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

Scifi Meshes)

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?

The one last thing I got from Star Wars and Joe Johnston was the notion of managing the impossible. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. When you’re faced with a seemingly insurmountable task, figuring out what you want to do is only half of the problem. In preproduction, and on through production, you need to decide, and occasionally review in light of new information, HOW you’re going to do it.Take scale:

That drawing is classic Joe Johnston. Simple, quick little technical jot, but it sets the scale for the ships, so that everyone involved in the production can see at a glance, without having to go ask or look it up, exactly how big the ships are in relation to one another. That’s very important.

But equally important is how you break up the Impossible Task. Take the surface of the Death Star, for instance. It’s a nightmare of chunky detail, what the special effects guys call “greeble”. Look at this scene from the movie:

Bad enough you’ve got to create acres of this stuff, you’re going to fly a camera RIGHT DOWN IN AMONG IT! Sure, the camera will be whipping by, and there will be fighter ships and lasers to distract the viewer, but no matter what, it all has to be made (this is in the days before CG, when stuff was actually built and painted by hand) and it has to hold up reasonably well at close range.

Well, Johnston and his boys came up with a solution: a modular approach. They designed a series of modules that could be broken into sections and reattached, or turned 90 degrees to get different effects. These were then modeled, and mass produced out of a sort of high density styrofoam. Brilliant! But it all started with this series of drawings by Joe Johnston:

This ingenious approach has served me well when I’ve had to model stuff, even in the computer, that needed the appearance of detail and variety, but time or resource was short. Think of the “forest” in Channelwood in realMYST. They are all one tree, scaled and rotated to try to give the impression of more:

Next time, I want to talk about how this approach worked on Star Wars, the strange things they wound up doing to make it work, and discuss a little bit about the power of detail.

After I spent all my allowance on model kits to bash, Plaster of Paris to make landscapes, and countless bottles of modelling glue and paint, and then filled cannisters of 8mm film on my little special effects and stop-motion animated shenanigans, I found myself out of money. This is when I discovered, as many art departments before me, that pen-and-paper is much cheaper than Building Stuff Willy Nilly. (Side note: if your last name is NILLY and you are looking for names for your soon-to-arrive son, think twice about William.)This is when the other book found its way into my hands: The Star Wars Sketchbook, featuring the pre-production drawings of Joe Johnston. The designs this guy came up with set the look and feel for pretty much every sci-fi production for the next 20 or so years. But his line quality is to die for! It is at the same time precise and effortless.I love the attention to detail. All those Greebles on the ships, senseless visual noise, while at the same time suggesting utility and scale. The main thing that impressed me is that Johnston’s designs actually look like things humans would build. They’re not all round and smooth and shiny and bright. They look like artifacts from a used, lived-in universe, which is what George Lucas wanted.

It is safe to say that Joe Johnston taught me how to draw vehicles. I began by tracing the drawings in that book, and then I graduated to copying them by eye. Finally, I let go of that comfortable artistic embrace and wobbled out into the deep water on my own, but I don’t think I ever truly let go. Johnston’s influence shows in my work today, although I never did truly get his line work down. Here are some examples of his fine, fine work.

Joe’s gone on to become a director, where he’s achieved notable success with films such as Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Jumanji, October Sky, and Hidalgo. But it’s fun to think that his drawings as a lowly designer on a small film in the mid-seventies inspired me way back when.

But he also taught me a bit about managing production. More on that tomorrow…

Well, it’s almost been 30 years since the original Star Wars came out. I suppose the readers of this BLOG can be effectively broken into three camps:Some, like my former Art Director, will only shrug, and perhaps yawn. No Star Wars fan, he. Some, who were not born when the movie came out, will perhaps wonder if I am speaking of one of the Prequels released this century. (I am not). The rest of you, who were old enough to remember when the movie came out, will think, “Dear God. Can it already have been 30 years?”

Yup, you old fart. It’s been 30 years.

So much of what made me want to draw, made me want to make movies, made me want to write, was in that original movie. No matter how schlocky and melodramatic the film may seem to you now, it was magical. Sure I was only 11 when I first saw it, but it really hooked me, as it did an entire generation.

And where I was concerned, the film actually had a lot to overcome. First, I didn’t like sci fi as a kid. Found it dreadfully boring. Second, it had the word WAR in it, and I didn’t want to see a bunch of soldiers running around shooting at each other. (I also found war movies boring.)

But mostly, even as an 11 year old, I had a cynical voice in the back of my mind asking whether Star Wars was just a piece of government sponsored propoganda designed to show young kids that War was Cool. (Yes, I was a strange little kid, but remember that the Vietnam War had just ended poorly, a conflict my older brother and his friends narrowly escaped. It was a scary time and I had no desire to be a soldier.)

But the colors, the effects, the spaceships, the music, and the characters all added up to something special that I don’t think has been duplicated. Like I said, it was magical, and by the time the smoke of the first battle had cleared, I didn’t care about whether it was sci-fi or not, about whether it was war or not. My jaw was on the floor and I wanted to know what happened next.

There was a book that came out not long after Star Wars became a phenomenon. I saw it on the bus on the way to school when I was 12. That’s the cover in the header of this article, and of course it uses the art from the Hildebrandt brothers’ great Star Wars movie poster. Believe me, for years, everything I drew looked like that poster. (A shame the title blocks out all but “BRANDT” from their name…)

Anyway, the kid next to me on the bus let me look through it on the way to school, and I saw something that would wind up having a huge impact on me, perhaps even leading to my current career.

More on that tomorrow.