Doug Chiang and Oliver Scholl, co-production designers on Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, talk to StarWars.com about the design of the Onyx Cinder and the Supervisor’s Tower (as seen in the finale episode).
The very idea of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew — an adventure told from the perspective of four young travelers seeing the wider world for the first time — invites the design of new worlds in rich color palettes, transfixing the characters and fans at home with all the splendor and danger the galaxy far, far away has to offer. From the beautiful spas of Lanupa to war-torn At Achrann, the production design had to reflect the vast array of cultures and denizens the Onyx Cinder’s explorers encounter as they try to find their way back home to At Attin.
Behind the scenes, co-production designers Doug Chiang and Oliver Scholl tackled the job with more than half a century of filmmaking experience between them. “One of the joys of working with Oli is that it’s a terrific collaboration, because he brings a very distinct perspective to it,” says Chiang, Lucasfilm’s Senior Vice President and Executive Design Director. “I love those kinds of collaborations because we get fresh ideas. He may suggest something that I hadn’t thought of before, and it’s a terrific way of world building. It feels more authentic, and I think that’s one of the things that’s so important for Star Wars, is that we want this to feel authentic.”
Having worked as a concept artist on films like Back to the Future Part II, Chiang served as design director on Star Wars: The Phantom Menace before working as production designer on Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, The Mandalorian, and Ahsoka. Scholl’s first Hollywood production design job was on Independence Day, followed by projects like Edge of Tomorrow and Spider-Man: Homecoming, where he first worked with Skeleton Crewcreators Jon Watts and Chris Ford.
Spoiler warning: This article discusses story details and plot points from the first season of Skeleton Crew.
Nevertheless, creating the worlds of At Attin, Starport Borgo, Lanupa, and beyond presented unique challenges, not to mention the Onyx Cinder, a brand-new type of starship with set components that had to rotate 180-degree. With a bold new aesthetic defining each new locale coupled with nostalgic homages to Steven Spielberg films of the 1980s, the worlds of Skeleton Crew are here to welcome you with eight episodes now streaming on Disney+. “We wanted to pay respect to Spielberg’s films, but at the same time world-build at a level that we’ve always wanted to do for Star Wars,” says Chiang. “We wanted to fill every frame with a visual spectacle while supporting the story. I think it’s one of the most beautiful series that we’ve done and it has a touch of nostalgia.” Recently, we sat down with Chiang and Scholl to pull back the curtain on the series’ many locations.
Aboard the Onyx Cinder
Once our heroes discover that what Wim thought was a Jedi temple is actually a ship, the Onyx Cinder quickly becomes something of a home away from home. The designers knew they had to create a unique silhouette that also paid homage to other Star Wars ships, taking great care to incorporate decorative elements from previously established pirate ships in The Mandalorian season three. “Space ships are really hard because we treat them like characters. They need personality,” Chiang says. “And the Onyx Cinder had to be our version of something that was very magical in terms of both design and form for the story. And we wanted to go for a unique silhouette.”
Like the Millennium Falcon, the cockpit sits off to one side of the ship, although this version is wider to allow for the full crew — including Jod (Jude Law) and SM-33 (Nick Frost) — to fit inside all at once. “It’s rugged. I mean, it looks like a junker. And that was on purpose,” says Chiang. “We wanted personality. We wanted this ship to be really interesting and really powerful because when the kids discover it, it’s upside down and the big reveal is the surprise as it turns over. That’s the beauty of working with Watts and Ford; they love these visual tricks to keep the audience off balance, but then when you discover what it is, you get the joy of, ‘Oh wow, this is a really cool spaceship!’”
The six engines on the outside of the ship accommodate that rotation, while the black and white stripes on the hull lean into its pirate past, helping to visually tie the ship to the rest of the fleet from The Mandalorian. “In season three we had this cruiser with these very distinct zebra stripes, and it created a foundation for our pirates in our series,” Chiang says. “The starting point was ironclad armored warships of the Civil War from 1860,” adds Scholl. “We came across this black and white image that shows these steam-powered ships. They look like stealth ships because they’re just these blocks with these beveled handles of thick armored steel.” The shape became the inspiration for the nose of the Onyx Cinder. “The other elements that are classic Star Warswhen you look at this is kit bashing,” Scholl adds. “The way the surface has a lot of detail, things that give it scale. We have two classic circle gunports there. We’ve got the big loading ramp and the engines that are mounted on the top and bottom of the wings.”
And the design team had to take into account that in episode 6, the emergency hull demolition sequencer would reveal a sleeker, cleaner ship beneath the armored exterior. In pre-production, the final form of the vessel was designed first, then reverse-engineered with the armored plating and black and white pirate stripes. “The challenge there was that it had to work on so many different levels,” Chiang recalls. “The sleek version we made silver because we wanted that contrast. It very much calls back to the Naboo aesthetic in terms of the elegant chrome ship. We thought early [on] that it might be an early Jedi ship and could it be something that was a hundred years old that was very sleek, and that it leaned toward the Queen’s aesthetic in terms of form language.”
Inside, designers and set decorators added crates, barrels, netting, and ropes to dress the 1:1 soundstage set that could also be flipped upside down, complete with long hallways of up to 150 feet each giving the characters plenty of room to run around. “You can’t build two sets, one right side up and one upside down,” Scholl says. “We had to come up with a smart way of being able to have some key elements in the set that we could rig to be on the ceiling or on the floor, and the rest was symmetrical.”
“It was really important to Jon Watts that there was this magical moment when they go in the cockpit and they almost see the front windshield as a mirror,” Chiang adds. “Wim sees his reflection, and he doesn’t know that he’s in a spaceship yet. When the ship actually starts to flip over, that becomes the front windshield, which had to be flat so we could get that effect.” To further camouflage the true nature of Wim’s discovery, the seats were crafted to fold down, obscuring their shape. “That created a lot of challenges,” Chiang says. “Oli and I had to be very clever in terms of the design so that when it’s right side up, it’s still the same footprint.” A retractable control panel completed the effect for the cockpit, while elsewhere on the ship the team defined the hallways with distinct buttresses that could be shifted from the floor to the ceiling to complete the flipped-over effect.
The Supervisor’s Tower
By the finale, the audience and the young residents have discovered that there’s much more to their home that at first meets the eye. Hidden behind the Barrier is one of the last known Old Republic mints, the true meaning of the fabled eternal treasure. After finally finding their way back, Jod, Wim, Fern, KB, and Neel land the Onyx Cinder and descend into the previously unseen vaults. “It’s a very peaceful sort of mundane world on top, but then when you go down deep underneath, there’s the machinery of all that,” Chiang says, as our heroes head toward the planet’s core. “We really wanted to play into the drama…to create this idea that deep in the planet was this hidden vault, almost like Fort Knox. We really played up the actual motif of giant vault doors. We took a bank vault and just scaled it up by a thousand so that it looks like this immense structure in there filled with gold. And the lighting quality really played into that as well.”
The journey into the Supervisor’s Tower also provided an opportunity to use Industrial Light & Magic’s StageCraft technology to create the illusion of a massive domed droid head in the center of a room that would have been impossible to create using practical effects alone. “It worked really well because you have this very simple shape with a single eye,” Chiang says. “Obviously, that head was gigantic. I mean, there’s no way we could have built anything like that [with the] moving mechanisms on there and have it rotate at the same time. The Volume can actually give us the dynamic animation quality of a giant set that we couldn’t do physically….It speaks to droids, but also the scale of it makes you wonder, ‘Wow, what is this creature or character? What is this supervisor being?’”
Read the article in full here which also covers the wretched hive of Starport Borgo, the Observatory Moon, the strange new world of At Achrann and Lanupa. Stream all episodes of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew on Disney+ now.
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