We recently spoke to Andre Kirk, art director at Lucasfilm Animation, about the challenges and processes involved in the visual development of Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord.
Here, he provides a deeper dive into how artists developed the look and feel of four specific components of the hit Disney+ animation series, including the design of new Jedi master Eeko-Dio Daki, the city of Janix, and the look of Maul himself.
If you need tools for your own art, see our guide to the best drawing tablets.
Looti Vario
Looti Vario was fun to work on. We knew he was going to be an Aleena, a small lizard-type alien in the Star Wars universe, and we knew that we wanted to put him in a mech suit.
So, a lot of discussion happens, between reading the script and talking to the supervising director, about what role does Looti have? When can we lean into the whimsical things like his teeny tiny gun? Those are sort of conscious decisions where you’re thinking: ‘We know what Aleenas have looked like before, in The Clone Wars and in live-action Star Wars. We started with those versions as a base and added in the flexibility that we knew we needed with the character.
We always want to make sure we’re paying respect to the previous versions when we’re iterating on what’s come before, but also creating our own version of these characters. We knew that Looti Vario would have a lot of expressive emotions, so we concentrated on his open mouth, detailing out the teeth, gums, all of that to really realise his character.
In a lot of the earlier versions of Looti, we attempted various outfits for him. Was it Napoleonic, was it purely functional, what would his taste in fashion be? It was about trying to suggest a back story for the character because we always encourage designers to think of a back story when they’re designing. For example, asking: ‘How did this guy become a mob boss? Feel free to inject any of your ideas into there.’
If it’s not written down specifically, it could be that what you’re suggesting becomes what this character is. A lot of the time it just ends up being ‘head-canon’ where all the little details we add aren’t necessarily on the page or screen, but fully realised in our heads.
For Looti Vario, we figured this fella out all the way from his birth through college, and then graduating as a crime lord. Thinking through everything really helps out when designing the character because there’s a real and character-driven validity to all the design decisions we need to make along the way.
Designing Jedi Master, Eeko-Dio Daki
There was a lot of development on his back story, outfit and how he should be dressed. His costume is very similar to a flight suit, but where did he get it? Is it his originally? He’s on the run, but is he a pilot? In disguise? Ultimately all of our characters have this level of scrutiny because it’s our job to think about all these questions in Design, and Master Daki was no different.
And then there are things you might not consider, like his cape. How do you break that up into multicolours? How do you get those additional hues in there, but get it to store light fairly evenly? Do you paint in shadows so we can rely on [those] you get from the folds of the fabric? How will we do tattered edges on the fabric, the hood, the cape?
Ultimately the question becomes how do we retain the painterly and stylised nature of the world without things getting too realistic? Sometimes where you do see real-world textures, like a cotton weave or something in a fabric, it’s oversized. It’s not attempting to be realistic.
It’s a bit like what you would have with plaster gypsum. A lot of our surface texture is that and it’s telling the designers, ‘Hey, you might not have the designers, ‘Hey, you might not have played with gypsum, but this is what it looks like, and this is what we’re after; where your surface texture goes in and out between paint, then weave, then paint, and then weave.’ It’s all of these observational things that you pass onto your design team that are able to integrate into their work and have it help develop their designs.”
head shape, and light and shadow interplay. head shape, and light and shadow interplay.
Planning the planet of Janix
“There’s very little interpretation between the designs and the final product. So for instance, for the bridge (seen in episode 1 of the series), the design team would be responsible for showing you every angle of it: how it would work, how it connects to the buildings, how the buildings are made, what they look like from every angle.
What the signs are on those buildings and just sort of laying out the space that you’re in. We give opportunity for the storyboard artists to move things around, but once we’ve checked with the supervising director on very specific things he wants, we’ll lock that down. We don’t want someone to look at a scene and go ‘Wait. Where am I ?’ It has to make sense not just for the story but also in a real-world city layout way, even though it’s something a viewer might never see.
The making of Maul
A lot of it is about breaking up solid colours into complementary colours and having additional hues to make your eye realise that this is a painted surface. It’s not a solid colour. So, with Maul, and for the environments, we don’t want that flat solid colour. We want to see that someone has painted that out of very similar hues and very similar values, but they’ve broken up that surface with paint. So, with Maul, if we get in close, we don’t want to see the pores of the skin.
We want to get closer to the painting… to see those brushstrokes. That is the surface of our world. It’s not reality. It’s something you have to sort of be aware of and go ‘Oh, that’s going too realistic.’ We want the paint to be the surface of objects and clothing and skin.
There was a lot of work with that; particularly on Maul’s black outfit and his skin, but without totally shifting it so that in neutral light he doesn’t suddenly take on a warmer look.
For Maul, we favoured a cool look to offset the red and the black areas, rather than have him always be warm. There is a concentration on that. When we introduce these complementary colours or hues, it is not to shift it into a different lighting environment so a character will stand out when acting opposite another character.
It also makes it a lot easier for the lighting team if the colours are fairly neutral. But in terms of Maul’s topology and his body, there weren’t too many changes because we were pretty happy with where he was in The Clone Wars season seven.
This article originally appeared in ImagineFX. Subscribe to ImagineFX to never miss an issue. Print and digital subscriptions are available.
Creative Bloq is now easier to access than ever before with our on-the-go app, which brings you all the content you know and love from our website, but in a super-streamlined design.
Download the Creative Bloq app for iOS
Download the Creative Bloq app for Android
