He’s a friend of the site, a great laugh and he’s also one of the key performers on this new era of Star Wars movies and now over at StarWars.com Brian Herring chats with Kristin Baver about his role as part of the team behind BB-8 and operating some cute Ahch-To avians in The Last Jedi.
StarWars.com: You were part of Neal Scanlan’s team developing the BB-8 puppet from the beginning, back in 2013 when you joined his creature effects department as a puppeteer consultant. Let’s talk about the inception of this character and the practical effects that brought BB-8 to life. I believe BB-8 started out as a scrawl on a napkin, code named “Snow Globe”…
Brian Herring: Yes! J.J. [Abrams] very much wanted a live character to be on the set with the actors. He set out to make a sequel to Return of the Jedi like it was 1985, so he was very much into the practical effects side of it. So he doodled something on a napkin that went to Christian Alzmann at Lucasfilm and he did a load of designs, then it came over to London and it went to Jake Lunt Davies’ massive brain and he brought the thing home, he made it look like the BB-8 you see. At that point people were starting to work out how it would be done and Josh Lee, who I always refer to as BB-8’s dad, he came up with an idea of doing it as a practical puppet. He built a small puppet that he then gave to me to do some little character studies on. I dressed in black on a black background and I made a little landscape covered in black again so the only thing you could really see was this little puppet and I rolled it around. Neal Scanlan came in, he directed me a little bit and we sent those studies off to J.J. J.J. liked it and it was a go and from that point. Josh and, I think, Matt Denton, who’s one of the chief animatronics people that works for Neal, they started work on the rod-puppet version and other versions. There were seven versions altogether, and they had different functions.
