Bruce Logan, Who Blew Up the Death Star in ‘Star Wars,’ Dies at 78

Movies|Bruce Logan, Who Blew Up the Death Star in ‘Star Wars,’ Dies at 78

Destroying the Death Star — the Empire’s space station and superweapon in George Lucas’s “Star Wars” — was a signature moment for the visual effects artist Bruce Logan.

In the climactic scene of what is now known as “Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope” (1977), Luke Skywalker demolishes the Death Star by firing two proton torpedoes into it from his X-wing fighter, a triumph for the Rebel Alliance.

“Blowing up the Death Star is my greatest P.R. coup, but was in fact very low-tech,” Mr. Logan told the Los Angeles Post Production Group, a filmmakers’ organization, in 2020. He added that he found newer effects to have “an unsatisfying synthetic gloss.”

Mr. Logan — who was also a cinematographer and director — recalled that he could not film the Death Star’s detonation as if it were happening on Earth.

“When you shoot an explosion conventionally, with the camera straight and level, with forces of gravity and atmospherics acting on it, what you get is a mushroom cloud which doesn’t look like it’s exploding in outer space,” he wrote on Zacuto.com, a film equipment website, in 2015.

To achieve the needed effect, Mr. Logan manned a high-speed camera, which was surrounded by a sheet of plywood, with a hole cut out for the lens and a sheet of glass covering it. With the camera pointed upward, Joe Viskocil, a pyrotechnics specialist, set off a series of miniature bombs overhead, which created the illusion of the explosions occurring in zero gravity in outer space.