Visual effects artists for the original 1977 Star Wars movie filmed the iconic opening text crawl by physically pushing a camera over a giant piece of black paper with yellow letters painted on it.

A closer look

Visual effects artists for the original 1977 Star Wars movie filmed the iconic opening text crawl by physically pushing a camera over a giant piece of black paper with yellow letters painted on it. George Lucas demanded the dramatic space opera intro, so the crew laid out a two-foot-wide model on the floor and spent hours painstakingly rolling a camera across the ground to create the illusion of text floating into the infinite cosmos. Long before digital generation made this a five-minute task on a basic laptop, creating a sci-fi legend required grown adults to army-crawl across a dirty soundstage floor while trying not to smudge the paint. It is hilarious that a cinematic universe defined by laser swords and hyperspace travel started its legacy with a practical effect that resembles a high school science fair diorama. Modern blockbuster budgets dwarf small nations, but the coolest part of your childhood was just a glorified spelling test on the carpet