Porsche Spaceship To Appear In Future Star Wars Universe Project

There are a ton of ships represented in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, but one future craft could be molded after a car you can see on the road right now. Porsche’s the brand behind the Tri-Wing S-91X Pegasus Straighter, and even though it isn’t in the new movie, the carmaker has plans to bring a craft to future installments of Star Wars. This brand collaboration is inspired by the Porsche Taycan and tries to communicate some of the common design elements from the brand’s past. When asked by Roadshow about possibly appearing in a future installment of the franchise and Lucasfilm vice president and executive creative director Doug Chiang offered, “Yes, that is our hope, that this will live in one of our storytelling projects in the future.” The ship itself is pretty clean, but some might object to the idea of such a large brand designing a ship that ostensibly could be viewed as a commercial for Porsche during one of these movies. But, at least these props seem to be physical models and fans have been fans of that approach with Star Wars. The special makeup supervisor on Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Neal Scanlan, thinks that the series needs those practical effects.

“I have a little theory that in all of our hearts, as brilliant and as wonderful as CGI is, and I of course am an absolute fan of it, this is going to make me slightly controversial, but there’s something deceitful about it,” Scanlan said to Radio 1138 Podcast on Jedi News. “It asks you to believe that it’s real, and the better it gets, the more it wants you to believe that it’s real and forces you to believe that it’s real.

“And I think there’s just a natural – something just deep inside us that knows when something is real. It may not be that it’s as perfect or fantastical or mind-blowing as the CG version may be, but it’s something that you allow into your heart and into your soul, and it allows your imagination to make up some of the little spots.”

Scanlan also mentioned how that was reflected by the data, as audience surveys indicated that they prefer more practical effects. That’s led teams at ILM, Lucasfilm’s effects powerhouse, to find “a creative middle ground” between practical and digital effects.

“[It] is really exciting, to be able to say that we can go so far practically, then go further digitally. Or we can create a partial creature, or enhance a creature, or assist in a place, like we did for K-2SO, who ultimately is a digital character, but to work with the actor as an alien, as a creature, as a physical character as if he were just another practical effect. I think that will make a difference, and I think you’ll see that in the film, that he was K-2SO on that set, and he had the same support as any creature we made. So I think he felt part of the practical effects, but ultimately he’s digitally in the film.”