Editing Stargate (film) (section)

==Production==
{| style="border-collapse: collapse; float:right; margin:5px; border:2px solid peru"
|-
|style="border-bottom:2px solid peru; padding:5px; text-align:center;background:navajowhite;" colspan="2"|'''Hieroglyphic script on the coverstone and its chalkboard translation'''
'''(including original translation and later modification by Daniel Jackson)'''
|-
|style="text-align:center;padding:10px;" colspan="2"|<hiero>r:n:p-rnp-t:Z1*Z1*Z1-I8:V20-r:q-b-H-w-W15-N1:N25-p-w-r:a-C1-m-i-t:n-N8</hiero>
{{big|<s>time</s> ''year'' million sky Ra sun god}}
<hiero>m-x-m-t-S20-Aa18-n:f-q:r-s-T19-A24-Q6:A55-f:n-D&t-tA:r-G21-H-H-ra:N23</hiero>
{{big|''sealed + buried'' <s>coffin</s> <s>forever to eternity</s> ''for all time''}}
<hiero>s-sbA-b-O32-n:Z1*Z1*Z1-s-b-A-sbA:ra-Z1*Z1*Z1:f</hiero>
{{big|his <s>door to heaven</s> ''stargate''}}
|-
|style="border-top:2px solid peru; padding:5px; text-align:center;background:navajowhite;"|literal translation of the text:
years million in sky this Ra as Aten (=sun disk)<br />sealed buried enduringly and repeatedly<br />door his to stars
|style="border-top:2px solid peru; padding:5px; text-align:center;background:navajowhite;"|Jackson's final translation:
million years into the sky is Ra Sun God<br />sealed and buried for all time<br />his Stargate
|}
<!--The audio commentary would help a lot-->

===Development===
The film in its original cut and in the director's cut plays out in [[Chronology|chronological order]]. When Devlin and Emmerich edited the film in the director's cut to tighten the narrative, they decided to add a scene at the very beginning of the film to show who the human host of [[Ra]] was before the aliens took him. Only Davidson's upper torso was filmed.<ref name="acdevlin" /> The first scene was a combination of model shots and a set in [[Yuma, Arizona]] where ''[[Rambo III]]'' had been filmed. The scene of the excavation of the Stargate was also filmed in three days in Arizona. A golden look was achieved by filming near sunset.<ref name="acemmerich" /> To keep within the budget, the producers put stick figures with cloth in the distant desert to appear as humans. The original Stargate was painted black, but it looked like a giant tire so it was repainted silver at the last moment.<ref name="acdevlin" />

Daniel Jackson's lecture on his theories was filmed in a hotel in Los Angeles.<ref name="acemmerich" /> The scene was originally much longer and delved more into the theories that aliens had built the Egyptian pyramids, but it was trimmed for time concerns for the release.<ref name="acdevlin" /> The scenes with O'Neil at his house were the first ones filmed with Kurt Russell; his hair was cut short afterwards. Russell requested his hair color to be brightened a little for the film.<ref name="acemmerich" /> The fictional facility housing the Stargate was the largest set for the film, the former [[Spruce Goose]] Dome located in [[Long Beach, California]].<ref name="Dome">{{cite news |last1=Pinsky |first1=Mark I. |title=Long Beach Dome Gets New Life in Film : Movies: The former home of the Spruce Goose earns good reviews as a production facility 'five times larger than the largest stage at Warner Bros.' |url=https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-03-10-ca-41097-story.html |access-date=2 March 2019 |work=Los Angeles Times |date=10 March 1995 }}</ref><ref name="acemmerich" /> Egyptologist [[Stuart Tyson Smith]] joined the production to make all Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and spoken language as accurate as possible.<ref name="acdevlin" />

===Filming===
The mask of the [[pharaoh]] in the opening credits was made out of fiberglass and modeled in the workshop. The sequence used a [[Motion control photography|motion-control camera]] to give better depth of field.<ref name="acemmerich">{{Cite AV media |people=[[Roland Emmerich|Emmerich, Roland]] |date=2001 |title=Audio Commentary for Stargate |medium=DVD |publisher=[[MGM Home Entertainment]] }}</ref> The score of ''Stargate'' was composer [[David Arnold]]'s first work on an American feature film. When Devlin and Emmerich first flew to London to meet with Arnold, they had not yet heard the score; hearing it, they felt "he had elevated the film to a whole other level".<ref name="acdevlin">{{Cite AV media |people=[[Dean Devlin|Devlin, Dean]] |date=2001 |title=Audio Commentary for Stargate |medium=DVD |publisher=[[MGM Home Entertainment]] }}</ref> Arnold later interviewed the actors during [[principal photography]], using the information to improve his score.<ref name="acdevlin" />

===Visual effects===
Jeff Kleiser and Kleiser-Walczak Construction Co.'s visual effects team of 40 people created the look of the Stargate. They used self-written image-creation and compositing software, as well as commercial digital packages to create the Stargate, the morphing helmets worn by Ra and the Horus guards, and the cityscape of Nagada. The morphing helmets were not true 3D but 2D elements, as Kleiser explained: "You shoot the character without the headdress, you shoot the character with a headdress. And then you have to go in and, and create all these little sections that you would then wipe off to reveal—and it had to match up, the two things had to match up. I think the cameras were moving as well."<ref name="Hoare">{{Cite web |last=Hoare |first=James |date=June 17, 2022 |title=CGI Fridays {{!}} Jeff Kleiser's Strange Journey from Super-8 to Stargate |url=https://www.thecompanion.app/2022/06/17/cgi-fridays-jeff-kleisers-strange-journey-from-vegas-to-stargate/ |access-date=June 24, 2022 |website=The Companion |archive-date=June 24, 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220624143257/https://www.thecompanion.app/2022/06/17/cgi-fridays-jeff-kleisers-strange-journey-from-vegas-to-stargate/ |url-status=dead }}</ref>

Footprints in the sand were often digitally removed. The creation of the wormhole, which was fully digital, was one of the biggest challenges in the making of the film. The ripples had to be digitally composited to appear accurate and realistic. Scanning lasers were lined up parallel to the gate to illustrate the amount of body that passed the surface of the Stargate plane. Afterwards, the parts of the body that had or had not yet gone through the gate (depending on the side of filming) were obliterated with a digital matte, a process that removes unwanted components from an individual frame or sequence of frames.<ref name="specialeffects" /> The funnel of water that precedes the Stargate opening was filmed by discharging an air cannon into a water tank, as Jeff Kleiser explained: "We didn't know how much air pressure to set the cannon on but it went from 1 to 500&nbsp;lb, so we said 'Let's try 100—start the camera rolling and hit the thing.' It evacuated all the water out of the tank and onto the camera and everybody. It turned out that 1&nbsp;lb was about the right amount."<ref name="Hoare"/>

The use of computers generating a big 3D storyboard allowed Emmerich to try out different shooting angles before settling on one angle.<ref name="specialeffects" />