Iconic Spots and Images Shown from a Different Perspective

Star Wars is a massively influential movie today, so it can be difficult to recall that when it was first made, it was just like any other untested studio movie. It, too, had a budget to stick to and did not have massive special effects. (Yes, today is a very different story!)

So, in order to achieve the now-iconic opening crawl of text, the filmmakers needed to resort to some fancy footwork. Rather than some digital screen work, visual effects photographer Richard Edlund used a tilted hand camera to pan down the introduction slowly. It is a simple way to achieve the shot, but we would have never expected it from such a futuristic movie!