Millennium Falcon Turret Spin

Created this animation to show how the turret is now able to rotate, as I outlined in the previous post here

Ch-ch-ch-changes...

so the turret is backwards... spotted on The RPF by the eagle-eyed Jaitea. It's be speculated that the turret can or should rotate into this position, though it's never been seen on film. Until now.

I think I can deal with this. I think I'll have to do a quick animation, to see what it looks like swinging around. But visually it totally makes sense, and doesn't break the ship or add anything stupid, in my opinion.









But what's really weirding me out though is the disappearing red panel...

this is the rear quarter from the first teaser, ostensibly from the same desert battle with TIE fighters. Note the red panel


and here she is now with in the new trailer with no red panel.



what gives?

I kind of hope she gets blasted at some point, and we see Han or somebody standing on the falcon replacing her panels. That could be a fun scene. But I also wonder if the flight scene in the teaser was made up specially for the teaser, and the model they used had a red panel for some reason, which was discarded for the actual movie.

time will tell.

Falcon and X-Wing in flight

with some bonus extra angles

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.

The New Dish

here's basically what we're looking at with the new dish, based on my photomatches.

I'm not sure how it connects yet to the base, though.

here are orthographic views of what I have so far. Still missing some details.

and here are overlays of the perspective-matched reference material.