Ralph McQuarries Influence on the Star Wars Saga

I think it’s safe to say that art is definitely a key part of creating any IP, whether it’s a game or even a movie.  To fully visualise anything in pre-production really helps in the long run, therefore shaping the overall look of the final product. Thanks to his inspiration conceptual pieces, Ralph McQuarrie helped to shape the overall look of the Star Wars Saga and the Star Wars Universe; the result of those pieces being the lush environments of alien planets such as Tattooine and Endor and even iconic characters such as Darth Vader, Chewbacca; even C-3PO and R2D2.So you’re probably wondering, who is Ralph McQuarrie? Ralph McQuarrie was an American concept artist, designer and illustrator. His most notable artistic contribution being for the original Star Wars trilogy, however McQuarrie also created pieces for E.T – The Extra Terrestrial and Cocoon. However in this post I’ll just be covering his work on the original Star Wars Trilogy.One thing that many people don’t know about Ralph McQuarrie is that he started off in a dentistry firm drawing both teeth and equipment. Soon after his job at the dentistry firm, McQuarrie went on to work as a Preliminary Design Illustrator for the Boeing Company. Here he drew diagrams for manuals on constructing the 747 Jumbo Jet.

It wasn’t until 1975 when director and filmmaker George Lucas, was mesmerised with his work and met up with McQuarrie to talk about Lucas’ plans for a ‘space-fantasy film’; it was then when Lucas commissioned McQuarrie to illustrate scenes from the film based on the script.

Ralph McQuarrie with George Lucas

Not only is McQuarrie responsible for the look of iconic characters such s C-3PO, Darth Vader and Chewbacca, but he is also responsible for the iconic looks of such planets and locations like Tatooine, the Mos Eisley cantina, the Death Star and even Yavin 4.Ralphs work was so important and valued by the franchise that George Lucas made sure that the shots in the movie replicated his paintings exactly. This is why his Star Wars portfolio is so vital to the overall aesthetic of the original trilogy. There are also many examples of where some of Ralph McQuarries art work has been re-used to aid other parts of the Star Universe, outside of the original trilogy. One of many noticeable examples of this is the design of Zeb Orrelios from the Star Wars Rebels animated TV series. With this side by side comparison, you can clearly see that Zeb’s character design is heavily based off of the original concepts of everyone’s favourite walking carpet, Chewbacca.

(Left) Original Chewbacca Concept and Zeb Orrelios from Star Wars Rebels (Right)

Even the Storm trooper training gear seen very early on in the Rebels TV series looks similar in design compared to McQuarries earlier Storm trooper concepts.

Storm Trooper Training Gear (Star Wars Rebels)

Early Storm Trooper Concept Art

As well as this there are other examples of McQuarries influence later on in the saga: twice! These examples are present in 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The first being the architecture in Rey’s Village on Jakku. The visual style looks almost identical to McQuarries original concept piece of the outside of Jabba’s Palace in the original trilogy.

Jabba’s Palace Concept Art

Rey’s Village in The Force Awakens

Another example is the design of the X-Wings in this film. As you can see the Design is completely different to the original X-Wings in Episodes 4, 5 and 6.

X-Wing design in A New Hope

X-Wing design in The Force Awakens

The new design looks like the original concepts done by Ralph McQuarrie of this X-Wing dog fighting in space with this TIE Fighter. The similarities between this X-Wing and the X-Wing class from the Force Awakens being that they both share the same engine design: this being semi-circular.But if I’m honest one of my favourite pieces done by Ralph has got to be the piece which appears to be set on Cloud City, where we see lightsabre wielding Storm troopers for the first time; maybe this could’ve been inspiration for the Storm trooper TR-8R in the Force Awakens, who knows.Every artist has their inspiration no matter if it’s a specific movement or artist; Ralph McQuarrie is no exception. From all of the production paintings McQuarrie produced, it was the concept of R2-D2 and C-3PO wandering the desert that was completed first.If you analyse the painting very closely, it’s quite apparent that Art Deco movement may have heavily inspired McQuarries piece. What do I mean by this? Well if you compare C-3P0 to the Art Deco robot, Mashinenmensch from Fritz Lang’s film from 1927, Metropolis, then you’ll notice that the resemblance is uncanny.Not only did this painting start the design of C-3PO off, but it also had an impact on the actor who would later play him, Anthony Daniels.Daniels even said himself that the figure of McQuarries design had ‘a rather wistful’, ‘yearning’ and ‘rather bereft quality’ which Daniels ‘found very appealing’. Thanks to McQuarries painting, Daniels accepted the role as C-3PO.

Soon after the first film, McQuarrie went on to create other pre-visualisation concept art for the following films: Empire Strikes Back and The Return of The Jedi.Despite not working on the prequel trilogy and experiencing creative fatigue, it’s safe to say that Ralph McQuarries work has definitely inspired the Star Wars Universe as a whole. He may not still be around today but thanks to his influence, he has truly left his mark on the world of cinema with his work on Star Wars.

 

 

Synoptic Project: Concept Piece

Due to the absence of our creative lead, I have had to step in and have quite a lot of creative input throughout the project. Whether it be critiquing my colleagues’ work or coming up with new ideas, I do believe I have been of some help. However just before we started creating effects for the short film, we came to a halt. This was due to us not knowing what we wanted the mirror scene in our short to look like as we already had a brief idea of what we wanted every other scene with effects to look like. For those of you unaware of what I’m talking about, the scene is basically the main character seeing a dark reflection of himself in the mirror (this dark reflection being the psychopath).So with this in mind I created an entire concept piece from scratch in Photoshop, trying to illustrate how I thought the scene should look. The piece took me roughly 5-6 hours to really get right. It may not be the best piece produced for the project but its noticeably one of my best pieces that I’ve produced all year. Here’s part of a time-lapse of me drawing the piece and below that the final piece itself…

Overall I’m very happy with how this piece turned out and I think that it’s definitely improved my digital art skills.

Synoptic Project: Filming, Dailies & Behind The Scenes

From mid April, myself and the team have been gathering footage to work with for our short film. However due to the set backs with actors and so on (mentioned in a previous post), we’ve had to act out the short film ourselves. This blog post will be focused around how I think the team communicated throughout filming and how well we managed to plan shots and capture footage.
Originally we had planned to film quarter of the way through March once the actors had been recruited; of course this ended up not being the case and we had to scrap the idea of filming with actors entirely. This led us to star in the film ourselves: the cast being members of the group and classmates who were kind enough to act for us in between working on their projects (thanks guys!). So now we had myself playing the main character: James Jones, Dan (from our team) as James Jones’ work colleague, Andrew as Mr Johansen, Allan as the Psychopath/ evil reflection and Daniel as the Thug. Obviously to fit the script around the cast we had to make some minor and some major changes to the script: minor changes such as the thug beating the character up with his fists instead of stabbing him with a knife and some changes as big as taking an entire act out due to time limitations and the submission build deadline, this being the 23rd of May.

Overall I believe that filming went quite well and to be honest there were only slight issues we had during filming. Most of the time it was audio issues such as us filming on the green screen whilst a class was underway or even if it was just the audio that was being captured by the camera was bad. Sometimes issues came up in post with footage that we had to work around in post but I will talk about that in a moment.

However throughout the whole of the filming process, Jacob had captured a tonne of footage that he created a BTS for every filming day. He then compiled all of them together to create a 20 minute long documentary which you can view down below. As well as the considerable amount of paperwork that has been completed, this also contributes to our documentation. In the video you can see how we went about filming and there’s even a QnA segment with myself, discussing certain aspects of the filming process and more. Big thanks to Jacob on this documentary and be sure to check it out below.

With filming out of the way, it was time to review the footage. Despite the filming process being long we did have a lot of takes to choose from, so when it was time for editing the clips together we could have a better understanding of what we should use and what we should leave out. For instance we would discard takes of us laughing or just simply not doing actions correctly. 
But going over the footage, we did manage to capture some pretty good shots and the majority of our footage looked pretty nice and I think with this my directing of the shot supervisor and rest of the crew, in some instances, really helped to give some shots a unique and satisfying look to them. For instance this scene where the main character is walking along the bridge.But we did in fact encounter some issues. These were mainly issues in post. For example some scenes looked incredibly grainy due to the lighting being low and the ISO on the camera being cranked up as a result, therefore causing the grainy look; we even encountered some issues where some shots were the polar opposite and were over exposed, sometimes causing light to over power the subject or camera in terms of lighting. Another issue was that there was too much motion blur in some pieces of footage, this was an issue for tracking mainly as sometimes the tracker would be thrown off position in After Effects whilst tracking an object or person. This was due to the shutter speed being slow which as a result created more motion blur when the subject or camera was moving.Reflecting back on the filming dates, I think that there is definitely room for improvement if we were to do a project like this again. For instance, I’d make sure that the shot supervisor was fully aware of what they were doing before starting and were fully educated on the basics of cameras, ISO and shutter speed, therefore giving shots a more polished look and making thinks easier to track in post. I would also make sure that we had the right equipment. What i mean by this is perhaps a microphone for better audio quality and different types of tape for markers so that the actors knew where they were going to be in the next scene and so on.

Despite our issues, we did manage to pull off some pretty nice looking shots and the filming days were certainly a good experience and I think the team handled themselves well and we all communicated great: especially with our fellow classmates/ actors. Now time to put everything together and make some VFX!

Synoptic Project : Problems, Problems, Problems

Problems. Oh so many problems.

With the submission deadline drawing closer and closer and hardly footage captured or any VFX done so far, I think that its safe to say that we’ve struggled quite a bit so far. So with that I will be discussing some of these problems.
In my original pitch, I said that we would recruit actors from the drama department to star in the short film and students from the music department to produce music for the short film. In terms of recruiting the actors we did run into some major problems. At first when approaching the students to see who would want to act in the short, we initially got an overwhelming response with almost an entire class wanting to take part, therefore exceeding the number of actors we actually needed. We arranged several meetings with the actors to talk about the script and if they were comfortable with doing acting in front of a green screen and doing audio work if need be.Well in our first meeting, we were shocked to discover that out of the many actors that put their name down to take part, only 3 of them turned up. Meeting after meeting, week after week, the less the actors turned up; at one point no one turned up at all. This was unacceptable and wouldn’t be tolerated in the industry and with that being said, this had to be our mindset during this time. So with this we got rid of the actors, since all we really got from them was test footage.

As well as this, we did experience some team related problems; our creative lead not turning up to be more specific. Without proper creative input from our creative lead we are struggling quite a bit. Also this is resulting in work being put to one side and the rest of the team having to pick up the pieces. This will be resolved soon enough.

However despite all of the problems, we are in talks with a music student at the moment who has produced an amazing music sample for us.

Due to the actors setting us back, we will have to star in the short film ourselves; the acting may not be as good but at least then we will have at least some footage to work with.

Now we need to focus on gathering footage and creating some solid VFX.