“These AT-AT Walkers looked much bigger in the sale brochure!”
This picture shows yet more work by Lucas’s own Industrial Lights and Magic as they work to fabricate yet another scene for The Empire Strikes Back. This time they are trying to create the massive sense of scale needed to grant legitimacy to the colossal Imperial Walkers, the AT-ATs.
The walkers are minuscule in real life compared to how they are portrayed in the film, standing only two feet high as opposed to the twenty meters that they are made to appear in the films. They look more like a child’s toy when you see the prop that created the illusion. Many small cameras were employed all around on ground level pointing up at them to give the illusion of height. They also used this scaled set piece with small mountains so people would think that they dwarfed the icy mountains of the planet Hoth.
In order to make it appear the models were truly walking on their own in the film, the film crew employed stop motion using very many frames to not have it obvious. The walkers would also be used very briefly in the next movie in the Endor scene using the same methods and technology to animate their movements.
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