The AnimWatch Blog

Well… here we are at the final installment in my series of posts celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the release of the original Star Wars and how it inspired me to become an artist.In this last post, I want to talk about the extraordinary lengths the team went to in order to bring the fantastic world of Star Wars to life. Remember, this was before computer graphics, so all this stuff had to be built, and painted, and photographed. See the image up there… those are the Death Star surface modules I was telling you about yesterday. Here they are, all assembled into a continuous surface, and actually taken outside. The sun, it turns out, is a really good light source for photography.

Also, it allowed the team to get really unusual perspectives. By turning the model up on end like this, they could put the camera on rails and push it forward for the impression you were dive-bombing the Death Star.

Plus, someone figured out that explosions filmed like this would scatter sparks and debris in unexpected directions, giving the impression it had been filmed in space and not on Earth.

For the sequences of the fighters zooming down the Death Star trench, the model shop built an actual trench out of Johnston’s modules. To get the point of view of the fighters zooming through that trench, they strapped a camera to a boom, strapped the boom onto a truck, and drove along with the camera in the center. I wish I had a picture of that. It’s one of my favorite images from the making of Star Wars.

I think it’s the scale of the operation that impresses me. I think of the parking lot behind the initial ILM facility, littered with these mammoth Death Star surface models, and the trench. Think about working outside because you get different effects than working in a nice, sterile studio environment. Isn’t this such a cool, gritty feel? Isn’t just so garage-development?

Today, you’d just do it by computer. An to prove the point, look at this screen capture of the Death Star surface from the original Star Wars:

And now, look at a CG recreation, composed of modules faithfully replicated off of Johnston’s original designs. That’s pretty neat. Makes me want to model a few ships and animate them flying off down the trench. (The Death Star greebles are available at our friends over at

The CG model is undoubtedly crisper, and undoubtedly cheaper to create. But I sure miss the artifacts. I mean that both in terms of a physical artifact, a memento of shooting, but also artifacts in terms of imperfections. Something about the edges being imperfect, not sharp, not crisp. The physical models just have so much charm.

Of course when the camera is zipping past them at a zillion miles an hour, who cares about that anyway.

But the guys in the model shop cared. There are gun turrets on the Death Star. They could have just been tossed together out of junk plastic. But they weren’t. They were designed:

And built:

See what I mean about all that junk and artifacting? Look at the amount of detail on that thing. Just phenomenal.

Well, that’s about all I have to say about Star Wars for now. Since I began running this series, I’ve had many artists contact me to tell me they had the same books, and the same reactions to some of the same pictures. Funny to think how much this film has inspired an entire generation of artists.

And now, I guess it’s our turn, we who are lucky enough to be working in TV, film, computer games, comics. We should spend that extra bit of effort on that drawing, that model, that design. Just think… some kid might be inspired by your work.

Isn’t that an interesting thought?