Behind The Scenes: Book of Boba Fett (Patreon)

I'm always super excited when some of my favorite shows stream a new season, or whole new series. It creates an opportunity for me to work on something I truly enjoy and look forward to without the need of brainstorming new ideas or concepts.

The latest arrival - The Book of Boba Fett - has a special place simply because it's Star Wars. I grew up on the original trilogy and this is a great homage to old characters and old places.

When I first saw the trailer, I knew I need to create the Jabba's throne room with Boba on it.

Visit the full Pinboard here

I fired up the Pinterest and gathered what I could get from the show. This is always a bit tricky, because there is not much of well defined references from TV scenes.  And if you try to find frames from the actual show, you often find if out of focus, badly lit and "muddy".

And if you want to get a good read on some specifics, you really need to dig deeper and find everything there is from multiple angles. Luckily, the throne room is not a new set. Actually it's one of the oldest designs appearing in the Return of the Jedi from 1983.

So there are lots of frames lying around. You just need to cross combine the old set with the updated version of the new TV show. And there is some fan generated content as well, so that helps too.

When taking the project into the sketching phase, if became apparent that it won't be one of those "model what you see" type of scenes. The Jabba's throne room is quite large space with different little corners and quirks appearing on multiple old Star Wars shots.

You feel like you know the place, but when you try to lay it out, suddenly you find you that it's more of a feeling puzzled up together from those little pieces and multiple shots.

To make this work on a small scale with readable low poly character, I needed to dissect it into key components and compress it together. So if you compare the sketch to the reference board, you'll find out I completely ditched one side of the stairs around the platform. And made it all smaller and compact. 

There are some elements brought from a different wall and there is an partial arch to support style of the palace architecture.

The rest of the reference board served mostly as mood shots for coloring and lighting, like the streak of the blue light in front of the character.

You can watch the process video on Youtube