Lucas O. Seastrom, writing at Lucasfilm.com, talks to stop-motion animation artists to share insights about a decade of Star Wars projects made in partnership with Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic going back to Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Like many in his generation, stop-motion animator Tom “Gibby” Gibbons took inspiration for his ultimate career when he saw Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) as a child. Unlike his peers however, one very particular sequence became his obsession: the dejarik holochess monsters. Little did he know that nearly 40 years later, he’d be among the artists to work on the revival of the sequence for Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015).
“How weird is it that I got to work on this?” Gibbons says with a laugh. “It was probably one of the weirdest synchronicities, cosmic accidents, that’s ever happened in my life — that I had that relationship with the chess set as a kid, and decades later I got to animate it.”
Growing up loving the films of Ray Harryhausen, the original holochess sequence from Star Wars had an outsized impact on Gibbons. “There had been a gap in films where I hadn’t seen the things I particularly loved in them — puppets and monsters — for a while,” he recalls. “Then Star Wars came out and the chess set appeared. That was the moment when I decided I wanted to do that. I realized there must be new people doing this kind of work. It’s still a thing.”
Image: Dennis Muren, left, and Phil Tippett shake hands with their star, a rancor puppet used in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.
Enter artists Phil Tippett and Jon Berg. Originally hired at Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) to help make creatures for the Mos Eisley Cantina, Tippett and Berg convinced director George Lucas to use stop-motion animation to shoot the holochess sequence. They made ten distinct monster puppets, eight of which were used, and shot the sequence with the assistance of Dennis Muren as camera operator.
This all-too-brief moment in the original Star Wars film heralded a renaissance in the use of stop-motion for visual effects, much of which was centered on the work of Tippett and his colleagues at ILM on productions like Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Dragonslayer (1981), and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). By the mid-1980s, Phil Tippett had departed Lucasfilm to establish his own Tippett Studio in nearby Berkeley, California. Stop-motion remained an important stock-in-trade for many years on visual effects projects like RoboCop (1987) and Willow (1988).
As computer graphics (CG) heralded yet another renaissance in the industry, Tippett Studio embraced the change, often working in collaboration with ILM on visual effects projects. Among their animation talent was Gibbons, who’d broken into the industry in the San Francisco Bay Area as a stop-motion animator before learning CG animation. He never stopped working on stop-motion projects, however, and it came as quite a surprise in 2014 when he was told that Lucasfilm had approached Tippett Studio with an unusual request: could they recreate the original holochess sequence with new stop-motion animation for the forthcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens?
Image: Phil Tippett with an in-progress walker puppet during production of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.
What might’ve seemed like a relatively small request at the time ultimately blossomed into what is now a decade-long collaboration between Lucasfilm, ILM, and Tippett Studio on multiple Star Wars features, The Mandalorian (2019-23), The Book of Boba Fett (2021-22), and most recently, Star Wars: Skeleton Crew (2024-25), which has been nominated for 17 Children’s & Family Emmy Awards. In September, the studio hinted at a return to the galaxy far, far away, contributing to The Mandalorian and Grogu, which will premiere in theaters May 22, 2026.
A Holochess Trilogy
As work was beginning on The Force Awakens, which marks its 10th anniversary this month, a number of Tippett Studio’s CG artists had convinced Phil Tippett to let them provide assistance on his personal stop-motion opus, Mad God (2022), with the use of new digital cameras and related tools. Among them were visual effects supervisor Chris “CMo” Morley and lead fabricator and art director Mark Dubeau. “At the places where I’d worked previously, it was very ‘stay in your lane,’” explains Dubeau, who’d started his career in animation and visual effects in his native Canada. “At Tippett things were more open, and a lot of that had to do with their background of doing practical work, with people pitching in together. Even in CG, they wanted people who were characters, who had different types of skills and experience.”
“Learning the stop-motion craft was something I always wanted to do but never got to,” explains Morley, who studied traditional fine arts in San Francisco before becoming a CG artist. “The first shot we did for Mad God was hand-cranked on a model mover. We now use a motion-control camera with animated lights and all these different elements. A lot of people sparked their own stop-motion careers on Mad God. By the time Lucasfilm and J.J. Abrams were making The Force Awakens and wanted to do practical effects, it was a feeling of, ‘We know how to do that.’ That was our first resurgence of stop-motion.”
Image: The famed dejarik holochess set that launched the Tippett legacy.
Dubeau was largely responsible for organizing the team that would create the puppets themselves. “We looked internally, and collected everybody we knew who had the abilities to do this kind of work,” he explains. “When we needed additional help, I recruited fabricator Frank Ippolito, and Phil still knew a lot of people in the community, and that’s how someone like Brett Foxwell came in.”
Machinist and engineer Brett Foxwell had started making stop-motion puppets and related equipment while employed in a machine shop for Northwestern University’s medical school. Moving to California, he found work with stop-motion armature maker Merrick Cheney, who’d worked previously with Phil Tippett. Foxwell soon became another member of the Mad God crew, and after a stint at Laika on Boxtrolls (2014), he returned to Tippett Studio just in time for the holochess sequence.
“We went to the Skywalker Ranch archive and looked at the original chess pieces, which were in pretty bad shape,” Foxwell recalls. “They’re latex, which degrades badly. We took pictures and looked closely at the miniatures, all the while glancing over at the racks of other stuff that extend back into the room. After we were done, the curators said, ‘Go help yourself.’ We explored all throughout that space looking at everything. Phil’s shop is the same way, going back to the 1980s, including the machines themselves, which they used for RoboCop and the first Jurassic Park [1993] dinosaurs.
“I looked up the canon for the two biggest chess characters,” Foxwell continues, “the Mantellian Savrip and the Kintan Strider. Phil never paid much attention to the canonical names. For him they were Mr. Big and Hunk. The Kintan Strider, the smaller of the two, never had an armature. The bigger one did have an armature, which Phil had made in high school. The old latex had been stripped off of it, so I was able to look at it. It was very roughly made out of bicycle chain links and chunks of metal. I asked Phil what the new puppets would be doing and what quality they needed to be. He said, ‘We don’t know what they’re doing yet. Make it a good, high-end armature that can do anything.’ It was a wonderful challenge to rebuild the puppets in the best forms I could.”
Image: A close up of the dejarik table in The Rise of Skywalker.
What the puppets actually did was determined by the story beats of the sequence, which Lucasfilm allowed Tippett’s crew to pitch themselves. “We saw each of the sequences as an opportunity to tell a little story on a smaller scale,” notes Mark Dubeau. “We try to make sure that things have a sense of history and fit into that world.”
“We had to understand where this fell in the timeline,” notes Tom Gibbons, who animated the scene with Chuck Duke. “This was after what we’d seen in A New Hope. Had the game progressed? Had anyone turned it on since we’d last seen it? J.J. Abrams said no. So when it turned back on, we picked it up where it had left off. Mr. Big had just picked up and thrown Hunk onto the ground. Phil stepped in and said, ‘We’re going to reverse the action. This time, Hunk is going to win.’”
The result caused a stir amongst Star Wars and stop-motion fans alike. This led to additional scenes shot for both Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019). Solo in particular allowed for a playful bit of retroactive storytelling.
Read the article in full here.
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