Landing at Yavin Base

Yavin Base

What did you do to my ship!?

Images were "leaked" recently of the Millennium Falcon's new dish for the upcoming EP 7.

read about it here

and the Falcon is sporting a new radar dish. Gotta love the nod to the end of Jedi, where Lando knocks the dish off while careening through the death star's guts. But how's this thing look?


so I perspective matched the leaked photos and imported my Falcon model. The model I've built is based primarily on the blueprints used in Empire to create the full-size prop seen in Echo base and on the Bespin landing pad. Looks like the production team on EP7 is doing the same thing. A fairly nice match, a few weird spots, but definitely close enough to work out the dimensions and look of the new dish.

and here are some renders....


Hmm, could I live with this?

hmmm...

Yavin Base Briefing Room

Echo Base Rough

Just fooling around with a few models... The X-Wing, the Falcon, and all the background elements are mine, but the snowspeeders were downloaded from the sketchup warehouse for a quick preview. The space is based on the blueprints of the Elstree Sound Stage where the interior sets of Echo Base were constructed. The extended space beyond the berths (second picture right-hand) is a rough extension of the large matte paintings that were used in those areas on the sounds stage to imply a larger space.

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

 

The Millennium Falcon in Yavin Base

Antoni Gaudi chair in Star Wars?

Check out the blue chair Mark Hamill is getting out of here, while putting down the T-16 Skyhopper Model, built by Colin Cantwell.

And now here's the profile view of a chair, designed by Antoni Gaudi, and build by Vico Magistretti in the late 60s/early 70s.

Strikingly similar isn't it? There are some key differences, but it's a little hard for me to ignore how closely they seem to match. I'm still searching for the variation, imitation, knockoff, tribute, or modification that actually appears in the movie. The Gaudi Chair itself did actually appear in the Sci-Fi Television show, Space 1999, which premiered around the time Star Wars was in pre-production.

Star Wars had a few other nods to Modern design, such as these Omkstak Chairs, Designed by Rodney Kinsman in the early 70s

Which appear in the Rebel Base.

(you can see them here, low-center frame)

It's interesting to me that Modern design in this era focused on an idea of futurism, which seems to have been realized to its greatest effect in the sci-fi movies of the day.

Yavin Base Transport (Part 2)

Here's that Rebel transport again with more accurate color choices, and with a bit of scuffed up texturing to give more of that lived-in-universe feeling.

credit for the stand in of Luke goes to John Schulze

Yavin Base Transport

credit for the stand in of Luke goes to John Schulze 


The drawing hanging in the background was the original design for the rebel troop transports that are modeled in the foreground. What seems to have ended up happening, is that the design for the modular parts of the transport were transformed into two things. One are those boxes in the background, which appear in Yavin Base, here and there,

(pictured here)

Then, cutting the modules in half (eliminated the "W" shape), they became the skirting for the actual transports that appear in film. More clever reuse of parts.

Yavin Base

Yavin Base is a fantastic modular set. The production team built a partial Y Wing (just an unconnected cockpit and engines) an X Wing, and a slew of flat cutouts for the background. They dressed the set with a few flight-deck looking floor modules, built sets of tapering faux-stone and faux-steel columns, and basically called it a day. The team used one sound stage and just those few details, rearranged a number of ways for different shots, as well as a composite shot with a matte painting, to give a sense that the Rebel Base was stronghold of fighters ready to take on the Empire.

( a preliminary plan of the soundstage.)

 (in the foregound, the Full Scale Y Wing, and X-wing, and flat cutouts beyond that.)

A few other items were holdovers from other sets. The gantries suspended from the ceiling are recycled from the Death Star Docking Bay set. In the scene where Han Solo is carrying off his reward for rescuing the princess, there's a background prop from Tatooine suspended from the ceiling. The rampant prop recycling that happened on the first Star Wars movie has become one of favorite features of the film. In a way it was a form of cutting corners, but the end product was put together such that you never notice, until you scrutinize every last detail. So in effect, their economy becomes an art from in itself.

Here's a video of a model Yavin Base I built to see what all the different shots of the Elstree Sound Stage all composited into one place. In the future, I'd like to build this model up to include the exterior of Yavin Base as well, from the matte painting of the exterior structure, to the shooting location in Tikal, Guatemala.