The EditDroid, Rise and Fall

2014· 45 min· Documentary, Short

Filmmaker George Lucas, spiritual father of the successful Star Wars series decided to invest 40 million dollars to develop a new editing system. From 1983 to 1986 the revolutionary EditDroid system was developed. This new system was created to replace the mechanical period in which film editing found itself. The EditDroid was the first nonlinear electronic editing system and used several laser disc players loaded with the raw footage of a film. The simple computer interface was unique for its time. After a short period of success the EditDroid disappeared from the film scene and George Lucas sold the machine's patents to a small company called Avid. In the spring of 2005 Tom van Klingeren and Bruce Gray (both editors and instructors on filmmaking at the University of Amsterdam) went to Marin county in the United States in search of the lost history of the EditDroid. They visited the editors who had worked on the system in the 1980's and 90's. They made a return journey to the Skywalker Ranch with the now retired coordinator of the EditDroid project. At the ranch they explored the archives of Lucas' production company in search of the last EditDroid.

Cast: Edgar Burcksen, Ben Burtt, John Sinclair

Director: Tom van Klingeren