Various concept sketches came from producer George Lucas' call for a "rocket powered scooter" in Return of the Jedi. While Industrial Light & Magic's (ILM) Nilo Rodis-Jamero designed a blocky vehicle with a large engine, Ralph McQuarrie's
designs were more fanciful but with less of a sense of the vehicle's
power source. The final designs resulted both in full-scale Imperial
speeder bikes used by the actors for film against a bluescreen, along with miniatures mounted by articulated puppets. ILM used a steadicam recording at 1 frame per second to record the speeder bikes' path through the forest moon of Endor -- in reality, a California
forest.Playing the footage at the standard rate of 24 frames per
second caused a blurring effect, what looked like 100MPH actually was
shot at 5MPH , which ILM used to simulate the vehicles' high speed.
The BARC speeder in Revenge of the Sith was designed to appear like a predecessor to the speeder bikes in Return of the Jedi. ILM's Doug Chiang designed Darth Maul's (Ray Park) speeder in The Phantom Menace to resemble a scythe, and Chiang's initial designs for the droid army's STAP vehicle resembled the speeder bikes from Return of the Jedi. An all-CGI swoop appearing in A New Hope stems from a design created for Shadows of the Empire, and the swoop also appears briefly in The Phantom Menace.
It seems each week there is more and more Star Wars models on the market...I'd love a slice of the royalties.
ReplyDeleteThis looks really nice, I may have to branch out.
I wish they would re release this kit. I want to kitbash a winterized version of it.
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