We lastly know the identification of the mysterious Pressure ghost that briefly haunts Anakin Skywalker’s again within the lava-filled showdown on the finish of Revenge of the Sith.
When you’ve watched Revenge of the Sith with out ever noticing this man, don’t fear. He seems in body for only a cut up second and is admittedly solely seen should you’re watching in sluggish movement or going frame-by-frame. However he’s nonetheless there, a face frozen in time, peeking proper over Anakin’s shoulder.
Apparently, folks have been speaking about this man since 2015, however in 2024, the thriller popped up on Reddit again — prompting one Industrial Gentle and Magic veteran to dive into the thriller. Todd Vaziri, who labored on Revenge of the Sith as a compositor, determined to dive into archival footage — not a straightforward activity, contemplating the archival footage had been moved off the servers years in the past.
“I feel it took 24 hours to unearth the footage and put it again on our servers. I used to be so excited, my coronary heart was pounding out of my chest. Nobody had seen the unique greenscreen footage for almost twenty years,” Vaziri told Ian Kintzle for the Star Wars Celebration 2025 program. “The issue was I didn’t bear in mind precisely what these plates regarded like, each as a result of it wasn’t my shot, and it was twenty years prior. So I dug, and I dug, and eventually I discovered the plate pictures. I couldn’t consider it. There, on-set, was a person — possible a stunt rigger — carrying not a gown, however a peculiar shirt that resembled one, standing behind Hayden, manually puppeteering the greenscreen lava skiff that he and Ewan have been preventing on. His face and the ‘Pressure ghost’ matched up frame-for-frame.”
Whereas this second would possibly technically rely as a “mistake,” it’s additionally the results of some pure film magic that exhibits how a lot laborious, sensible work went into the prequels. As Vaziri instructed Kintzle, “No one that was a part of this course of ever caught [the guy] and that’s the way it made it within the film. However in a method, I feel it’s actually fantastic. Loads of my pictures have errors in them, and because the saying goes: excellent is the enemy of fine. We would like our pictures to be as excellent as they are often, however we will’t hit the whole lot. Within the final 20 years, we’ve got advanced what we name the “Last Examine” course of, which is our method of scrutinizing pictures earlier than they depart ILM. An additional step of high quality management, if you’ll. The underside line is that we put human fingers on each single one of many 1000’s of pictures that you just see in Star Wars. This world is handmade, and little issues like this grow to be a part of ILM historical past.”
