Prequels, etc, but I do love the look of the ARC-170 Starfighter.
Prequels, etc, but I do love the look of the ARC-170 Starfighter.
This is an interesting theory, but I notice the author has to omit one of the most important Heinlein novels to make...
Originally shared by Curt Thompson This is an interesting theory, but I notice the author has to omit one of the most important Heinlein novels to make it work. Time Enough For Love was written in the very early 70s and was a straight (heh) extrapolation of the chaotic and frenetic zeitgeist of that era. http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2012/11/the-joke-is-on-us-the-two-careers-of-robert-a-heinlein/
The prequels had tons of super creative and talented people working on the design and effects. It's a shame that a lot of it went to waste.
ReplyDeleteYeah, Naboo designs are great because they're so unlike everything else in Star Wars. Smooth and new and not dirty and greebley.
ReplyDeleteBased on the awesome P-61.
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you look at the modeling for the original trilogy, and most of the vehicles are simple shapes. Fighters are shaped after letters (the TIE Fighter is known as an H-Wing in the timelines where Palpatine's coup failed). The Death Star is a sphere. Star Destroyers and snowspeeders are wedges, the Mon Cal corvettes and Cloud City are ellipsoids. A Corellian Corvette is ... an I with heavy serifs? (reaching here, I guess)
ReplyDeleteYou also had simple animal shapes (AT-ATs, AT-STs, Slave One)
Even when the modellers started compounding shapes, like with the nebulon frigate and the cloud car, they stayed simple and joined the compound shapes with narrow beams so that the simple shapes were the ones that defined the design.
I found much of the modeling for the prequels was much muddier and less distinctive. The models I liked were the trade alliance blockade ships -- just toruses and spheres. The spider walkers were distinctive too, they really drew the eyes. Obi-Wan's fighter from Clones had a nice simple wedge shape. The ARC-170 is a bit busy but it's okay to me.
I thought that much of the rest of the vehicle modeling was really blobby and undistinctive, like nike swooshes glue-gunned together. The Naboo fighters and the droid fighters in Phantom Menace were the same basic shape, having much the same front-on profile. I suspect they made the naboo fighters schoolbus yellow so they'd be recognizable on the screen.
I do like that the Naboo stuff is shiny, though, a nice visual cue that we're dealing with a more genteel age, before the polishing droids were melted down into AT-ATs.
The droid ships do nothing for me. I take that back, when they're walking I like the vulture droids.
ReplyDeleteI've always been partial tot he ARC-170 too. Love it.
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