I'm sure all of you have heard of Star Wars. If you haven't, I recommend a brain surgeon (just kidding), but most people have no idea about the making of Episode 1 or anything about the special effects used in Star Wars.

George Lucas, the man who created Star Wars and directed all the first films, was born in 1944. George Lucas said that in the mid-70's he could "eat, sleep, and breathe film" He worked all day and all night and survived by eating candy bars. He also has a red binder with LUCAS written on the front. He has written all of his scripts in that binder and the very first script was American Graffiti. His main focus was to make a movie that few people understood, muchless believed in, he wanted a unique film. But now his life is totally different, he has three kids and oversees a non-profit educational foundation, and even runs four large companies! The first day of writing the script for Episode 1 George Lucas was most concerned about the effect that it would have on kids, due to all the shooting and action scenes.

Although writing the script was a very hard job, George Lucas was excited to get back into the Starwars world. Due to techology, he was now able to do things that were impossible to do before. The main reason he started writing the movies again, was due to the advantion of techology. For example, before R2-D2 could barely move in the original trilogy but now he can take him and every little or big robot anywhere!

Episode 1 was deffinetley a creature film. In Episode 1, they made a younger version of yoda, with more hair and younger looking. But there wasn't too much to improve upon in this new movie. They streamlined a few things and built it out of silicone (a translucent material that allows for greater detail and flexibility of movement) instead of foam latex. The Episode 1 Yoda also has a a radio-controlled smile eyebrow movement and mechanism. But Frank Oz will still control the actual lip-snyching of the puppet. Deciding what to use to make the aliens and creatures depends on a lot of questions including how much time you have, the cost, and the prominense of a character in the film. If a creature is just going to be in one scene, it's probably a too expensive to use computer graphics and they will probably decide to use makeup which can take four to five hours a day, or build a rubber mask and a body suit. For some characters who are entirely CG (computer graphics), Nick's (the Creature Effects Supervisor) team built stand-in puppets or properly proportioned costumes so the actors would have something real to react to during shooting.

The goal the choreographing for the action scenes was to create stunts that flowed from the story. To create stunt choreography that would not just demonstrate jedi swordsmanship, they would have to practice months before shooting began. Geoge Lucas liked what he saw, so the "Jedi Style" lightsaber school began.

When safety permits, Nick (the choreographer) likes the actors to do their own stunts. "It adds to their performance" he didn't have that much time to train Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor in the art of jedi style, but says they both picked the talent up very quickly he would separate the fights into segments and let some of them fight at one time, and he'd teach them segment by segment slowly taking a little bit faster each time as the actors learned their parts. With Andreas Petrides and martial arts expert Ray Park, Nick would practice the stunts and fighting scenes for hours so they could train the actors quickly. "By the time we got to Liam and Ewan, we had run through the choreography at least 500 times ourselves. We've hit each other so many times, we know where it's going to happen." he says. In the end,they end up super fast on film. "It's probably so fast that you'll hardly be able to see the little touches we put in,"Nick said. No two sword fighters had the same fighting stile.

However, fighting and puppets definetly wasn't the only thing that was a key part in Episode 1. A huge key in the world of Episode 1 was costumes. In the original StarWars trilogy they tried to keep the costumes very simple. But in this new movie the sophisticated society required something more elaborate than the sandy-colored suit Luke Skywalker wore or the simple white dresses of Princess Leia. The original Obi-Wan costume was found out of the Lucasfilm archives to help choose the colors for the Jedi-Knights in Episode 1. However, Naboo and Coruscant were new territory spanning styles in historical periods were used as a inspiration for making the costumes. For the queens costumes it was anything works and goes. As for Queen Amidala, her costumes expanded in number and detail and really helped it become clear visualy fashional the movie would be. "When George decided that each time you saw the queen she would be wearing a different costume, I think it was then he decided it would be a costume drama," says costume disigner Trisha Biggar. Trisha dealt with the elaborate gowns and bulky creature, costumes and the complicated stuff. She gathered different fabrics from all over the world to give the moovie variety Her team also made some of their own fabrics from scratch . It took one woman one month five days a week just to make the exotic fabric for the queens travel dress.

Queen Amidala's dresses are by far the most complicated of all the costumes they've created. "Probably the most difficult was the throne room dress. It has a series of lights around the hem of the dress and was architecturally the most difficult dress to make."