Read this: The Revenge Of The Sith's Force ghost mystery has been solved

Screenshot: Lucasfilm/FXRant

“I think it took 24 hours to unearth the footage and put it back on our servers. I was so excited, my heart was pounding out of my chest. No one had seen the original greenscreen footage for nearly twenty years,” Vaziri says. “The problem was I didn’t remember exactly what these plates looked like, both because it wasn’t my shot, and it was two decades prior. So I dug, and I dug, and finally I found the plate photography. I couldn’t believe it. There on set was a man—likely a stunt rigger—wearing not a robe, but a peculiar shirt that resembled one, standing behind Hayden, manually puppeteering the greenscreen lava skiff that he and Ewan were fighting on. His face and the ‘Force ghost’ matched up frame-for-frame.”

The whole piece is worth reading, both for Vaziri’s endearing love for VFX mistakes that reveal the artists behind the effects and a better understanding of how these mistakes happen. Better yet, with the imminent re-release of Revenge Of The Sith, fans can see this mistake the way the filmmakers intended: In a theater.

“The bottom line is that we put human hands on every single one of the thousands of shots that you see in Star Wars. This world is handmade, and little things like this become part of ILM history.”

Check out “The Movie Mistake Mystery from ‘Revenge Of The Sith'” here.