![]() ![]() The new law spurred Appleyard and Craik to tackle a thorny issue in the planning and development of public works, says urban designer Peter Bosselmann, who worked with Appleyard and Craik in UC Berkeley's Environmental Simulation Laboratory and later led the lab after Appleyard's death in 1982. The purpose of the law was to prevent environmental damage and to "stimulate the health and welfare of man." In 1970, then-President Richard Nixon signed the "National Environmental Policy Act" into law, which required federal agencies to start taking into account the environmental impacts of construction projects, like highways. In the early 1970s he partnered with his friend, Berkeley psychologist Kenneth Craik, and together they helped establish the new field of environmental psychology, which investigates how people are affected by their surrounding environment, from busy streets to peaceful parks. for public planningĭonald Appleyard was a professor of urban design at UC Berkeley with a passion for how streets, neighborhoods and entire cities can be designed to maximize the quality of life and safety of their residents. "And to discover that it's a 3-foot-long model? It's just, how did they do it? " A new hope. "The one that blew everyone away was that very first shot in Star Wars with this ship that looks like it's a mile long, flying overhead," remembers ILM Executive Creative Director John Knoll of his reaction when he first saw "Star Wars" as a boy. In the process, Dykstra and others in the lab prototyped some of the techniques and equipment that the inventive team at ILM would later use to draw audiences into a perceptually believable fantasy with dogfighting TIE fighters and trench-running X-wings. The research and technological innovations achieved in the Berkeley lab provided a new understanding of how people respond to what they see - be it real or on celluloid - and how that understanding could be applied. The Dykstraflex system, including the crane and dolly track, with a model TIE fighter and bluescreen background. Copyright Industrial Light & Magic © & ™ Lucasfilm Ltd. ![]() A few years later, all three would become founding members of ILM, where they would expand on the work at Berkeley to create a computer-controlled camera system capable of movie-quality special effects - the eponymous "Dykstraflex" system which was first used for "Star Wars."Ĭredit: Courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd. "The focus of the project required that I figure out, in a scientific way, the things that made the image believable," says John Dykstra, who worked on the experiment in Berkeley's Environmental Simulation Laboratory in the 1970s along with Jerry Jeffress and Alvah Miller. That innovative fusion was based on experimental techniques first tested in a research project at the University of California, Berkeley and supported by the U.S. They combined technology and artistry with a keen understanding of the fundamentals of human perception. ![]() The staff of ILM ignited a revolution in filmmaking aesthetics. That scene and many others were created for the first "Star Wars" movie by Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas' then-fledgling special effects company. ![]() It was, of course, an elaborate fake - constructed and photographed by skilled artists in a humble warehouse outside Los Angeles. That iconic opening shot of 1977's "Star Wars" is seared into the collective memory of millions, if not billions, of people. With mouths agape, movie audiences for more than 40 years have watched a certain outgunned rebel spaceship's futile attempt to flee a ginormous imperial star destroyer. ![]()
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