved it . So did other people . ”
George LucasMoviesStar Wars
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