‘Skeleton Crew’: Jon Watts Confirms Stop Motion Work by Phil Tippett, Provides Updated Synopsis
Showrunner Jon Watts sat down with Collider this past weekend at CCXP Mexico and had the chance to reveal a few snippets about the upcoming Skeleton Crew series for Disney Plus. In addition to teasing a Christmas release date for the show, Watts also talked about some of the techniques he got the chance to play around with in the show.
He first provided the following, updated synopsis for the show:
“It’s about a group of kids that find a mysterious secret on their planet and accidentally get lost out in the galaxy, and it’s the story abut them trying to find their way back home.”
He also added that you don’t really need to be into Star Wars to enjoy the show, something that Kerry Condon also alluded to recently, but “if you do, you can enjoy it on many levels.”
In particular, one of those added nuances is the inclusion of some old-school filmmaking techniques that were abundant in the making of the original trilogy. Phil Tippett, the puppet master behind some of the most stunning work in Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, did some stop motion work for the show, he said. They also used matte paintings like they had in Cloud City in Empire, for instance:
“I got to use all the cool stuff on my most recent Star Wars show. We had pre-viz, MOCAP, we shot on the volume, we did everything. But the most fun part was we also used all the old school techniques as well. We got Phil Tippett to do stop-motion. We did matte paintings, like real old-fashioned matte paintings. We got an ILM painter out of retirement to come out and do that. So to me, all that stuff is fun, but it’s just another tool, and it depends on how you use it.”
Phil Tippett has seen a second life via the Disney Plus series after being sidelined by computer-generated graphics for decades. He was involved in The Mandalorian, stop-motion animating a few sequences for Jon Favreau, and he was also one of the highlights of the docuseries Light & Magic that came out in 2022. A new season of that show is currently in post-production.
Skeleton Crew will be coming out this holiday season on Disney Plus. The next Star Wars show hitting Disney Plus will be The Acolyte, out on June 4. A new trailer was revealed over the weekend.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
