This week I’m sitting down with Lucasfilm Animation producer Athena Portillo.
Plus Pablo gets to spend some quality one-on-one time with Therm Scissorpunch.
Are you gonna be okay with that?
I’m not jealous because Pablo is a friend and I’m very happy for him when good things happen for him.
Wow.
I almost believed that.
[Under breath] No.
This is The Star Wars Show!
From the Lucasfilm headquarters in San Francisco, here’s your hosts, Andi and Anthony!
Hello and welcome to the Star Wars Show, an internet show that should never, ever actually
be confused with a real Star Wars Show.
See those have budgets, actors, and special effects.
We have the two of us, a camera, and barely a nickel to our name.
But at least we have “Star Wars” in the name of the show!
Did you say the Star Wars?
The Star Wars.
Say, Andi, do you like bonus features on the home releases of your favorite films?
Do I ever!
Do you also like hanging out with me and showing some of those bonus features to people on Facebook?
Why, yes, yes I do.
Oh, oh, Well, then you will love it when the two of us host the Solo: A Star Wars Story
bonus showcase tomorrow at 8PM Eastern 5 Pacific on Facebook.
But will there be guests?
HAH!
Will there be guests, of course there will be guests!
Like who?
Well, to start off, we’re going to be co-hosting with the co-writer of Solo, Jon Kasdan.
That’s a lot of co’s.
Some would say it’s a co-operative effort.
We’ll also be joined by Ray Park and Chewbacca.
Together we’ll look at behind the scenes features, talent interviews, and deleted scenes
that are included in the bonus content of Solo: A Star Wars Story
Available on Digital now and Blu-Ray September 25th.
[Ding]
For more details on the bonus showcase check out Facebook.com/starwars.
And while we’re talking about behind the scenes Solo content, one featurette you won’t
find on the home release is Pablo Hidalgo going Be-han the Scenes with the aliens from
Solo to find out how they’re digitally scanned by our friends at Gentle Giant.
Makers of the almost completely sold out Star Wars Show statuette available at this link.
Hurry, before they’re all gone!
Nice plug.
I do my best.
Anyway, here’s Pablo with the last, and in my opinion the best, Be-Han the scenes,
featuring my favorite handsome lobster son, Therm Scissorpunch.
Ahhh…
I love Therm Scissorpunch.
I know.
Then, enjoy.
You, you should open your eyes to watch it though.
No, just letting the Therm wash over me.
That’s gross.
[Solo Music]
Hey everyone, I’m here in shed 32 at Pinewood Studios and in this shed is all sorts of special
photography that’s done to get you images of characters, props, and all sort of interesting
stuff from the movie.
I’m here with Henry and I can’t help but notice but I’m surrounded by cameras.
We’re standing in Gentle Giants 3D scanner.
This is one of the largest photogrammetries systems that we’ve built.
In this rig there’s 185 cameras.
We’re covering all the angles as much as possible and we run this through some software
to create a 3D model.
The creatures in Star Wars, they all come in different various sizes, down to small
droids to very large creatures.
So we had to build a system that could accommodate all those plus Chewbacca.
If we can scan Chewbacca, we can scan anything.
Joining me right now is Dave from the creature shop.
And I know you’ve helped create bring to life some beloved characters.
Yeah, there’s loads now, that’s the thing.
The porgs in Episode 8.
I operate the head of BB-8.
And in this movie there’s about 10 things that have got me somewhere underneath or behind or inside.
But it’s kind of a team of 5 of us who are here all the time who look after everything.
It’s lovely that you get a different thing all the time.
How many people would it take to operate Big Eye over here?
Big Eye was three people, I think.
He’s got sort of a left and right and he bends over the sabacc table and he has eyeball
stuff going on and blink and brow and all that.
Most of the big characters require upwards of two or three people each.
You look at a scene and there will be 5 characters in it.
And there’s probably 25 people underneath the table or hiding or in green to make everything work.
Because every time an arm moves or an eye blinks somebody is on the end of that.
Obviously you can’t have a one man band.
If you did have a shot in the movie where you tilted under the table you would just
see bodies like this, you know, or like that.
Cause you all get in very tight and you can’t be worried about personal space.
[Porg sounds]
Athena Portillo came all the way upstairs from Lucasfilm Animation to join us this week.
So you are right now working on Resistance.
We can’t really talk about it that much.
But you are executive producing the show, which is a new role for you.
Can you tell me a little bit about that experience?
It’s been awesome so far.
We actually started back in 2016 and it’s really great to say that we’re airing on
October 7th on The Disney Channel.
So I’m really excited about that.
And having to work with Justin Bridge who’s our supervising director and Brandon Auman
our head writer is awesome, yeah.
So you’ve been working with Lucasfilm Animation for a while now.
You’ve worked on all of our major animated series starting with The Clone Wars.
I wanna start with how you came to work in Lucasfilm Animation because that’s not your
role when you started here.
So my path was actually journalism with an emphasis in magazine writing.
And there was an internship posting at college that basically said, try out writing for a
Star Wars newsletter.
I lucked out, I got the internship but while I was doing all this I was being exposed to
product development.
I took that role and it was for Episode I and then within that timeframe I would volunteer.
ILM was working on the Star Wars special editions and they were doing some reshoots and then
I fell in love with visual effects.
So from licensing I went to ILM.
I did visual effects for 6 years and then I came back around to animation.
And every so often the guy in the hat would come around my office and he was like, are
you the one with the Jedi 96 license plate?
And I’m like, yeah.
He goes, you should be working on Star Wars, I mean obviously that’s your passion.
I’m like, I would love that.
And I moved on to Clone Wars and I’ve been part of Lucasfilm Animation ever since.
That’s a wild trip.
I mean that is such a strange and unique path.
Mhmm.
A lot of people always ask me, oh how do I get a job at Lucasfilm, where did you go?
And I’m like, you really just have to find your own way.
And that is like the most find-your-own-way story that I’ve ever heard.
Yeah.
So let’s talk about your career growth.
You brought a bunch of memories here with you because you’ve been here for a while.
I found my acception letter to my internship.
This was in December 19, 1995.
Wow.
I was able to go to the MTV Movie Awards and interview Peter Mayhew and I think there’s
actually a picture of us in here that we took.
[Laughing]
That is really funny.
I got the cover story for wampa attack.
That’s awesome.
So I thought that was great.
This is when we achieved our first 100 episodes of Clone Wars.
So there was a little gift pack that they gave us and I kept it because it was very memorable.
This one is my favorite.
This is when MTV came to Skywalker Ranch to screen Episode I to a lot of celebrities and
so I was in charge of giving tours.
So I remember giving a tour to Limp Bizket and Korn.
Seth Green, Elijah Wood, the cast of 90210, which was really interesting so that was a lot of fun.
One of my favorite characters in Rebels is named after you, AP-5.
Usually in our writers conferences we have so much fun cause everyone's just feeling
so comfortable.
And of course by the end of the day everyone’s like poking fun at each other.
The way they were describing the droid was, the droid, you know, it’s about statistics,
it’s about stats all the time, very serious, getting things done.
And Filoni makes fun of me because whenever we talk about schedule I’m like, oh yeah,
totally that’s going to happen on 9/27 and the week after that is 10/4 and very much like that.
Yeah.
So he’s like, I think we're just going to call it AP…
AP-5.
It’s like what’s the 5 for?
You’re 5 feet tall.
You know, so it’s like AP-5.
Working as a producer on these shows you do a lot of work that’s completely behind the scenes.
How has that changed how you consume Star Wars?
I guess because I’m a Star Wars fan, even though I work on it, I never get tired of it.
So when Clone Wars and Rebels were airing I made sure I would tune in all the time.
And I do unfortunately think of it in the lense of the amount of work that was put into
it in terms of those character count tracking documents.
If we were within asset parameters, the writers conference, the script phase, but I could
also still have fun watching it because it feels like a great accomplishment with everybody
that worked on it.
It’s like that Drake song, right?
It’s like, started from the bottom and now we’re here.
Started from the bottom and now the whole team here.
[Laughing]
It’s true.
It’s like the whole team is what it takes to do all of this, you know?
You’re amazing.
Thank you so much for that.
Today we’re here at Lucasfilm shooting the Han Sandwiches Star Wars cookbook.
We have about 6 different scenes that we’re photographing and they all turned out really great.
What seems like a very simple set, where it’s just a couple of action figures and
a sandwich, it actually takes a lot longer than you might think.
It requires just the right lights.
Everything at the right angle and the right proportion.
It’s fun to work on a project with a subject matter that you grew up loving.
It was just a really good chance of a lifetime basically to do this.
I think I would recommend this cookbook because it’s a subject matter that most people do love.
The figures of characters that you know come along with fun recipes that you could make
for your family or friends and kind of show off your Star Wars love.
[Chewbacca sounds]
You’re watching The Star Wars Show.
Last week we asked what your favorite Star Wars buddy buddy goof off moments were, and
y’all had some opinions!
Erica said she loved Chopper and Artoo’s reactions to meeting each other, while Samlalo
said Cassian & Kaytoo being the best rebel spies.
Lots of deleted scenes were mentioned as well, like Tyler citing the elevator scene from
Revenge of the Sith, James with the Han, Chewie, and Finn moment from The Force Awakens and
the Finn elevator scene from The Last Jedi.
Thanks to everyone who submitted this week.
And as always, remember to like the video, subscribe to the channel, follow us on Twitter,
Facebook and Instagram, download the star wars app, and help control the pet population,
have your pet spayed or neutered.
Thanks for watching, and may the Force be with you.
I’m very good at guessing the prices of canned vegetables so like I feel like I would
do pretty well.
I could sort of do a puppet.
Hey, Andi.
Just keep going, just keep going.
THE NEWS!
You gotta follow through.
Mhmm.
You follow through.
Always follow through.
[Off camera] So what do we wanna be doing?
Let’s just do it.