star wars clone fighter concept warren fu

Meanwhile, the design for the ship that sparks The Great Disaster when its destroyed while flying through hyperspace is taken from an early design for The Force Awakens. But now James Clyne's originally art lives on as a new ship in The High Republic. So that's how Szostak plucked the next two ships seen below.Ībove is the Republic Longbeam with a design that was originally created as a Resistance bomber for the opening sequence of The Last Jedi. They have to understand what it is within two or three seconds.

And those subsets of art would then get passed along to Mike Siglain, Troy Alders, Pablo Hidalgo, and myself for further discussion and refinement.'įor those who don't know, the three-second rule is that when the audience sees something new on screen, they have to immediately connect with this new item. 'Due to the sheer volume of unused concepts I was selecting from, I used George Lucas and Doug Chiang's 'three second rule' to choose candidates that clearly and quickly read as potentially appropriate to each High Republic need. It just so happens that Lucasfilm's creative art director Phil Szostak had just put together 'playlists of hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of unused concept art images from across all eras of Star Wars filmmaking' for another project. This is something done frequently at Lucasfilm when a new Star Wars project is coming together. So for some of the other new ships, they looked at some concept art originally created for The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. Though these ships were created from scratch for The High Republic, as we saw with the Jedi Vector, the creative minds of Star Wars never let a good design go to waste. Above is the Nihil Tempest Runner and below is the Nihil Stormship. They're a departure from the look we've come to expect from scavengers and pirates in the Star Wars universe, but they're clearly not in the same vein of anything we've seen from the New Republic, Rebel Alliance, Empire or First Order. On the other end of the spectrum, we have the more industrial ships created for the savage marauders known as the Nihil. It's called the Jedi Vector, and Pablo Hidalgo explained that their design explorations included a lot of ideas that had a 'delicate, streamlined feel that felt relevant.' For this ship specifically, they wanted it to have ' an angular and elegant design befitting this gilded age.' If the design feels familiar, that's because it's derived from a piece of Revenge of the Sith concept art by Warren Fu for a Republic clone fighter, an alternate take on what we know as the ARC-170 starfighter.

Here's the new design for the starfighters that the Jedi are cruising around in during this time period: A lot of the visual exploration in the High Republic is taking what we know, but idealizing it.' In the Core Worlds especially, that's reflected in fashion and technology. By moving further in time, away from that downfall, we're able to see the Republic at its height in this storytelling.

'We all found a lot of inspiration in how the prequels opened up a more refined era of the galaxy, but by virtue of those films' proximity to the originals, it had to start showing early signs of corruption. On top of that, they had a chance to create new vehicles for the villainous marauders known as the Nihil, and they were even able to use some ideas originally created for the Star Wars sequel trilogy that didn't make it to the big screen.įor the general vibe of the new vehicles, Lucasfilm Story Group's Pablo Hidalgo explained to : So with this new era, they've also refined the look of the the Republic a bit. But even though it's set two centuries before the sequel, Lucasfilm concept artists have taken inspiration for Star Wars: The High Republic vehicles and ships from how the prequesl reimagined the saga's aesthetic by going in a more elegant and refined direction.

Star wars clone fighter concept warren fu