Editing in Storm Troopers
It turns out you don’t actually need a high-tech cloning facility to create an army. All it takes is a good artist and the proper effects equipment. The creators could have really saved the Republic some trouble by sharing that information.
All joking aside, this is a serious technique that was and is still used in order to fill in a large number of similar-looking characters in movies. While the particular technique being practiced in the image may be relatively unique, the basic principle remains the same. By drawing or digitally crafting the same basic model and recreating it multiple times, you can fill an army without needing to cast so many people to fill these rather generic roles.
In the modern day, we still have films doing this, usually opting to digitally render clones of a standard character model and filling the screen with them. The main difficulty of using this tricky technique is not overly-implementing it to the point that the audience is able to clearly tell when it is being shown to them and when it isn’t.
Back in the eighties, however, it was a painstaking process having the artist draw this many figures without making a single major error. You can see that some storm troopers in the picture bear fewer details than others, but this is because with as many subjects as there are, the audience probably wouldn’t notice a few absent lines.
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