**Spoilers ahead** Now that we know what’s in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” with many people having taken in multiple viewings of the movie, the conversation is turning to what didn’t make the picture. J.J. Abrams previously stated that his first cut of the movie ran just over 2 1/2 hours, and that about a dozen scenes wound up on the cutting room floor. And a couple of weeks back, many of the axed scenes were detailed, and among the most interesting, was a larger role for Maz Kanata, played by Lupita Nyong’o. In the original script, the smuggler used her Force powers to fight off the First Order and stormtroopers. And a few more details about that scene have been revealed.
SFX Supervisor Chris Corbuld recently chatted with Collider, and shared his thoughts on the sequence. “There was a particular part of a scene that never made it, where they go underneath the castle and they’re going into the underground passageways, and stormtroopers are coming down the stairs and Maz uses her powers to collapse the ceiling,” he said.
Perhaps we’ll see in on the DVD which will feature deleted scenes, but as Abrams made clear, no extended cut.
Meanwhile, among all the big battles and reveals throughout ‘The Force Awakens,’ it also has plenty of little moments of magic. And one of them is quite simple, showing Rey turning one of her food portions magically into a loaf of bread. And as it turns out, that wasn’t CGI, but a practical effect.
“I’m gonna be famous for Star Wars for nothing else but this bread! It was a little gag which was incredibly successful, everybody thought it was CGI,” CFX & SMUFX Creative Supervisor Neal Scanlan told DP/30 (via The Independent). “We moulded up an inflatable bread so that it was deflated underneath the liquid and then we slowly inflated it and sucked out the liquid with vacuum pumps at the same time to produce this bread coming up and forming.”
“It took about three months,” he added. “The actual mechanics of it was fairly simple, but the actual cosmetic side took a lot longer.”
That’s some nice movie magic right here.
Check out Collider and DP/30 conversations with Corbuld and Scanlan below.
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