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Published December 28, 2016
Carrie Fisher's legacy will live on in the next “Star Wars” movie — which has already wrapped shooting and is now in post-production, according to reports.
Sources told Variety that the actress had already finished all her work on “Episode VIII” before her death Tuesday.
The film is slated to be released in December 2017.
It is the eighth movie in the franchise and Fisher’s fifth in which she takes up her famous role as Princess Leia.
"Star Wars" producers won’t ultimately have to address her death until they begin shooting “Episode IX,” which was also expected to feature the actress, who at this point in the series was Gen. Leia Organa.
One route producers could take would be to use a combination of live action and digital effects to resurrect her character, much like they did — SPOILER ALERT — with her and iconic “Grand Moff Tarkin” actor Peter Cushing in the newly released “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.”
The move has angered many movie fans and critics, who felt the filmmakers were overstepping their boundaries.
One story even went so far as to call the CGI usage a “giant breach of respect for the dead,” while The Guardian described it as “a digital indignity.”
In order to accurately portray Cushing’s likeness, the producers hired English actor Guy Henry — who bears a slight resemblance to him — to play the role on set. He wore a motion-capture device on his head throughout filming, which through digital altering, displayed the late screen star’s facial expressions.
The effect was ultimately achieved by taking preexisting footage of Cushing in “A New Hope” and applying it in post-production.
Over the years, very few actors have been portrayed on screen using CGI.
One of the most recent examples came in 2015 following the death of Paul Walker, who had been set to star in “Furious 7” before he was killed in a car accident.
Much like Cushing, the producers used the actor’s two brothers to shoot each of his scenes, and then went back and replaced their faces with CG versions of Walker’s.
“We really tried to limit our interpretation of the character to things that we had seen Paul do as the character,” Weta VFX supervisor on the film, Joe Letteri, told The Hollywood Reporter at the time.
“We found performances that matched the situation that we needed to put him in, and we used that to guide us,” he said.
In a statement posted to Starwars.com on Tuesday, Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy described how Fisher had an “indomitable spirit, incredible wit, and a loving heart” — which would be hard to replace.
“Carrie holds such a special place in the hearts of everyone at Lucasfilm it is difficult to think of a world without her,” Kennedy said. “She was Princess Leia to the world but a very special friend to all of us.”
In addition to “Star Wars,” Fisher also had recurring roles on “Family Guy” and the Amazon/Channel 4 comedy series, “Catastrophe,” which she was working on in London just before her heart attack on Friday.
Though it’s unclear whether she had wrapped shooting on any episodes for “Family Guy,” Fisher has reportedly shot all her scenes for the upcoming third season of “Catastrophe.” She is slated to appear in one of the six episodes, which will air in the spring.
This article originally appeared in Page Six.
https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/carrie-fisher-had-wrapped-star-wars-episode-viii-prior-to-death