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" In limbo for nearly 25 years, Red Tails\u2014George Lucas&amp;#039; sweeping aerial epic about the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II\u2014finally hits theaters today. Red Tails spends much of its time in the cockpits of P-51s as the Airmen fight and dodge their way through a flurry of fire. And because Lucas spent a quarter century and millions of his own dollars to bring to the movie to life, it&amp;#039;s no surprise that his team obsessed with getting the World War II\u2013era details just right.  &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s historical footage everywhere,&amp;quot; says visual effects supervisor Craig Hammack. &amp;quot;You can watch old John Wayne movies that were shot with real airplanes. So people have a general idea of the capabilities of the planes, and how to tell that story and stay true to those dynamics is a challenge.&amp;quot; The visual effects team started its research by analyzing historical footage and flight simulator games to get a good understanding of P-51 flight dynamics. Then Lucas called in Ed Shipley, an acrobatic pilot of P-51s, to help. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s an absolute expert,&amp;quot; Hammack says. &amp;quot;And so he was always made available to talk through dynamics of the scenes.&amp;quot; The actors who portrayed Tuskegee pilots also studied with real surviving airmen to learn how they controlled their planes.  On set, the crew built cockpits\u2014and, in some cases, entire mocked-up planes\u2014for the actors to sit in. To get the jumpy, jolted look of 1940s combat, the crew relied on a hand-operated gimbal\u2014a platform equipped with extenders that crew members could hold and manipulate. &amp;quot;The thing about these planes, especially in the first part of the movie, is that they&amp;#039;re supposed to be kind of just buckets of bolts up there,&amp;quot; Hammack says. &amp;quot;You want a little bit of shimmy, a little bit of unexpected rattling kind of going on.&amp;quot; The hand-operated gimbal delivered this kind of imprecise, organic movement perfectly, and it was faster to use, too.       Back at Industrial Light &amp;amp;amp; Magic, VFX artists replaced everything in the cockpit except for the actor and the seat\u2014the guages and switches you see are digitally created. &amp;quot;Reality is not always as exciting or as good-looking as you would want,&amp;quot; Hammack says. &amp;quot;The thing about the mockup planes and even the real planes is that they&amp;#039;re very functional, which means they&amp;#039;re very sparse, and they&amp;#039;re built for function. And it ends up looking not as realistic.&amp;quot; But even more important was that in order for the shots to look realistic, animators had to have completely control of how the light played in the cockpits. &amp;quot;One of the really recognizable things about aerial photography is the play of shadows across everything as you maneuver,&amp;quot; Hammack says. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re typically up above the clouds or in the clouds, so you get really pure light direction. In real photography, you don&amp;#039;t always have the ability to control light to simulate the high-speed maneuvers in the air. So we chose to replace it all so that we could get the right kind of light kicks and emphasize the action more.&amp;quot; Making sure the finished result was photo-real was incredibly important. &amp;quot;You couldn&amp;#039;t let the audience even begin to think that the cockpits might be CG because they show up so much throughout the movie,&amp;quot; Hammack says. &amp;quot;It would have taken viewers out of the story.&amp;quot; When it came time to build VFX sequences for the dramatic aerial battles between the Red Tails and the Germans, Hammack&amp;#039;s team faced a unique challenge: making the dogfights feel fast-paced and exciting while keeping the dynamics of the planes true to life. &amp;quot;Dogfights in movies are always tricky because these days we have a video game culture,&amp;quot; Hammack says. &amp;quot;Things need to move faster than they normally would to keep your attention. So it&amp;#039;s a little bit of a struggle, design-wise, to keep the action very fast-paced and to keep 14-year-old boys entertained while still showing that these planes built in the &amp;#039;40s are kind of lumbering machines and only have a certain amount of maneuverability.&amp;quot;  And Lucas challenged his team to stay true to history. &amp;quot;I think that some of the initial Star Wars space scenes with the X-Wings and the TIE Fighters are based on World War II footage, so he&amp;#039;s had a lot of experience studying it,&amp;quot; Hammack says. &amp;quot;It was very important to him specifically to get the speeds right. There were times where we would push it beyond and he would say, &amp;#039;You know, you guys are making it exciting but you&amp;#039;re starting to break the reality of what the planes could do, you know, so just dial it back a little bit.&amp;#039;\u200A&amp;quot;  The final result was dogfights that floored real Tuskegee airmen. At a panel for the film, Hammack sat next to one of the airmen while filmmakers showed the dogfight footage for the first time. &amp;quot;You could see him almost maneuvering the controls in his seat,&amp;quot; Hammack says. &amp;quot;Afterward he told me that it felt very, very real to him, and that was a huge compliment.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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