Inside the ILM Art Department: ‘Star Wars: Beyond Victory’
ILM.com continues to showcase artwork specially chosen by members of the ILM Art Department, and in this installment, artists share insights about their work on the 2025 mixed reality playset from ILM and Lucasfilm, Star Wars: Beyond Victory.
Art Director Stephen Zavala
Beyond Victory required a hub where our characters would live and roam. That’s how the garage was born as an idea. It served as an HQ where the player could come back after starting and finishing every quest. Like all concept work, one needs to find their footing, and this is done by providing several ideas for a particular story beat or design need. Challenges arise once we see the space in VR, since spaces have a tendency to look smaller or larger than we originally imagined. Once we see the space on a virtual space it’s all about adjusting the space to a scale we’re comfortable with.
The director, Jose Perez III, really wanted a place in the middle of nowhere. I tried to capture that, but it was also important to make sure it didn’t look abandoned. It’s isolated, but lots of activity happens inside the garage as well as the surrounding areas. I always liked the idea that it was a hub where all kinds of visitors would come and go, either to fuel up or repair their speeders, and bringing with them all kinds of cool stories.
I wanted to design a place with a sense that it’s been lived in for quite some time. It wasn’t meant to be in disrepair, but instead have that sense of daily life and how it can be messier than we’d like to admit when it comes to managing our spaces. It certainly was satisfying how the garage slowly grew into that exact idea.
All art pieces come with challenges. When in doubt you reference, step back or subject your designs to peer review. A brief pause often provides time for introspection on how to adjust the course.
Senior Concept Artist Casey Straka
Volo is our main/player character, and there were a few different physical traits they had to have, storywise; mainly, they had to be on the smaller side for podracing prowess, and have four arms for some specific game mechanics they wanted to incorporate. Besides that, it was a very open brief.
We considered multiple different species for Volo at first, lots of mulling over, lots of options that didn’t feel quite right. I proposed a Nikto, since they are such a varied species in the galaxy and have different subspecies and evolutionary traits depending on where they’re from. Maybe one subspecies evolved an extra pair of arms, which was a trait we needed. We landed there, but I don’t think we stayed there in the end, so I think Volo is something new altogether. I mostly took inspiration from previous Star Warsheroes! I wanted Volo to be very appealing, like you’d want to be their friend after you spend enough time following their story. I did a lot of additional drawings of Volo to find their mannerisms and expressions, the little things that make them, them.
Volo’s outfit was fun to do, I love a good Star Wars jacket. They also have flexible spines on their head, and how those move according to emotions ended up being inspired by cats; they flatten to their head when scared, flare out when angry, droop a little when sad.
In a very technical sense, a goal I set for myself was to hit a new benchmark in terms of skill; I learned a lot about my own process on this project. But one goal I always set for myself is to make a character people can get attached to. That’s always the most important part to me. I think all designs have their struggle points, some more than others. If something isn’t budging I try to take a walk. Concept art is a lot of problem solving, and getting distance from it to work something out can help.
