"Come on, buddy, we're not out of this yet!"

and here's my photomatch work. This quad-laser prop is bananas, in my professional opinion, but it's starting to grow on me...

and here's a bit more junk.

looking up

looking down

"Good against remotes, that's one thing...

Good against the living... that's something else."

Had to build this guy to hang out in the Falcon's main hold. I've been putting this one off for a long, long time. Once I finally got to building, it went very quickly. I'm here to tell you, "cease the day" and all that...

Don't get cocky...

The composition popped into my head over lunch. I had all the models built, so I thought I'd give it a try. Not too shabby, even if I say so. 

T-16 Skyhopper

I spent some time this weekend perfecting a model of Luke's T-16 Skyhopper. One of my favorite ships throughout the world of Star Wars.



The ship shows up in the garage scene on Tatooine. Luke holds a model of it while complaining about his bleak future. Something it took me years to notice was that there was a full scale T-16 in the background of the very same scene.

I made the model using Sketchup's Photomatch tools, combining a number of photos of the original scale model made by Colin Cantwell. I've also been building in such a way that it will be 3D-print ready. Once complete, I may even sell some kits.

here an image of the actual model

and the scene where the ship shows up.

Lars Homestead Garage

A start on Luke's garage from blueprints found in the Rinzler tome. A good start, getting the lighting right has been key. The T-16 in the background was also built from production blueprints. The so called Lars Family Speeder was built from some basic plans that appear in the Star Wars Techinical Journal (Shane Johnson, 1994), but needed a lot of modification. Lots of details to be added, including the possibly modified Gaudi chair.

Yavin exterior with the Millennium Falcon

This is a composite that shows what might have been if the full scale prop of the Falcon had been composited into the shot of the Yavin Base exterior. I found copies of all the original elements of the shot that ended up in the film, and started playing around with recreating it from scratch, adding an element of my own. To get the Falcon into the shot, I used sketchup's photomatch tools to match the perspective of the hangar shot below. Then I added some simple figures into the scene where the actors are standing, to set the scale. Next I added my replica of the full scale movie set into the scene.

Here is the final composite

Now here's the the stack of effects elements

and finally, here is the shot as it appeared originally in 1977, without the Falcon

 

Vac-Formed Wall Panels

 

I'm working on models of the vac-formed wall panels that recur throughout A New Hope. A detail that I've mentioned before, these panels only appear on neutral or Rebel equipment, in the Blockade Runner, on Tatooine, on the exterior of the Millennium Falcon and on the rebel troop transport in Yavin Base.

Stacked together, flipped in various ways, and even cut in half, the panels were well designed as modular pieces that could make up any number of variations without seeming like repeated tiles. It took me a while to recognize their repeating patterns throughout the movie, but once spotted they appeared all over the place. They were used with great effect to make ordinary bare corners of the film seem full of technology.

There were four panels in all, and above I'm working on the two that feature largely in the Blockade Runner Set. Original drawings of the panels appear in Rinzler's Blueprints book, but are labeled as parts of the Cantina Exterior (the one place I haven't seen the panels show up).

You can see these two panels clearly to the left and right of the doorway R2 and 3P0 are shuffling through. Above them, on the same columns, are the same panels, but cut in half to form seemingly different panels. 

And here they are again on the Lars Homestead, covering those bulky boxes. Each box had a unique arrangement of the modular panels.