Star Wars: Explore Ahch-To With New 'The Last Jedi' Behind-the-Scenes Featurette

The Star Wars saga is known for introducing audiences to a variety of strange and peculiar locales, whether they be inhospitable climates or worlds full of strange creatures. The Last Jedi continued this tradition by introducing audiences to Ahch-To, where Luke Skywalker sought refuge and isolation after he failed to train Ben Solo. To celebrate the locale, an Irish tourism organization created a behind-the-scenes look at Skellig Michael, which you can watch below.

The above video not only offers a variety of glimpses at the gorgeous landscapes of the location, but also reveals that the crew actually only filmed on the island itself for two days, shooting the rest of the scenes necessary for the story in other parts of Ireland.

"It's like fairytale world, with the sheep and the cows and the pastures and the ocean. You just can't believe your eyes," Mark Hamill said about the location.

Another interesting reveal in the video above is a glimpse of a puffin, a species which populates the island, as it's also a bird sanctuary. It was these birds that actually inspired the porgs, both as a means of paying respect to the real-world animals of the island and created an opportunity for some visual effects corrections.

"You physically can't get rid of them, and digitally removing them is an issue and a lot of work, so let's just roll with it, play with it," designer Jake Lunt Davies told StarWars.com. "And so I think [writer/director Rian Johnson] thought, 'Well, that's great, let's have our own indigenous species.'"

The porgs weren't the only indigenous inhabitants of the island, as the Caretakers also lived there to maintain what remained of the Jedi Temple.

"We'd already started work on the Caretakers, which again was a brief from Rian," Davies recalled. "We'd just been told 'puffin people.' Yeah, there was going to be this race of people and puffins again were a source of inspiration for Rian. The puffins were sort of a big influence on everything, really."

You can see Ahch-To in The Last Jedi, in theaters now.

[H/T YouTube, Discover Ireland]