We’ve already seen a breakdown article by Dave Filoni and a few high resolution images from the film showing off the various Star Wars Rebels cameos present in director Gareth Edwards’ Rogue One. Following along those same lines, ILM’s John Knoll spoke briefly about the process of including these elements from Rebels into the first Star Wars standalone film.
For executive producer, story writer, and VFX Supervisor John Knoll (he’s a man of many hats on this film), the Rebels tie-in was simply “natural.” It was something he had in mind right when he was first pitching the idea of making an entire movie out of two lines of the opening crawl of the original Star Wars.
“Rebels was in development around the same time that I was developing the initial story pitch on this, and the proximity and time seemed like a natural fit, that maybe there needs to be some crossover. At some point in the Rebels show, maybe you’ll see some characters from this movie and maybe there’s something we can incorporate from Rebels into Rogue One,” Knoll told ComicBook.com in an interview.
“I got talking with [Rebels showrunner] Dave Filoni about that, and I asked, ‘what are your plans for the show? Would it be appropriate if The Ghost showed up in the space battle?’ He was pretty enthusiastic about that, and we got the CG model from him. Obviously it was built for doing an animated show, so it needed a bit of a rebuild and texture and detail upgrade to work in a feature film, but it was really a fun project. It’s a nice little gesture to the fans. If you recognize it for what it is, that’s great, and if you don’t, it’s just another bit of variety of ships in the space battle.”
