More Jedi concepts, and some storyboards

Some more quick crappy art, to facilitate a mostly private conversation for a long simmering project.

Jedi Ship V2:
After revamping lots of other designs to incorporate more KBVRtv items, it seemed right to go back and rethink this Jedi starfighter (despite already modeling 90% of the ship that appears in Revenge of the Sith). For some reason I’ve always thought it would be funny to have a snowspeeder out in deepspace. And I wanted to make a simpler cockpit window to better show off the greenscreen footage we shot. I thought it’d be cool to work in the sliding glass doors at the old tv station. Tried to put some light kit “barn doors” on either side of the cockpit at first, but then realized it would block an important moment where a character looks out and sees something on the wing.
Also note: two spots for a droid to sit, based on the round toothed spool in a VHS tape. Wasn’t sure which would match the footage, but might just leave them both in. … maybe leave barn door collar on far side?
+ stole the idea of the opening flaps being viewfinders, because it’s just a very iconic design. best to have it on this hero ship. (also, wondered about putting “rippled sound booth wall foam” on the inside of these flaps)
+ lower down, I toyed with the idea of a vhs tape end flap being over the back thrusters, having a the boxy rippled light kit shape under those thrusters.
+ also toyed with idea of barn doors being around a small fresnel lens in the front. Or maybe huge versions that flop down below the ship.
+ doodled a simple cockpit based on the old xwing layout, just to ponder what it would look like with the center bars of the sliding glass doors overhead.

Sith Ship V2: After stealing the viewfinder flaps from this ship’s first design (see above), I tried to rethink the sith interceptor design to not have flaps opening.
The idea here is to have a cluster of simple diamon shapes, instead of the usual big round thrusters.
+ thought it would make sense to have light kit barn doors in the back, protecting the area where you enter and exit this sort of ship. (thus, you could have thrusters firing up while you entered ship).
+ toying with the idea of sunken fresnel lens shape on top, to kind of evoke the rounded ball core.
+ thought it didn’t look menacing enough, so added some claw like metal, based on the rim of the light kit core. Could also add some metal wire twisting around to hold things in place, as you see on lights.
+ thought it might be a nice nod to Carrie if the ship had her trusty honda accord van embedded on the bottom (upside down, with windows painted over). might be too hard to model this in a recognizable way though. … maybe remove windshield, and act like it’s some sort of large engine vent?

STORYBOARDS

A) here’s how I first pictured the opening of the movie. I think this is ripping off the quiet start of either Predator or John Carpenter’s the thing. A wide planet shot, with a tiny ship depositing something that flares on entry like a meteor.

B) here’s a quick variation where the ship emerges from the sun. Just trying to think of iconic star wars “pan downs” which reveal something new. It’d be cool to focus on a flaming sun. Kind of symbolizing the rage of the queens of the Sith? Another idea here is to show the ship firing off probes into different nearby planets. but. probably a mistake to compress space this much. (doesn’t make a lot of sense to fly by every planet you’re probing? and they should probably be much farther apart?)

C) final idea here is to pan down to a sith ship, looking dead in the water. Then have it fire of shots in 8 directions (like an octopus?). We follow one of them.
+ this image continues on to show the plan for the next two shots.

+) And here we see a quick concept for someone recognizing her prey from the Probe Droid’s POV broadcast (should an alarm light be blinking? could we shoot this somewhere that has an old edit console? maybe at KBVRtv?). Quick idea for a (lame?) gag here – have her push the multipurpose Padme button (from Attack of the Clones) to autopilot her ship to this signal.