Tuesday, October 31, 2023

'77 Elstree Falcon Underside Details

 a few pieces of damage away from completing the modeling. Let's see if this most recent burst of energy will carry me through a materials phase.

Students of the 5-Foot filming model will no doubt recognize a lot of things, and also be puzzled by a lot of things. This full-scale prop is a rats nest of perfectly observed details and then wild deviations. Guess that's true really of all the Falcons. If you get a saucer, two forks, a nose, and a cockpit in roughly the right shape and then cover it with enough kitbash stuff it'll pretty much look like the Falcon.

What a pieces of junk.



'77 Elstree Falcon Superstructure

Just for fun, I wanted to show the superstructure based on images of the construction of the Falcon prop, so I imagined what it might look like if they had continued the construction all the way around the way they did on Empire.




Monday, October 30, 2023

'77 Elstree Falcon

 




 

been working on this version for a long time, I think I'm finally getting close to done...



 

and got to create some rigging in blender

Friday, March 26, 2021

The Foss Brothers

 

The R1 on the left is fairly well known from the ANH scene where R2 and 3PO are sold by the Jawas, and it's also pretty established that the design was based on a book cover painted by Chris Foss. Much less well knows is that R1's brother on the right, who resides at Mos Eisley and is seen for all of a handful of frames in the background as our heroes arrive at that well known hive of scum and villainy. 

 These models are from all new photomatches of behind the scenes materials. I'm setting these up for a collaboration with the incomparable Jason Eaton.



Thursday, March 18, 2021

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.




Saturday, July 25, 2020

random holochess discovery

I was looking at the holochess table in the ESB main hold and it has some details that are different than the ANH version. ESB has these big white rectangular greebles, instead of the silver knobs on ANH. In fact they're still present on the table that's on display at disney studios


Knobs version on A New Hope






Slots version on Empire




then I was looking closer at the bits and realized they looked like upside down rocker switches
that are standard all over the Falcon
 

















 when I put the rockers I'd already built into place they fit perfectly.




the bottom of them, if they are rockers, look pretty manufactured to me. I know that a bunch of the rockers in the real props are just painted wood, but at some point it was theorized they were based on something else, some other found part. Maybe seeing the bottom of them will jog someone's memory?



here's the complete set in the latest version of my ESB intieror model