With Solo: A Star Wars Story available now on digital media, and coming next week on Blu-ray and DVD we get to go behind the scenes at Tippett Studios where they revisited the famous Holochess set. Over at Tippett.com there’s an insightful interview with VFX Supervisor, Chris Morley….
How did Tippett get involved with this movie?
In 1977 Phil Tippett and Jon Berg designed and animated stop motion creatures for a scene in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. In 2015 we recreated those 8 creatures for a scene in the Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. So, Lucasfilm knew who to call when they needed the Tippett stop motion gang back together for Solo.
How would you summarize your/Tippett’s work on this movie?
We brought the iconic Star Wars Holochess creatures back to life for a scene where Beckett and Chewbacca are playing a game of Dejarik. We completed 9 shots that included practical stop motion animated creatures that were digitally integrated over live action plates shot on the millennium falcon communal space set.
Were there any creative ideas that Tippett brought to the sequence?
For Star Wars Episode IV, Phil Tippett and Jon Berg designed and created 10 stop motion creatures for a scene aboard the millennium falcon. Out of the 10, George Lucas chose 8 of those characters to be used for the final shots. In Solo, the Millennium Falcon is new and clean, much different from the grimy, heavily modified version we see in the later years of it’s service. We decided that it would be a good idea to pitch bringing back the two Holochess characters that didn’t make it into the first film in 1977, as if in the Solo movie the Dejarik table was in full working order with all pieces intact. This led to capitalizing on a very serendipitous moment during the shoot where, in one shot, Chewy slams his paw down on the Holochess table in frustration. The force of the blow broke two buttons off the screen right side of the table set piece. An unplanned event that we thought would be a great opportunity to tell the story of how the two new Holochess pieces were lost from that day forward. We added some sparks, glitched off the two creatures and showed a version to Lucasfilm VFX supervisor Rob Bredow who loved the idea and pitched it to Ron Howard who ran with it. It was a great feeling to be able to embrace the magic of what we call a happy accident.
Read the full interview at the link below. Also, check out this piece over at the Official Site where they discuss this Easter Egg too.
