Secrets of Star Wars Design

i wanted to come up with a comprehensive system that explained star wars visuals in a way that was objective because obviously you can't just say well star wars designs have to be good well okay but how can you account for personal taste certain ships that might completely fit the star wars universe might look bad and other things might look amazing but have no place in star wars and how do you define that in objective terms even after i've spent an absurd amount of time researching the original designs and how they were developed and how they were built i still can't fully wrap my mind around how star wars so consistently can have some of the best sci-fi vehicle designs in history but i might be focusing too much on subjective taste because far beyond whether or not a design is good there's also this kind of near mystical quality of designs that just work in the star wars universe and why is that after giving it a lot of thought i think that i now have a system of how to make star wars designs that work pretty much every time now arguably the most important aspect of a star wars design is its shape and i think a lot of us might say that star wars is typified by maybe geometric or angular shapes or designs composed of simple primitive forms modified with various technical details but that doesn't account for the flowing organic shapes of other designs in this saga and i think that getting all these specifics right is very important but it requires the balancing of three principles that i believe drive the vast majority of star wars design number one an iconic silhouette number two remembering to use the correct materials and number three having the proper inspiration so let's get into number one now we typically use the word iconic to mean something that is universally culturally recognizable and that certainly applies in the context of star wars which has some of the most recognizable vehicle designs in history but often times whether or not something is iconic is something that we really only judge in retrospect so instead i'm going to use the word more in the sense that star wars designs literally have the characteristics of icons like computer icons icons are designed ahead of time to be instantly recognized and equally importantly to not be confused with other icons good icons immediately communicate a unique idea and are sufficiently different from one another so that you can use an interface quickly without having to constantly stop to read or study the meaning of a certain symbol this requires shapes that are radically different from one another you can't just have a bunch of slightly different amorphous blobs and call it a day every single ship in the original trilogy has a completely unique silhouette that just literally cannot be in any way confused for any other ship this applies for everything even similar designs like the regular star destroyers and the superstar destroyer have significantly different silhouettes or the various tie fighter variants we see they're all different in ways that are immediately recognizable with the slightest glance and if we're being honest this is just good design in general it's not like it's exclusive to the feel of star wars but even common sense design like this can be fairly lost on some of the more modern designs we've seen for instance virtually every single fighter craft in the sequel trilogy is just a mile the redux of ships from the original trilogy and what we get is silhouettes that just are not immediately recognizable anymore and you could say of course they look the same they're just improvements of the same ships but see we've almost never seen this sort of barely noticeable incremental change in star wars before an improved tie fighter model in the original trilogy had a completely different shape with entirely new wing panels why is it that this supposedly new tie fighter looks largely identical to the old version if we look at the prequel trilogy even ships that are meant to be direct predecessors of ships in the original trilogy at least have very unique silhouettes that cannot be confused for one another the star destroyer lineage is very strong in the venator class but there's absolutely no way that you would confuse it for an imperial class star destroyer even if you only saw it for a split second but an iconic shape is not enough i can think of iconic shapes that probably wouldn't fit in star wars and yet star wars has a pretty wide variety of styles and still somehow maintains a coherent visual tone and i believe that's partially due to the materials that the original model builders used to bring these ships to life when your primary building materials are sheets of flat or vacuum formed plastic you just can't make every conceivable shape which means that the bulk of the visual language of star wars was developed to accommodate flat planes and shells flat planes could be easily cut and arranged in the geometric shapes or bent into simple curves and then shells could be created via vacuum forming even highly organic designs like the mon calamari cruisers are largely detailed with just tons of little shells and iconic elements like the equatorial trench on the death star weren't really the original artist's intent but were rather the practical result of trying to connect two plastic hemispheres the net effects of countless tiny imperfections in the materials meant that they never perfectly lined up the solution incorporated into the design in fact we see trenches like this on lots of star wars ships likely for similar reasons so these imperfections and limitations are largely responsible for why some designs simply wouldn't work in the context of star wars this is a ship allegedly designed for the star wars high republic era imagine building this monstrosity using the techniques of an ilm model maker in the late 70s or early 80s it wouldn't be feasible especially considering that the demands of miniature effects requires that many star wars ships were designed to be easily reproducible at multiple different scales and that's not even mentioning that this thing doesn't have anything remotely approaching an iconic silhouette now okay it's not as if a ship like this couldn't exist in a huge galaxy with hundreds or thousands of alien species but it just wouldn't because the context of star wars design is rooted in things that could be simply engineered and assembled by hand with common materials and at small scales this is a visual context that persisted through pretty much the entirety of the george lucas saga because even the prequels despite the advent of improving cgi were still largely built by hand many of these designs worked so well in the existing framework of star wars because they were literally built using most of the same methods and this second rule is actually something that the new films emulate fairly well they often prototype designs with actual materials in ways that resemble the methods employed by the original model makers resulting in ships that could very well have been built in the 70s or 80s so that brings us finally to inspiration this is the final principle that pushes an iconic and physically plausible design into star wars territory because star wars isn't based on just anything star wars vehicles have a very clear link to real vehicles virtually everything in star wars is an impressionistic interpretation or remix of things that actually existed or were designed in the real world with the ubiquity of modular designs docking rings solar panels and rocket bell thrusters many star wars designs evoked contemporary space vehicles the wings of the tie fighter resemble ernst schulinger's ion engine spacecraft concepts from the 60s y-wings are functionally based on world war ii era torpedo bombers and share nominal visual similarities with fighter aircraft like the lockheed p-38 the twin pod cloud car evokes an f-82 twin mustang even seemingly exotic fighters like the b-wing have precedent in bizarre asymmetrical designs like the german bv141 reconnaissance aircraft even ships that at first glance wouldn't seem to fit in with these star wars design language established in the original trilogy actually work fairly well in the universe because designs like this are still firmly rooted in our own aeronautical history the queen's starship is an sr-71 blackbird the n1 starfighter as atypical as it seems is really just a re-contextualized speedboat which while a departure from the traditional military aviation inspirations of star wars actually fits in very well with the nautical inspirations of star wars like how star destroyers evoke classic battleships heck some nautical influence goes way back like how we get 18th century naval warfare in some scenes general grievous's ship takes inspiration from ancient greek trireme ships but the main thing to take away from this is that star wars really isn't a boundless world that's limited only by the designer's imagination it's a practical mechanically plausible world that's firmly rooted in a deep legacy of real world design become a historian and study the things that originally inspired star wars look at bizarre world war ii fighters look at classic nasa concept art find the origins of the shapes in star wars design and you'll immediately notice what a difference it makes i would like to do more design analysis videos like this so if you guys liked this video let me know and i'll see if i can't incorporate more videos like this into my schedule this is a pretty obscure topic and it's not the sort of sensational kind of thing that the youtube algorithm really likes so i'd like to give a huge shout out to my supporters on patreon you guys are really amazing i thank you so much for believing in my channel and supporting me your support gives me the freedom to pursue videos that i actually like to make rather than chasing trends so i really appreciate that and i cannot thank you enough if you're watching and you'd like to be a part of that head on over to my patreon and see if that's something you'd like to do to the rest of you i'd like to thank you all so much for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: EC Henry

Views: 696,732

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Id: f80mfPYLqHg

Length: 9min 43sec (583 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 21 2022