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Colin Cantwell, a concept artist, animator and computer engineer who helped bring the Star Wars universe to life, designing and building prototypes for a fleet of epic spacecraft — from the menacing TIE fighter to the elegant, dart-shaped X-wing — and giving the Death Star its alien look and fatal flaw (a trench), died May 21 at his home in Colorado Springs. He was 90……
When Lucas hired Mr. Cantwell in late 1974, the director was still negotiating financing with Twentieth Century Fox, working out concepts like the Force and overhauling a screenplay that was tentatively titled “Adventures of the Starkiller, Ep. 1: The Star Wars.” The script mentioned a number of spacecraft, but offered only vague descriptions of what they looked like and how they moved.
Mr. Cantwell was tasked with filling in the details, instructed by Lucas to make the ships look realistic but with “a comic book nobility,” according to Brian Jay Jones’s book “George Lucas: A Life.” He exchanged drawings with the director before landing on final sketches that he used to make his models, assembling plastic miniatures from thousands of pieces — including pill containers, lamp pieces, and parts of commercial model kits for planes, cars and boats — that he stored in a set of eight-foot-tall drawers.
Whether the spacecraft were shown individually or en masse, zipping across the screen in formation or chasing one another in a dogfight, Mr. Cantwell wanted them to be immediately recognizable, and to generate a sense of nervousness or excitement depending on their place in Lucas’s science fiction saga.
“My premise was you had to instantly know the bad guys from the good guys … by how [a ship] looks and feels,” he said in a 2014 interview for the website Original Prop Blog.
His design for the X-wing, the Rebel Alliance’s signature starfighter, was inspired by seeing a dart thrown at an English pub and was meant to suggest the image of a cowboy drawing his guns outside a saloon.
His sleek initial model for the Millennium Falcon, on the other hand, was meant to evoke a lizard that was poised to strike — and was used instead as the basis for the rebel blockade runner that appears in the film’s opening scene. (Other artists, including Joe Johnston and Ralph McQuarrie, ultimately contributed to the Millennium Falcon’s worn-down, hamburger-shaped look.)
Mr. Cantwell also created prototypes for the imperial star destroyer, the wedge-shaped ship that fills the screen in the film’s opening moments (to determine its size, he asked Lucas whether the ship was supposed to be “bigger than Burbank”; the answer was yes), and created the Death Star, the laser-equipped space station capable of destroying entire planets……
When Lucas hired Mr. Cantwell in late 1974, the director was still negotiating financing with Twentieth Century Fox, working out concepts like the Force and overhauling a screenplay that was tentatively titled “Adventures of the Starkiller, Ep. 1: The Star Wars.” The script mentioned a number of spacecraft, but offered only vague descriptions of what they looked like and how they moved.
Mr. Cantwell was tasked with filling in the details, instructed by Lucas to make the ships look realistic but with “a comic book nobility,” according to Brian Jay Jones’s book “George Lucas: A Life.” He exchanged drawings with the director before landing on final sketches that he used to make his models, assembling plastic miniatures from thousands of pieces — including pill containers, lamp pieces, and parts of commercial model kits for planes, cars and boats — that he stored in a set of eight-foot-tall drawers.
Whether the spacecraft were shown individually or en masse, zipping across the screen in formation or chasing one another in a dogfight, Mr. Cantwell wanted them to be immediately recognizable, and to generate a sense of nervousness or excitement depending on their place in Lucas’s science fiction saga.
“My premise was you had to instantly know the bad guys from the good guys … by how [a ship] looks and feels,” he said in a 2014 interview for the website Original Prop Blog.
His design for the X-wing, the Rebel Alliance’s signature starfighter, was inspired by seeing a dart thrown at an English pub and was meant to suggest the image of a cowboy drawing his guns outside a saloon.
His sleek initial model for the Millennium Falcon, on the other hand, was meant to evoke a lizard that was poised to strike — and was used instead as the basis for the rebel blockade runner that appears in the film’s opening scene. (Other artists, including Joe Johnston and Ralph McQuarrie, ultimately contributed to the Millennium Falcon’s worn-down, hamburger-shaped look.)
Mr. Cantwell also created prototypes for the imperial star destroyer, the wedge-shaped ship that fills the screen in the film’s opening moments (to determine its size, he asked Lucas whether the ship was supposed to be “bigger than Burbank”; the answer was yes), and created the Death Star, the laser-equipped space station capable of destroying entire planets……
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