#6 panels

This week's theme: Funky Background Aliens (FBAs)!

Here are some of the moneyed FBAs of Canto Bight!

⭐ Crystal Skull Babe by Ivan Manzella. ⭐ Four-eyed Fancy Collar by Jake Lunt Davies. ⭐ Magnet Head with Balloon Pet by Jake Lunt Davies. ⭐ Knockoff Jabba by Ivan Manzella. ⭐ Popped Collar Dog Man by Jake Lunt Davies, who designed this look with a specific actor in mind:

“There’s a character in there who you can’t really see... He’s like 8-foot-tall, this character, and he’s got a face like a dog. Previously on Rogue One we had a performer called Derek Campbell, who’s a double amputee. He’s now doing film work and turning it ’round and using this disability as a positive thing... We fitted him with prosthetic legs, which were twice the length of his normal legs, and very, very thin, so we have this character which you couldn’t build unless you used a double amputee...” -- Jake Lunt Davies

⭐ Purple Lady by Ivan Manzella.

“The purple lady is all sculpted, with an animatronic head... Gustav Hoegan, creature effects supervising animatronic designer, mechanized the features to give her that air of real life. We sculpted her with that feeling that she can court any man she wants. The extras played brilliantly off of her. There’s one man in particular, with a very James Bond look about him, who would spend a lot of time caressing her shoulder or holding her hand...” -- Neal Scanlan

I liked this quote about how they came up with these FBAs:

“Rian said that this casino wasn’t a place where the skullduggery and the lowlives of the Star Wars world would meet. This is where you went if you had inherited money, made money, or were in the process of becoming very rich, to go and enjoy yourself amongst your own. And the patrons would be wearing black-and-white suits, which was a rather frightening idea. But apart from that, it was a completely open forum.

“We laid maybe three hundred designs all out on boards in the workshop and invited Rian for his first shortlisting... He walked down, very freely, putting on Post-It notes -- same as we did with J.J. on The Force Awakens. Four to six weeks later, it got to what we called D-Day. I think we ended up making forty-something characters, and he chose thirty-five in that one session. Had any of us bet on which ones he was going to choose, we all would have lost.” -- Neal Scanlan

Concept art and Neal Scanlan quotes from The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, written by Phil Szostak. Published 2017.