Lightsaber
A lightsaber is a fictional energy sword featured throughout Star Wars. A typical lightsaber is shown as a luminous laser sword about in length emitted from a metal hilt around in length. Introduced in the original Star Wars film, it has since appeared in all 12 theatrical Star Wars films, with at least one lightsaber duel occurring in each installment of the "Skywalker saga". The lightsaber's distinct appearance was created using rotoscoping for the original films, and with digital effects for the prequel and sequel trilogies.
In the Star Wars universe, the lightsaber is the signature weapon of the light-side-wielding Jedi Order and the dark-side-wielding Sith Order. However, the lightsaber can also be wielded by non-Force-sensitive characters as an ordinary weapon or tool. The Jedi use lightsabers of various colors: most commonly blue and green, but also purple, white, black, and yellow. The Sith wield red-bladed sabers to distinguish themselves from the Jedi. The color of a lightsaber's blade is given by its kyber crystal, whose color is determined by a Jedi's connection to the Force. A lightsaber's hilt is built by its wielder and is, therefore, unique in design. There are several variations outside of the traditional single-bladed lightsaber, such as the double-bladed lightsaber, the curved-hilted lightsaber, crossguard lightsabers, and the Darksaber, forged by the Mandalorian Jedi Tarre Vizsla, but primarily wielded by the non-Force-sensitive Mandalorian rulers of Mandalore.
An active lightsaber gives off a distinctive hum, which rises in pitch and volume as the blade is moved rapidly through the air. As presented in the early films, the blade can cut, burn, and melt through most substances with little resistance. Lightsabers can deflect blaster bolts, allowing a wielder with Jedi reflexes to turn an enemy's own gunfire against them. It can be deflected by another lightsaber blade, which produces a loud crackle; by energy shields; or by the metals beskar and phrik. Some exotic saber-proof melee weapons have been introduced in the Expanded Universe as well as later episodic films. The blade has been used to weld metal, and has been shown to leave both cauterized wounds and bleeding wounds in flesh.
The lightsaber has become one of the most widely recognized elements of the Star Wars franchise. In 2008, a survey of about 2,000 film fans found it to be the most popular weapon in film history.
Prop construction
For the original Star Wars film, the film prop hilts were constructed by Roger Christian from old Graflex press camera flash battery packs and other pieces of hardware, while special effects that brought the blade to life on screen were made by John Stears. The full-sized sword props were designed to appear ignited onscreen, by later creating an "in-camera" glowing effect in post-production.The blade is a three-sided rod which was coated with a Scotchlite retroreflector array, the same sort used for highway signs. A lamp was positioned to the side of the taking camera and reflected towards the subject through 45-degree angled glass so that the sword would appear to glow from the camera's point of view.
Set decorator Roger Christian found the handles for the Graflex Flash Gun in a photography shop in Great Marlborough Street, in London's West End. He then added cabinet T-track to the handles, securely attaching them with cyanoacrylate glue. Adding a few "greebles", Christian managed to hand-make the first prototype of a lightsaber prop for Luke Skywalker before production began. George Lucas decided he wanted to add a clip to the handle, so that Luke could hang it on his belt. Once Lucas felt the handle was up to his standards, it went to John Stears to create the wooden dowel rod with front-projection paint so that the animators would have a glow of light to enhance later on in post production. Due to lack of preparation time, Christian's prototype and a second spare were used for the shooting in Tunisia, where filming on Star Wars began. It was discovered, however, that the glowing effect was greatly dependent on the rod's orientation to the camera, and during the Obi-Wan Kenobi/Darth Vader duel, they could clearly be seen as rods. Because of this, the glow would be added in post-production through rotoscoping, which also allowed for diffusion to be employed to enhance the glow.
While original trilogy hilts were typically constructed using found parts, during the prequel and sequel trilogies a different process was sometimes used. Hilts were first machined out of metal materials. Then casts would be made using the metal hilts to create resin copies that were used on screen. The resin was often molded over a metal rod that a dueling blade could be attached to for fight sequences.
Visual effects
Korean animator Nelson Shin, who was working for DePatie–Freleng Enterprises at the time, was asked by his manager if he could animate the lightsaber in the live-action scenes of a film. After Shin accepted the assignment, the live-action footage was given to him. He drew the lightsabers with a rotoscope, an animation which was superimposed onto the footage of the physical lightsaber blade prop. Shin explained to the people from Lucasfilm that since a lightsaber is made of light, the sword should look "a little shaky" like a fluorescent tube. He suggested inserting one frame that was much lighter than the others while printing the film on an optical printer, making the light seem to vibrate. Shin also recommended adding a degausser sound on top of the other sounds for the weapon since the sound would be reminiscent of a magnetic field. The whole process took one week, surprising his company. Lucasfilm showed Shin the finished product, having followed his suggestions to use an X-Acto knife to give the lightsaber a very sharp look, and to have sound accompany the weapon's movements.Sound
The lightsaber sound effect was developed by sound designer Ben Burtt as a combination of the hum of idling interlock motors in aged movie projectors and interference caused by a television set on a shieldless microphone. Burtt discovered the latter accidentally as he was looking for a buzzing, sparking sound to add to the projector-motor hum.The pitch changes of lightsaber movement were produced by playing the basic lightsaber tone on a loudspeaker and recording it on a moving microphone, generating Doppler shift to mimic a moving sound source.
Depiction
Lightsabers were present in the earliest drafts as mundane plasma weapons that were used alongside laser guns. The introduction of the Force in a later revision made the Jedi and the Sith supernaturally skilled; initially, they were only portrayed as swordsmen. The lightsaber became the Force-user's tool, described in A New Hope by Obi-Wan Kenobi as "not as clumsy or random as a blaster. An elegant weapon, from a more civilized age". The source of a lightsaber's power is a kyber crystal. These crystals are also the power source of the Death Star's superlaser.In films such as Revenge of the Sith and The Last Jedi, melee weapons such as the electrostaff and plasma-lined blades deflect lightsabers.
Types
Lightsabers are depicted as hand-built as part of a Jedi's or Sith's training regimen. Each lightsaber is unique, though some may bear resemblance to others, especially if there is a connection between the builders. The hilt of most lightsabers is straight and predominantly cylindrical, though there are other lightsaber hilt types. The first film appearance of a dual-bladed lightsaber was in The Phantom Menace, wielded by Darth Maul; it consists of two regular lightsabers joined at their butt ends each producing a blade independently. Count Dooku, beginning with the character's first appearance in Attack of the Clones, is shown to have a lightsaber with a curved hilt. The video game Star Wars: The Force Unleashed introduced two other variants: a lightsaber pike and a Tonfa-style lightsaber with right-angle hilt. Additionally, in several spin-off series such as The Clone Wars and Rebels, special variants of the lightsaber have been depicted - such as the lightsaber-blaster wielded by Ezra Bridger.The Star Wars expanded universe adds several lightsaber types, including short and dual-phase weapons. In Star Wars Rebels, Ezra Bridger's original lightsaber is a hybrid that features a fully functional blaster pistol built into the handle. Kylo Ren, introduced in The Force Awakens, uses a lightsaber that features two crosshilt blades, giving it the appearance of a greatsword. His blade also has an unstable, fiery appearance, explained in canon reference books as stemming from a cracked kyber crystal. The Inquisitors of the Galactic Empire are depicted as wielding a unique variation of a double-bladed saber, mounted on a rotating ring enabling the blades 360 degrees of rotation and short-term flight capability. More obscure lightsaber variations, such as the "lightwhip", an elongated flexible blade used in a manner akin to a whip, the "lightclub", an enlarged standard lightsaber, and the "shoto", a dramatically smaller variation often paired with a standard sized saber have also made appearances. A lightsaber-sniper rifle hybrid known as the Farkiller was made over a millennium prior to the Imperial Era, and was used in an attempt to assassinate Palpatine.
Colors
Lightsabers in the first two released films, A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, had blades that were either blue or red. Luke Skywalker's new lightsaber in Return of the Jedi was colored blue during the initial editing of the film, and appears so in both an early movie trailer and the official theatrical posters; it was later changed to green in the film's final edit after initial viewings and screen tests by the filmmakers, who felt that it would better stand out against the blue sky of Tatooine in outdoor scenes, and this color change is also reflected in the film's re-release posters. Mace Windu's purple-bladed lightsaber, as first seen in Attack of the Clones, was requested by the actor Samuel L. Jackson, who believed the color, which is his personal favorite, would make his character be easily recognized among other Jedi. Jackson is known to frequently request that the characters he plays use an item that is purple in color. The Clone Wars showed the guardians of the Jedi Temple wielding yellow-bladed lightsabers, and, at the end of The Rise of Skywalker, Rey is shown to have built a yellow-bladed lightsaber using part of her staff as the hilt.As depicted in The Clone Wars and Rebels, the builder of a lightsaber finds a kyber crystal and meditates with it until the crystal acquires a color. The color of this crystal becomes the blade's color when installed into a lightsaber hilt. In the book Star Wars: Ahsoka and the comic series Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith, it is shown that dark side users remove the crystal from a defeated Jedi's lightsaber and concentrate Force energy on it to break its connection to the light side, a process known as "bleeding" to create a red crystal. The process can also be reversed, as shown in Ahsoka, when the titular character does so to a pair of crystals taken from an Inquisitor. She uses them in the pair of white-bladed lightsabers she builds at the end of the novel.
Other colors have appeared in various expanded media projects, including many video games where the player can select their character's lightsaber color.