American Cinematographer - February 2016 - 74

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Force Perspective

Right: Rey (Daisy
Ridley) teams
with astromech
droid BB-8 on
Jakku. This Niima
Outpost exterior
was built on
location in the
desert of Abu
Dhabi. Below:
Alex Hughes
works on BB-8 in
the creatureeffects
department.

BB-8, whom Abrams first illustrated
with a Post-it sketch that was passed
along to Alzmann. "It looked like a
snowman without a chest," Alzmann
recalls, "one smaller circle on top of a
bigger one. I spent about a month doing
different versions of what the 'drive ball'
could be, and at least in my mind it was
always going to have an R2-style head.
"I picked orange as the color
almost right away," he continues. "It
seemed like a good Star Wars color -
we see it in the X-wing flight suits, and
there's something about orange that just
immediately brings back 1977. The last
I touched it, I designed a bunch of
different 'faces' and tread patterns. Then
it went to Neal Scanlan in London, and
everything got finaled over there."
While there was a close collabo74

February 2016

ration between the art and creature
departments, Gilford notes that
Scanlan's crew worked outside the
production designers' purview. "Same
with Michael Kaplan," Gilford adds,
referring to the film's costume designer.
"On another movie, a production
designer might be very heavily involved
with things like stormtroopers, but
Michael's team was so strong.
Everybody was developing at the same
level and on the same timeline, and we'd
all see how everything was relating and
make sure it all wove together seamlessly."
The production designers also
enjoyed a close collaboration with cinematographer Dan Mindel, ASC, BSC,
who joined the conversation early in
preproduction. "We collaborated on
American Cinematographer

everything you can imagine as far as
lighting and the logistics of shooting the
sets," Gilford says. "He was intrinsically
involved in our department."
Principal photography began on
location in Abu Dhabi, where the desert
landscape stood in for the planet Jakku.
In particular, Gilford recalls that the
scavenger marketplace Niima Outpost
"was such a huge set. It was like building
a whole town out in the desert. J.J.
wanted to make sure you always saw the
horizon through [all the structures] so
you could really understand the vastness
and loneliness of the landscape. We were
very involved with Dan, making sure
[everything] was facing the right sun
direction."
After Abu Dhabi, it was back to
Pinewood, and from there the schedule
called for a good deal of "leapfrogging,"
as Gilford explains it, between the studio
and locations that included RAF
Greenham Common and Puzzlewood
in England, and Skellig Michael in
Ireland.
"We were outside on the
[Pinewood] back lot, too," Gilford notes.
"In the opening of the movie, there's a
battle sequence [in a Jakku village] with
stormtroopers and flamethrowers. We
did that on the back lot, and then we
struck that and turned it all into a big
snowfield [for exteriors of the First
Order's Starkiller Base]. On the south
lot, we had a huge castle-ruins set, and
we did a huge [First Order] rally
sequence in the Pinewood tank."
All told, Gilford estimates more
than 70 sets were built for The Force
Awakens. But, he adds, "It's tricky on this
type of movie, because some sets were
obviously massive, and some sets were
cockpits or kind of postage-stamp
process-screen sets. If you took in all
those things, it would be well over 100."
Throughout the sets, Gilford
continues, "we reused pieces as much as
we could." As an example, he adds, "We
used a lot of the same pieces for Star
Destroyer hallways [and] the hallways
for Starkiller Base. We designed what we
called 'cabinets' - A, B, C and D cabinets. Think of them as tall boxes with
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