ANH Falcon Back Wall Misalignment

So it's fairly well known that the back wall of the Falcon's cockpit is a little wonky in the first movie

The story goes that on ANH (left) they built it to match the specs so that in pre-production it looked like its counterpart in ESB (right), and then at some point Lucas said he wanted the cockpit to feel more cramped and some last minute adjustments were made. I'm not entirely sure I buy the official story that Lucas wanted a smaller cockpit, if for no other reason than that it doesn't actually make the cockpit that much smaller. So is it just an error in assembly that got overlooked? Maybe they had to move it from one sound stage to another and on reassembly it just got wonky? But the rest of the production is so meticulous that I don't really think that's true. So who can really say...

Either way, I wanted to show how much it changed. Here's my examination of the back wall based on photomatches overlaid with the production blueprints.

ESB Falcon interior - New Cockpit

here's another small update, working on bringing my cockpit in-line with the rest of my new photomatched interior. So far I've been able to pull in old models of the cockpit, move a few bits around, add a few bits I missed. One thing I'm seeing is that when I compare it the force awakens sets, which are basically ESB with tweaks, they really, REALLY, did their homework. Whatever else you could say about those movies, they really did the Falcon right in a way that's frankly amazing (imagine what could've been... imagine a fully redesigned Falcon-- Star Trek 2009 style. *DEEP SHUDDER OF HORROR*)

May the 4th be With You

Sometime in 2010 I found a copy of the blueprints used to construct the original Millennium Falcon cockpit. They were for sale in a packet from Ballantine books for the staggering sum of $19. The packet was published the same year as the original movie and I couldn't believe no one had used them to build anything since then. I had recently downloaded a copy of Sketchup and, initially just to learn the program, I imported scans of the drawings and got to work.

After I made some rough progress I posted my build on the Replica Prop Forum, with a little bit of embarrassment that my project was merely virtual. But people took interest.

In particular Greg Dietrich reached out to me with crazy dream of building in real life what I was doing virtually.

Smash cut to eight years later, we've got a write up on Wired...

https://www.wired.com/story/fan-building-millennium-falcon/

X-Wing Cockpit Photomatch

Finally nailed it... I've been trying to get this particular photo to work as a photomatch for hmmm, maybe a year or two.

1950s Millennium Falcon

Definitive "A New Hope" Falcon Cockpit

there was probably something else I was supposed to be doing... huh... oh well.

anywhere, here are renders of a project that I started in 2010. This is the cockpit of the Falcon from ANH, warts, misaligned panels, and all. Everything in here has been stared out for countless hours, reexamined, rebuilt, fretted over, deleted, lost in data errors, rebuilt, rebuilt again for good measure.

Finished it all one afternoon a few months ago, very suddenly. I wasn't even expecting it. I added a button, and looked around and kind of just went... oh... guess I... finished it. Then went and had a bit of a lie down.

now what? Finish the rest of the interior... uh, animate the blinky lights accurately? well, anyway, enjoy.

(big credit to J Maruska, who modeled the captain/copilot bucket seats that I used, and who's own excellent Falcon work can be found here!)

ANH Falcon Cockpit (part 2)

getting those lights to glow in the corridor was trickier than I thought it would be. It seems the crew may have shone some dim spot lights on them from the floor to get the glowing effect. Maybe... seems cumbersome but it's the only way I could achieve similar results with a physically based based render engine.

ANH Falcon Cockpit (WIP)

few more panels, and rendered a bit brighter...

Falcon and X-Wing in flight

with some bonus extra angles

Taking the Falcon for a Spin

Episode 7 Falcon Cockpit

Han's side

Chewie's Side

Falcon in Flight

What's left...

Once the areas highlighted red are done, that's it for the top of the new Falcon. Then I can sit back and wait for more reference images to emerge, which will no doubt prove I was wrong about everything, and I'll have to start all over again... I do enjoy this, right? Right?... I sure hope so...

Making-of the new dish

It took a long time to finalize the design of the Falcon's new dish, but it was well considered. There were moments, though, that might be a little less remembered by the movie-making history books.

"Almost there..." "Loosen up!!"

So close and yet so far...

I've put a lot of work into the model since December, and it's getting there, but there's always more to do. And I haven't even touched the bottom half of this thing...

also, I realized this blog is called "all things Star Wars" but I've pretty much been on one big Falcon kick for a long long time... will have to wait to get inspired by the next trailer.

Ep VII Falcon in Motion

Took my work-in-progress model and made a quick animation in 3ds Max.

Though it's subtle, the camera motion is actually bit of a geek out. I made a replica of the special camera rig developed for Star Wars by John Dykstra, the Dykstraflex Camera.

Since the days of Star Trek ( the Original Series) spaceship flybys were created by taking a stationary model and moving the camera toward it on a dolly track. The ship would be filmed against a bluescreen, which would be matted out in post production and replaced by a static starfield. The resulting illusion would be that the ship was moving toward a seemingly stationary camera.

Dykstra took this further by introducing a computer controlled rig that could repeat the exact same camera motion over and over, allowing for more effects to be precisely composited together.

The very particular axis of rotation on his camera rig gave the ships Star Wars a distinctive movement, as they seemed to pivot gracefully into and out of frame.

EP VII Millennium Falcon Work in Progress

Adding more details from the photogrammetric studies I did of the trailer screencaps.