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Making The Holochess Scene From "Star Wars: The Force Awakens"

Nearly two years ago, Star Wars: The Force Awakens hit theaters. Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the sequel to Awakens, is set to hit theaters this December. Beyond being revered for its use of homage and devotion to staying true to the tone of the original trilogy, Awakens was celebrated in the special effects community for its use of many state-of-the-art digital effects, innovations only recently pioneered, all of which were practically alien to the practical effects methods employed in the original Star Wars trilogy. However, Awakens did not yet completely forsake what many would today consider its humble beginnings in special effects, including the original film’s use of stop motion. One such homages in The Force Awakens to the original film can be seen for a brief moment when the character of Finn accidentally turns on a holographic chess board in the Millennium Falcon – an effect entirely created with stop motion.



Chances are that you remember the scene from the original film well, although it’s so briefly on-screen that there’s a chance you’ll miss it if you blink: Early on in the film, while aboard the Millennium Falcon, Chewbacca and R2-D2 play a game of holographic chess (also known as Holochess or, more accurately, Dejarik) composed of several miniature alien figures, each combatting with each other. In fact, the scene has become so iconic that you can purchase a 1/6th scale replica of the chess table here, and it has inspired fans to create their own full-sized table, such as the one created by this fan…



Phil Tippett, a man highly revered on this blog for his contribution to stop motion, was the visionary spearheading the stop motion Holochess scene for the original film, Star Wars: Episode IV–A New Hope. Tippett, originally hired in 1976 by George Lucas to produce puppets for the famous Cantina bar scene in A New Hope, was spotted by Lucas as having stop motion puppets whilst one day working on the Cantina scene. Phil recalls the moment in Ray Harryhausen and Tony Dalton’s book A Century of Stop Motion Animation: From Méliès to Aardman (page 211), “He saw some stop-mo puppets that I’d made, sitting on a shelf and he asked if we were animators. He called Jon Berg and me in, about a week later, and said that he was going to do the chess scene with actors in masks but thought it would be more fun if they were animated. So Jon built up some wire armatured things from scratch and I threw in one of my articulated creatures.”

It is interesting to note that the Holochess scene was a late addition to the original film, and that, from conception to final product, the project took only a few short weeks to complete. As Phil Tippet says in the most recent Tested interview with him on the creation of the characters for the chess set, “We just knocked them out, just quickly. We’d probably make one of these [creatures] a day each.” So it’s ironic when considering this to compare it with the several months of man-hours that it took to completely recreate the same brief scene for Awakens.

Below I’ve posted the links to what amounts to several hours-worth of documentation of remaking the Holochess scene for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which includes interviews with Phil as well practically everyone else who helped bring the project to life:

If you are interested in learning more about how the practical effects were created for the original Star Wars trilogy, I recommend you to two resources. First, the 1986 book Industrial Lights & Magic: The Art of Special Effects by Thomas G. Smith, which you can purchase from Amazon here. This book offers a unique in-depth look at the early innovations in special effects pioneered by ILM – George Lucas’s company which was formed in the first place to engineer the effects for Star Wars: A New Hope. In part what makes this book such an interesting read is that it was written literally at the dawn of the digital age, when ILM first partnered with Steve Jobs to create the short film Andre and Wally B., the film that helped to essentially found Pixar as we know it. Furthermore, this book includes detailed explanations with accompanying illustrations and pictures that detail how the special effects were produced for every film ILM worked on from 1977 to 1984, covering everything from the original Star Wars trilogy to E.T. to Goonies to Indiana Jones.
My second recommendation for further exploration of this topic is the classic collection of Cinefex – a visual effects behind-the-scenes magazine which has been covering the special effects industry’s secrets for over 30 years. The magazine has several glorious back-issues covering the making of the special effects for the original Star Wars films in great detail. You can download these classic issues of Cinefex for a small sum on the Cinefex app, which you can download here.

You can stay tuned for the upcoming interviews and articles by subscribing to Stop Motion Geek via the “subscribe” button at the top right corner of our homepage, or by following us on Facebook @StopMotionGeek, or by visiting https://www.facebook.com/StopMotionGeek/. You can also stay up-to-date with the blog by following us on Instagram or @stop.motion.geek.blog.







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