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Terrific bit of history, and much enjoyed it - even though Blue Sky's thread reading is... not great, lol.

It's about how Lucas chose the designs for the vehicles in the Prequels. As you no doubt know, in the pre-production phase, numerous concept artists and designers draw hundreds of sketches to enable the filmmaker to choose the design that suits him best. 2/25

We know a small part of this work thanks to the Art of (books). Here's an early design for General Grievous by Alex Jaeger 3/25

However, when presented with these drawings, Lucas quickly made his choices. Chiang: "During our art meetings, George came in the room, very quickly looked at the whole board, and right away identified the two or three [designs] that he really liked." 4/25

He's right about efficiency. FWIW, that's what we try to do in our little theatre troupe: posters and costumes that just work. We don't want people to think "oh I love this costume", because the costumes are only there for the whole thing to work.

However, the Naboo starfighter, for instance, felt weird to me because it felt more modern, and in a sense, it was. The original trilogy has older looks because it was made much before the prequels. That was probably inevitable. I agree they did a good job of mixing eras, though.

On the contrary, the Naboo style is inspired by the 1930s. I should thread about that :D

(And thanks for the thread!)

Both the Jedi Starfighter and the N1 piss me off in one simple way: the impossibility of fitting an R2 into them. The "body deformations" the cross-section books guys came up with to justify them are genuinely hilarious. But then, look at the X-Wing landing gear too. This isn't Ron Cobb design work.

Fair! 😁

And I love these ships. But, you know. (Shrugs.) It's always puzzled me that the Space:1999 Eagle landing gear clearly can retract into its outrigger modules, but we never saw that in any episode (although it was frequently drawn that way in some of the comic books.)

@redmisfit.bsky.social

Wow that's cool. Thanks mate

Isn’t it. I like the 3 second idea. And the visually explanatory idea. I mean, x-wings are visual obvious. They’re clearly fighters, they have the equivalent of guns at the ends of each wing pointing to a target. They have a very spitfire feel to them. Space dogfights etc.

Thanks for the cool thread! George Lucas and Doug Chiang are geniuses

A thing this thread drives home for me is how this thinking was not employed in “The Expanse.” That show had many merits but even after watching multiple seasons I could never suss what the Rocinante looked like

Very interesting, I know Guillermo del Toro also uses a silhouette-first approach to his designs. I wonder if he came up with that on his own, or got the idea from Lucas? Either way, it works!

finding and appreciating this very much almost a year later, thanks for this!