With Ahsoka approaching the end of its debut season, ILM model maker John Goodson sat diwn with StarWars.com to discuss the creation of Ahsoka’s T-6 Jedi Shuttle, a physical model built much like the Razor Crest from The Mandalorian that required all of Goodson’s immense skills and a visit to the workshop of 3210 Studios, the original home of ILM on Kerner Boulevard.
For Ahsoka, Goodson spent nearly four months working full-time in his Marin County garage to sculpt, cast, and fabricate Tano’s T-6 shuttle for the era of the New Republic with help from machinist Dan Patrascu who added the mechanical innards. “It was really complicated,” Goodson says.
For eight hours each day, Goodson vacuum formed and fabricated individual parts, instead of simply 3-D printing the majority of the model from a digital file. Despite its popularity, 3-D printed pieces are delicate, Goodson says, and for a hero ship that will be mounted to a motion-control rig for countless shots — sometimes colliding with the camera during production — the resulting piece isn’t sturdy enough to survive the process. “When you’ve got these models on stage and you remount them, they wind up getting manhandled a lot,” he says. “They’ve got to be robust. They really get a lot of abuse on stage. They have to be tough enough to withstand it.”
After cutting out wooden patterns, Goodson used heated plastic sheets to create the base of many of the model’s bigger pieces. Some of the largest elements, like the shuttle’s massive rotating wing, called for a visit to the original home of ILM, on Kerner Boulevard in San Rafael, California, to borrow the same equipment used by model makers for the original trilogy. “I didn’t have a machine big enough,” Goodson says, “but the original 2-foot-by-2-foot vacuum former that they bought in 1975 for the first Star Wars is still at 3210 Studios.” Luckily, the current tenants were happy to oblige.
Goodson’s final creation weighs in at about 15 pounds with a rotating wingspan that stretches about 30 inches across. There are about 350 individual parts on the finished T-6 model, which includes everything from the smallest greeblies pulled from a long-forgotten model kit to the large vacuum formed segments.
f
