AMAZING Detailed close-ups of Star Wars spaceships.

[arcane1]

This precious collection of rare close-ups of the ships used in the original Star Wars Trilogy gives us a glimpse into the great effort and detail that went into assembling them and shooting them.














MUCH more:

http://www.slightlywarped.com/crapfactory/curiosities/2014/october/detailed_close_ups_star_wars.htm

[hunter]

1. Wow is right!

Alas, it's almost all computer models now.

I wonder which is worse for your health, sitting in front of a computer "building" computer models, or actually moving about a shop building physical models, but breathing paint and glue fumes?

[A HERETIC I AM]

2. Very cool!!

I like to look at shots like those and try to figure out what they have used from other model kits. One of the shots of the Tie Fighter has what appears to be a wagon wheel, complete with the big nut in the center and I'm wiling to bet that's exactly what it is. The model maker used a wheel from a model of an old western style wagon and stuck it on the side of his space fighter.

Very very cool. Thanks for the link.

[arcane1]

3. Haha! I was doing the same thing: looking for evidence of kit-bashing :)

I know they did it, a lot! It's just a matter of finding it. There is one ship that looks like it's made of hulls from various submarines, airplanes, etc, of different scales:




And you just know there are more car-engine parts than we could count! It would have been a fun job!!!

[A HERETIC I AM]

6. Kit Bashing! That's the term I was thinking of!

I just finished a driving shift (was in CA, now in AZ headed back to JAX) and was taking a break earlier and typing with one thumb, so I couldnt do much more than a simple response....

so....


Yes....Kit Bashing perfectly describes what I'm on about.

Here's the shot I am talking about;



On a more thorough look, it appears to be more of a model locomotive wheel than a wagon wheel, as it also looks as if they included the brake shoe on the right. But it illustrates perfectly the ingenuity of the model builder. Of course when they filmed these, they were moving so fast you would never have been able to say "hey....is that a locomotive wheel stuck to the side of that Tie Fighter?" It's just that those sorts of things add detail and texture.

Cool job indeed.
Years ago I saw a "how they made it" film about the first movie and it was mentioned that the sequence of the attack on the Death Star consisted of no more than 6 squares of surface. That is to say, all they made was about 12 or so square feet of Death Star surface on 4 seperate squares they could rearrange, with buildings and fixtures and lighting, etc, and all they did to make it look huge was to put the 4 squares together in different ways - flip this one back to front, rotate that one 90 degrees, and so on for each successive 2 or 3 second piece of film.

I also read that on the original Star Trek sets, there would be pipes and hoses overhead in many shots. Some were clearly marked "GNDN".

Stood for "Goes Nowhere, Does Nothing"! Ya gotta love the film crew folks!

Again, very cool link. Really neat stuff.

[hunter]

4. For repetitive parts, I imagine...

...I'd do a lot of casting and vacuum forming.

I was trying to find evidence of that in the photos.

It's some amazing art.

[A HERETIC I AM]

7. No doubt. The big studios have craft departments that can make just about anything.

And if they can't, they have a vendor on speed dial in the LA area who can!

Amazing art indeed.

[progressoid]

5. And then they blew them up.