(Admit it: beautiful, isn’t it?)
Roger Christian
It seems like every Star Wars re-releases in recent years have tagged “never-before-seen” featurettes about the films’ creations, but none of them ever touched on a major tangential part of the original trilogy: Black angela short film of 22 minutes is included The Empire strikes back‘s European and Australian theatrical runs in 1980.
The short was considered lost for over 30 years, until an accidental discovery in 2011 of a negative in Universal Studios. That movie was created, written, and directed by Roger Christian, the Academy Award-winning set decorator of A new hope and art director of classics like Alien And Life of Brian. And after years of effort to fully restore it, Christian has now uploaded it to YouTube.
Tuesday’s upload was preceded by an introduction from Christian, who confirmed that Black angel was made after George Lucas gave him a £25,000 grant to produce something for of the empire theatrical performance. “He read my story and commissioned it on the spot,” Christian said. As our own Nathan Mattise reported in a 2013 feature film, after the negative was rediscovered, a volunteer restoration crew went to work preparing it for public screenings at film festivals beginning that year.
Christian warned YouTube viewers to “turn your clocks back 34 years,” but while Black angelThe film’s pace and content may not surprise fans hoping for a blockbuster experience, but the Scottish landscapes and moody setpieces have aged much better than the director of the short lets on. The influence of the movie alone might be worth a quick stream. Black angel is where Christian Lucas showed off step-printing, the technique that eventually made its mark during lightsaber battles in Rich. From the Ars story that broke the discovery:
Christian was forced to use some emergency techniques because there was not enough basic material for it Black angel to fill the required 25 minute run time. “So we slowed down fight scenes in it to build up time,” said Christian. They did this through a technique called step-printing. Strategic scenes are shot at a slower film speed to speed up the action, then frames are printed at a lower speed on the finished movie. Action becomes very fluid, with individual moments seemingly flowing into the next.
In his introduction to the film, Christian also hinted at a June 2 announcement. Black angel in the usual stream suspects and the movie still hasn’t had a DVD or Blu-ray announcement, we wonder if that’s what we should expect. In the meantime, watch the film in its entirety below.