To pay homage to the least divisive of Disney era Star Wars movies, I'll be feeding this concept art/behind the scenes thread throughout the day.
A really beautiful movie.
Rogue One (2016)
Let's start with the fantastic U-wing, a ship whose design fits perfectly into the context of the film. It could have appeared in 1977. It obviously took a gigantic iteration work to get there.
"I worked on the development of the U-Wing & was also hands on with general art department models duties such as 3D printing, kit basing dressing for the model sets and producing model assets."
"John Knoll was a hero of mine growing up, getting into VFX. At some point in the industry, if you’re not given a directing gig straight from film school, you have to pick a career. I picked visual effects."
@euisung As you know, the Ghost from Rebels (2014-2018) appears on Scarif.
@halhickel (animation supervisor on Rogue One): “It’s just casual and friendly contact between folks at Lucasfilm working on different aspects of the SW universe and going, ‘Can we put your ship in our movie?’”
@euisung@halhickel John Knoll: “I was chatting with Dave Filoni. [I asked] ‘How would you feel about having the Ghost show up somewhere in Rogue One?’ They were all excited about the idea.”
Ghost 3D models for Rebels (up) & Rogue One (down)
@euisung@halhickel That's how you do more than an easter egg: you're creating lore and connection.
The Ghost will appear again in The Rise of Skywalker (2019). And I'm sure it won't be far from Ahsoka, in 2023.
@euisung@halhickel The best easter egg: 39 years after Star Wars (1977), the reappearance of @AngusMacGold
as Gold Leader/Jon "Dutch" Vander (and the late Drewe Henley as Red Leader, too).
"They contacted me sometime in early October and said they wanted to use the footage? I said, "Well yeah."
@euisung@halhickel@AngusMacGold Director Gareth Edwards: "We got the neg documents and found the clips from ANH that hadn’t been used. And there’s pilot photography and lines that were never featured. Through the magic of @ILMVFX , they cut round them and manipulated them and stuck them into our cockpits".
@euisung@halhickel@AngusMacGold@ILMVFX@AngusMacGold
: "We re-recorded the dialogue for the sequence. Just little tweaks here and there – but it was important to change it, because obviously you couldn’t use the same dialogue at Yavin as you could with this sequence.”
@euisung@halhickel@AngusMacGold@ILMVFX Gareth Edwards: "It’s the sort of thing you think, ‘how many people will notice?’ Do you know what I mean? It’s like, is this a lot of effort for very little reward?”
And only 2 months before release. But we noticed, and it's a beautiful tribute.
"Gareth Edwards: It was a last-minute decision, and credit goes to Jabez Olssen, who was an editor on the film. We always wanted Vader in the movie as much as possible without playing that card too often."
@euisung@halhickel@AngusMacGold@ILMVFX@JonMcCoyArt "There were some other things in the works, and maybe we should stay clear of Vader a little bit. But as the film progressed it got clearer that this is that story that, if you watch the beginning of A New Hope, he’s obviously very pissed. [Laughs]"
Art by Yanick Dusseault:
@euisung@halhickel@AngusMacGold@ILMVFX@JonMcCoyArt "They have these plans, and he wants them desperately back. It feels like he was very intimately involved in some way in the moments that led to them being stolen. So we were always trying to fit him into the end of the film."
@euisung@halhickel@AngusMacGold@ILMVFX@JonMcCoyArt@MattAllsopp1 "I feel like the new future of Star Wars is that kind of passing of the torch, rather than one person defining it all. It’s this thing that lots of artists can play with and bring their voice to. Like, we see different versions of that world. I think that’s more exciting."
[Thread] The team behind The Expanse have created a new media company and have already signed on to develop a sci-fi series!...which is not a sequel to The Expanse. 😁
But don't cry, it's an adaptation of The Captive's War, the new trilogy from the authors of The Expanse! 🥳 1/8
Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, aka @JamesSACorey , The Expanse showrunner Naren Shankar, and The Expanse director @Breck_Eisner have come together on this very promising project, which I'm likely to be talking about a lot hehe
After all, why change a winning team? 2/8
And so their first project is a TV adaptation of the new book series The Captive's War, for Amazon MGM Studios.
The first novel, The Mercy of Gods, was published in August. A first novella set in the same universe, Livesuit, was released in October. 3/8
What would Battlestar Galactica (2003) look like if it were launched today?
Showrunner @RonDMoore : “I would still try to approach it with the same attitude that I had when I approached the original, which was I wanted to preserve the framework of what the original was." 1/4
"I want it to be recognizable as Battlestar Galactica. It’s still a warship and an aircraft carrier in space, guiding a ragtag civilian fleet running from the Cylons after an apocalyptic attack. It’s about their society. What are the pieces of their civilization they..." 2/4
"...chose to carry with them? What’s important to them? What does it mean to be a democracy? Then I would have to get down into the weeds and then it would be different because it would have to be informed by the last 20 years of what we have gone through." 3/4
But the future of the Internet promises to be a gigantic lie rather than the finest library in the galaxy, and it's sadly a tragedy worthy of a great sci-fi novel.
Cherish your old (art)books. Protect your bookshelves.
[Thread] So I've been playing #StarWarsOutlaws since last Wednesday. I managed to play it for 15 hours (despite a wedding this weekend 😅).
I quickly realized that this game is MUCH more massive than I thought, and I'm still far from measuring the scope of this game.
I'll give you my first impressions in this thread.
First you have to know where I come from. I loved open worlds in the 2000s, but after the incredible Black Flag I lost the desire to devote dozens of hours to a single game. Since then, I've only played Mad Max and Red Dead Redemption 2 this winter.
Suffice to say, I started Outlaws from a very high starting point!
Unsurprisingly, Outlaws is no RDR2 masterpiece. I wasn't asking for so much. I was asking for fun. I was asking for Star Wars.
Given that, after 15 hours (which is already my ideal length for a game lol), I'm dying to get back to Kay & Nix for a heist, that's a pretty good sign.😌
[Thread] You've seen or are about to see Alien Romulus, and you want to take this opportunity to revisit the history of sci-fi. 👋
Here are some of the films that inspired the writers of the 1979 film... #AlienMonth
1/18
You should start with Dark Star (1974).
In this film co-written by Alien (1979) co-writer Dan O'Bannon (where he also appears↙️), one of the story beats should ring a bell.
Alien would never have existed without Dark Star.
2/18
Beyond Alien, Dark Star is a milestone in the history of science fiction, as it launched Carpenter's career, which is no mean feat! The film was not a success, but Carpenter went on to make Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). The rest is history.🤗
With two weeks to go before the release of Alien Romulus, I'm starting my Alien rewatch.
And for the first time, I'm starting in the chronological order of this universe.
Welcome to 2093, on LV-223.
Iceland, I love you.
Love this shot.
(Ha yes, I don't know if I'll make the live tweet last, but the idea is to highlight stuff I like. I'm not in the habit of wasting my time on stuff I don't like 😌)