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meandmyechoes · 1 year

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There's more on production design than costumes but all in all a very enlightening and informative talk on inspirations and the design process!

timestamps below

00:22 How do you work with the story group to make sure fans of the lore are served without excluding the newer fans?

LH: we don't start from the basis of it being fanservice

crew includes a mix of passionate fans and people with no context. we are all filmmakers and focus on character work first, then look at what from sw can be put in there.

Luthen's collection works together to tell the story of lost culture

Never are we led by [that = fanservice], but things that enrich the environment should be there

02:03 Coruscant

Q: three main settings:

Syril's home, ISB, Mon Mothma

aotc: bright, saturated neon colours - a welcoming environment

andor: brutalist, minimal modernism, some art deco in MM -

an "anti-coruscant"

LH: the hardest to do

avoid CGI because we want a place that exist.

the core principle of Coruscant is height (upper, middle, lower) then it become character led

ref vertical cities like Tokyo and NY, what is their language, what makes them interesting?

the goal is not to make (RM's) it should smell like that, have that nostalgia and fit in SW, but shouldn't feel futuristic or scifi.

I want to understand it as a place that can really exists, not always leading away from it but a place we can inhabit.

first decide on the materials: hard, monochromatic, concrete, steel, glass -> inhumane, total lack of organic materials, and you build it up to realize what works or not

Eddy's: i reckon she bought that apartment 20 years ago, she had a view of Coruscant and then the whole city grew up around her and it got lost like she did.

Baker-like cream vs. clinical sterility of the ISB vs. Mon's… values of her Chandrilan culture but also lack of comfort (the embassy is given to her)

MW: want to build real societies. thought about the texture, culture, materials, technology of each planet -> stratified? diverse? levels of society?

every background player has a story and a reason to be on screen

06:57 Happy accidents on costuming?

less of accidents and more endless discussion and thinking about things

everything needs to have a logic and reason to be onscreen because they are under so much scrutiny

08:14 How did you design Narkina 5? What does the design of oppression look like to you?

LH: prison to a me like a cross between an abattoir and a laboratory, like a labour camp, you can't escape from it, like Alcatraz if it was a lab.

the Panopticon logic of turning the organic people be the fuel of the machine, the disposable element

makies it more interesting, more THX1138 than the obvious grungy prison

love making white sets: photograph beautifully, things pop more, have a sinister nature.

earthiness of Ferrix vs. organics of highlands vs. trapped sterility of prison

MW: Luke and I talked about How do those wielding the power use the environment to oppress, intimidate and disorientate?

The part of white on white: there's nowhere to hide, it's horrific, you lose your sense of depth -> disempowered by this soul-destroying environment.

we also spend lots of time on developing this fabric that's utilitarian, disposable, feels like they just peel them off at the end of the day. they are treated like cattle, "host down", sterilized and they are given a fresh one for the next day.

all of these details eat away at you psychologically.

11:38 Visual style of Andor

How close did you want to get to what we've already seen?

What motifs do you know you want to work in when creating the world of Andor?

LH: we don't start that way around. when i met tony it was like, 'we're gonna make a star wars show but it's not gonna be like any star wars show you've watched.'

it was challenging when you figure out it means going into people's apartment and bathrooms to work with them.

keep the tangibility of the OT, then looking at R1's grittiness, and a sense of modernity that could compete with other shows, and make work the drama/chc but maintaining the nostalgia of SW without having it becoming as if 'selecting things from a catalogue just for it to feel SW'

It was about enhancing what was there and fleshing it out to feel like you could walk and live with these people, and hopefully forget about it at times, forget that you're watching SW, and be reminded of it.

13:35 Costuming

MW: knew as soon as we had the script we knew we had to create a new look to go with the layers and complexity of the characters.

the established costume language of SW was there.

Use the established uniform to ground us firmly into the SW world.

15:06 There is an abundance of personal rooms/belongings, how do you approach setting those space versus a public one? What were you trying to communicate about their lives?

LH:

Maarva: the home used to be function when Cassian was younger, but with him drifting and her husband's death, and the shop closing, her world gets smaller till it centralized around her chair

Eedy: she bought it box-fresh, you can get upgrades and plug-ins to the apartment and over time, it aged and (BAY-ta-lye)

a home salon you never see in S1, things that you feel relatable but in the SW language. It always start with the chc.

MW: Luke design spaces like the character designed them. He thinks about who they are and what they want to project in their interior. I try to do the same with the costumes.

It's the difference b/w wearing something in terms of structure and how it makes you feel compared to something like layers that you can disappear in.

e.g. Cass was hiding, disappearing in his clothes, then his arc is to become closer to the hero we know from R1, little bit he reveals himself more, the coat becomes more tailored, longer lines, shoulders are squared out, a very subtle, subliminal transformation he goes through.

18:45 Syril's costuming and his own customization

within the constricts (blurring of individual) of the uniform, people can still find ways to express themselves.

on one end, guys working in the ball pen and jaded office workers, not at all engaged, their costumes are enzyme-wash to fade out, unironed, no pride in their appearance. On the other end of the spectrum is Syril who tailors and tweaks and personalize it to express who he wants to project and who he wants to be. We made his costume subtly more rigid, more sculpted, freshly pressed, slightly brighter colour.

21:00 how do you go from Chernobyl (a raw story) to the SW show (pre-established lore)?

LH: the process is the same for whatever project it is. the similarity between the two projects is there are a lot of research. with Cbyl you don't want to lost and become a documentarian. Cbyl had finished scripts but on Tony was taking on it when I started, so we were building it the same time he was writing.

It's about character, and environment and storytelling, and it was mood and tone.

we wanted this to have sort of a journalistic logic. you approach it like you're dealing with building up every character's reality and atst we're making fiction/drama. The material is a bit lighter on Star Wars and the world is much greater varied. From a design pov, they are both rabbit holes. the only similarity is you run out of time, I'd love to create bigger set but at some point you'd have to shoot it.

24:11 filming real-world location/what's the consideration for location scouting?

LH: I'd love to do more on location. But it was hard to have a large crew on site and in a pandemic, so we ended up building a lot more [sets] than we initially intended.

I don't want to do a desert, but I want somewhere where the landscape spoke for itself. What if we have a planet that looks like the Scottish highlands? Then we were looking at dams and there's this one that always feels like a blight on the landscape. It just felt very imperal. The whole Aldahni sequence was then based around that idea. It was an imperial stronghold there and so on.

Barbican has both the weight and texture that felt right for a megacity like Coruscant but also felt right for a certain level - the middle.

We don't approach a location on the basis of pure concpet, it was always about enhancing the real place and how we can put it in the wider world of Coruscant, how we can do shots that you'd do in a real city and not in a CGI environment.

I always said the best place to do Coruscant would be Paris becaus you got the scale and style of certain aspects of Corsucant. (it's [slimpickins] in London ???? can't understand this part)

[audience talks about how turning a corner you see a structure featured in the show] yeah with Barbican you are a little more limitied, a little more, targeted, i suppose. What I'm always looking for when piecing together Coruscant was Journeys. So again it wasn't like 'Oh, let's stand here and have a conversation with the city in the background' or sth like that. Barbican actually gives you a lot in terms of Joruenys: Syril going home is one of my favourite. This place in London I don't remeber the name of, it's like a bridgeless estate, we made it go much further down and give it that elevation and that sense of depression.

It's really hard, I want to shoot more on location but more often we pull back and use the real world location as an inspiration.

28:45 What are some under-discussed innovation in the your fields that help you create Andor?

MW: leaning heavily into the DNA of established SW costume language. It was quite an analog costume approach. A mixture, in fact. There are things that would've been groundbreaking 1977, that seem not so much now. But we would like to have that as a starting point, we had a similar approach with this one. There was a lot of handmade, old-school analog creative costumes, but we also have a fantastic costume props dept that use new tech and material to create mostly armour elements and small sculpted elements on costuming. Lots of 3D Printing happening, scanning, adapting, trying urethanes and other materials that can make more comfortable armour. A problem of the original stormtrooper armour is discolouration/yellowing. It was also quite rigid and difficult for stunts. We import new materials for the armour to stay white forever and allow room for the stunt people.

LH: It was an active choice NOT to use the Volume. It doesn't suit our goal, what Tony is writing. The idea is to be on the ground and moving around with the characters as much as possible, and not creating spaces for scenes to happen, if that makes sense.

It's something you can do with longer, multi-ep drama like this, is to build bigger sets and connect them up. Ferrix comprise of almost 30 sets. They are largest out on the back lot one large composite set so you can walk in around the streets and into the homes. All the complexes are enjoyable.

With any sets I'd start by designing the whole thing. Design the city, design the prison infold, then start to break it down and what we want to use and how, what, who we want to build lest we understand the full geography.

I think that filters through even if you don't see it all. You hopefully doesn't jar at any point. The technology part is we first build it in 3D and previs. We don't follow a pipeline like the Volume shows. The analog feeds into what we want to achieve, a bit more like the OT, more tangible.

It wasn't anything groundbreaking we do as much as trying to put more on screen but make it feels like it's less (intentional/artificial)

#andor #yuki watches andor #it's full of typo and short hand read if you will #sw bts #star wars #the writer one on the same channel is interesting too

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