Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser – Interview with Doug Chiang: Designing the Halcyon

“That was really important to us. When we design Star Wars, there’s a very rich history. Even in terms of visual language, it’s all been thought out in terms of what the timeline is, all the different elements. What you’re seeing now on the Starcruiser is a culmination of all of those elements. You see chrome elements from the Naboo era on the outside, decorative elements. You see the body, the form language, of the ship itself looks like the Tantive IV in terms of style. Those elements really bring it into the Star Wars universe, but you’re seeing it combined in a fresh new way. For me, that’s what makes Star Wars special. We’re always trying to achieve some level of newness. The universe is so expansive, we’re always trying to anchor it in what’s familiar and then add thirty to forty percent that’s new. That makes it more authentic in some ways.”

“It’s another layer in the ship itself. A whole new different experience, where you feel like you’re in a Zen garden. All the rooms were designed with that in mind, so that each one had a very distinct personality. You’re not really stuck on a ship. There’s enough richness so that you never get bored.”

“That’s a lot of fun in what we do. We take a lot of the same form language and turn it on its head so that there’s something very familiar. As fans, if they look at it, they’ll recognize things. And for non-fans, as well, they’ll look at it and say, ‘Those shapes are very Star Wars’ even if they won’t quite know what it is. Those are the things we always try to build in there. The dining room is a really wonderful example of that. If you look at the ceiling, the arc mirrors the architecture of Jabba’s Palace, but it’s not identical.”

“Even things like buttons and control panels, they’re all very consistently Star Wars but they’re all slightly different. If you put all of those pieces together, it creates a whole environment that naturally speaks of Star Wars. If you look a picture of the dining room, or the bridge, or the lobby, it just speaks Star Wars. It’s not one thing, it’s all of those things.”

“One of the hardest ones was the bridge. How do you realize the bridge set with this giant window that looks out into space, and make it immersive and make it real? On a movie set we can cheat quite a bit, because you can add visual effects after the fact. Here, it’s all happening in real time, so how do you create that illusion? One of the challenges that we had was: we’re limited by the technology that we have today, in terms of projection systems, and how far away you can make the screen, and the brightness of the screen. We were really trying to think of clever ways that we could overcome those limitations. The original plan for the bridge was to have this huge window with direct sunlight coming in, but in reality we could never achieve that. We can’t even achieve that on our movie sets. How do you then overcome that limitation and still create an experience where you feel like you’re on a bridge, looking out into space? If you look at it, I think it works.”