Design for Star Wars
There is a common phrase among design engineers: Design for X.
The “X” stands for almost anything but it’s traditionally used to represent one or more particular design phases or requirements: design for high volume, design for ergonomics, design for safety, design for reliability. It is also used for specific domains like design for energy, design for transportation, design for consumer products. Some other common examples include: Design for cost (DFC), Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DFMA), Design for Quality (DFQ).
Today I want to consider a new one: Design for Star Wars.
I realize that I’m on dangerous ground because everyone reading this knows about Star Wars. Well, perhaps almost everyone. The first Star Wars movie my wife ever saw was Episode III, Revenge of the Sith, in the theater. It was also her last Star Wars movie she ever saw. Hindsight is 20/20; I realized afterward that Episode III wasn’t the proper introduction to the wonderful galaxy far, far away. To my great disappointment, and to this day, she hasn’t watched another Star Wars movie.
What she’s missing out on is all the great design work that created the Star Wars Universe. Few things are more universally known throughout the world and discussed than the characters, the pseudo-science, the action sequences, the technology, the worlds, and the storylines of Star Wars. The themes penetrate almost every culture on our planet. One reference claims that Star Wars has been translated into 50 languages! [1] A 2017 survey reveals 49% of adults in the U.S. have seen Episode V. Extending this statistic to the other Star Wars movies and to other countries means that more people have watched a Star Wars movie than you will have heartbeats in your life.
There are so many stakeholders in the design of Star Wars that the pressure to have an excellent product time and time again is reaching astronomical proportions (pun intended).
To give you an example of how extreme fans and analysts can take this Star Wars product, a journalist was recently speculating on insider ticket buying. He was exploring the patterns of the sold seats in theaters for the December 20th, 2019 showing of The Rise of Skywalker. (That’s some pretty specific efforts to find data with respect to Star Wars…) Furthermore, new articles are published every day critiquing the most minute details, such as the hue of someone’s lightsaber, generating alternate endings, evaluating plot holes, or discussing who shot first. (Han did.)
Thus, out of necessity, Design for Star Wars has become a big deal. In fact, the design process for Star Wars has become so interesting, that documentaries about how these movies are made are sometimes even better. Many documentaries on YouTube have more than a million views. Most of the other products you love don’t get anything near that level of customer interest. You likely haven’t watched a documentary on how that smartphone in your pocket was built, although you should.
So, how does George Lucus, Lucasfilms, now Disney, and all the other organizations listed at the very end of the credits roll, design for Star Wars? Very carefully, meticulously, with lots of iterations, and with customer feedback. (Okay, there’s a lot more strategies than that but that’s what I have time for today.)
Very Carefully
Everything in Star Wars has to be designed carefully. With millions of eyes looking at every single frame of even the movie trailer, consistency needs to drive decisions. Other movies can get away with switching out the wardrobe of their characters, messing up their makeup between scenes, or using a different dog for different stunts. Not in Star Wars. We, as fans, will jump on any infraction of consistency, both in the physical portrayal of characters and environments and also in plot sequences and story flow.
There is a Lucasfilm Story Group, whose job is to safeguard and propagate the Star Wars canon and keep pure the Star Wars details that must span across all Star Wars movies, media, and related products. The canon masters in this group are paid to decide what must be kept as incontrovertible in the Star Wars Universe. That canon grows too, but adding new elements to a movie needs to be carefully compared to all the other stuff considered sacrosanct. Imagine your job is to walk around the Star Wars’ movie sets and the computer screens of animators and tell them to include this prop or draw this feature onto Baby Yoda. That’s a dream job for many of us.
The Mission Impossible, Fast and Furious, and James Bond franchises don’t even start to come close to the precision and care that Star Wars designers have to maintain (although I’m on the fence with Harry Potter). Today, studios employ astrophysicists, engineers, and other scientists to read over scripts and consult on effects as needed since educated customers demand this accuracy more and more.
The result of this design strategy is a high-quality product. We all have to suspend our disbelief to enter this galaxy but at least it’s internally consistent and well thought out so we can suspend our disbelief more easily. We have, after all, financially rewarded the directors, producers, actors, and writers for their conscientiousness work in the past, and for the most part, they live up to our expectations by being very careful.
Meticulously
In the original Star Wars movies, before the common practice of computers animating the motion for non-human characters or other objects, a painstakingly long process called stop motion animation was employed. In this process, an animator adjusts a miniature clay sculpture of the character (say a Ton-Ton) or an object (say a Tie fighter) and takes a still frame picture of the scene or character. Then the animator makes a slight adjustment to the character or object and takes another picture. After stitching all these still images together and playing them back quickly, the effect created is motion of the object or sculpture. To make believable motion, hundreds and thousands of images must be recorded and the animator must take every shot individually over days, weeks, and months. If just one image is too different from its neighbors, the motion will look unrealistic, choppy, or irregular. Only carefully and slowly making progress will the intended result be generated. It takes time and can’t be rushed. Being meticulous is the only way.
Today, computers can generate this motion by stitching the images together from 3D models that can’t exist or never will exist in the real world. However, the rendering of these images with all their necessary textures and lighting still need to be perfect. The process can still be very slow if the resolution or number of triangle facets on the computer model is high and thus will require significant computer time to converge, color, and shade each pixel to the right hue and intensity. Unless you’ve never watched an action movie in the last 10 years, you’ve probably seen an action sequence generated by computers that looked terrible. The production company may have been trying to save money by cutting corners or rushing the work. When that happens, the overall acceptance of the movie can suffer. Interestingly, in the Star Wars studios, there were times when schedules demanded the completion of certain models. Designers and modelers would have to put in extra long hours to make the deadline without sacrificing detail. One example is the hundreds of thousands of fiber optic lines that were hand threaded through the models for the Empire’s Star Destroyers to recreate many small lights to indicate the extreme magnitude of these space cities. I don’t know if I’ve ever done anything 100 thousand times but the crew on Star Wars did, meticulously, for hours every single day.
Lots of Iterations
It’s no surprise that there must have been hundreds of iterations before you and I get to see the final product of Episode IX later this month. There were meetings to discuss the storyboarding of the scenes, there were rewrites of the script dialog, there were clay or computer models smashed and deleted respectively, and then redone many times over. The sound effects were rerecorded, the make-up was reapplied between scenes, and the takes were reshot after actors messed up or the lighting was off.
Often the animators would develop half a dozen models for a particular character and then George Lucas would choose one that he believed would be best. For those half dozen models, there would be scores of iterations before and often many more iterations afterward, especially if Lucas wanted to combine the features of two models. The iterations of Yoda alone are quite interesting to see and interestingly, the final design was inspired by the face of Yoda’s own designer, Stuart Freeborn. (Do a search of his face, you may be surprised if you’ve never seen Freeborn before.)
Also, nothing is awesome at the beginning. Ed Catmull, the President of Pixar, would often say that every movie sucks at the start. Iterations are one of the secrets to making things go from suck to non suck.It’s weird to write this but at one point you’d be justified in saying “Star Wars sucks.” But you and I never saw the movie in that condition, and we never will because of the magic of lots of iterations.
Customer Feedback
The best example of this is Jar-Jar Binks. I can’t think of any other more universally hated character than Jar-Jar in the galaxy. That’s a tough one to swallow. The customer feedback to this character was very harsh. Jar-Jar was ridiculed and became the source of lots of jokes in popular media. Fans would even share versions of The Phantom Menace where every scene with Jar-Jar was removed. Thus, the customer response was more than a rejection of the movie at large; the customers still wanted the movie but wanted Jar-Jar edited out of the movie!
I’m also not a fan of Jar-Jar, but I’ve grown to appreciate this major flaw in the design of the first episode, and for the fact that the team seemed to learn from this failure and responded to the market. In Episodes II and III, the writers and directors reduced Jar-Jar’s roll to a level that would satisfy only the most essential plot requirements. In that respect, it was much improved. Listening to the customer was a smart move by Star Wars and that’s a part of good design. It’s speculation, but more Jar-Jar might have derailed the whole franchise. (I can’t see myself standing beside a replica of Jar-Jar in Galaxy’s Edge for a picture at Disneyland anytime in my life.)
Thankfully, customer feedback has continued throughout the development of the following episodes. Since Hollywood is built around providing a product to its customers, this is a necessary step. Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake and not listening to the fans could be ruinous. Design for Star Wars is big business. But it’s also very personal for so many of us who have grown up with a product we love and share with friends and family. We get to again share our feedback with our wallets in a few weeks.
Conclusion
You might not be involved in such a high-stakes design activity as Star Wars, yet, but you can embrace the principles I see in the Design for Star Wars: Take your time and get it right - many of the best things in life take time. Pay attention to details - the large things will be naturally hard to miss and won’t be forgotten during the process, but the little things can make all the difference in the world. Iterate, iterate, iterate - as many times as you can possibly squeeze in during the time allotted. Get feedback from as many people as you can - the collective power of many people is amazing.
See you in the theater!
