How ‘Ahsoka’ Goes Beyond the Star Wars Galaxy
With 11 feature films, six live-action series, nine animated series — and, lest we forget, one holiday special — the original “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope” is starting to feel like it was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. “Ahsoka” occupies an interesting spot at the nexus of “Star Wars” storytelling from the past couple decades, though.
The Disney+ series acts as a bridge between the worlds of Dave Filoni’s work on the excellent animated “Rebels” and the innovative technical approach to “The Mandalorian.” Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson), former apprentice to Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen), may have the challenge of trying to preserve the galaxy in the face of sinister threats from Morgan Elsbeth (Diana Lee Inosanto) and others, but “Ahsoka” has the challenge of blending templates set in animation with the demands of live-action — and pushing both forward, as the show takes Ahsoka and the series’ aesthetic to heightened places of danger far beyond the galaxy.
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One must understand the existing forms in order to innovate on them, and there’s maybe nobody who understands what makes something look and feel distinctively “Star Wars” better than Lucasfilm SVP and Executive Design Director/production designer Doug Chiang. “For ‘Ahsoka’ we tied in all the history — 40 plus years of ‘Star Wars’ filmmaking,” Chiang told IndieWire. “But ‘Ahsoka’ was 30 percent, 40 percent all-new aesthetics. And for me, that’s the area that I find the most exciting because we’re taking that risk.”
Chiang and his fellow production designer Andrew L. Jones needed to not just make animated design flourishes of ships and alien planets work in the real world, they needed to build in new material to help visually connect all the threads of the mystery that Ahsoka is trying to unravel. So, too, did the show’s hair and makeup team, including makeup designer Alexei Dmitriew and hair designer Maria Sandoval, need to not just visually translate “Rebels” characters but mature them and hint at how the years since the fall of the Empire have treated them. Within the visual template (ie. anamorphic widescreen) of the existing “Star Wars” universe, cinematographers Quyen Tran and Eric Steelberg made framing and lighting choices that heighten the action and somehow expand the scope of just how epic a “Star Wars” story can feel.
In the videos below, watch the cinematographers, hair and makeup team, and production designers discuss how they realized the “Star Wars” look we expect and then took it somewhere new.
The Cinematography of ‘Ahsoka’
It’s no secret “Star Wars” has always had a crush on the films of Akira Kurosawa. But to create a distinctive tone for the action and particularly the many different kinds of lightsaber fights in the series — some with witches, some with ghosts, some with characters from other series whom Ahsoka and Sabine (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) thought might be ghosts — cinematographers Eric Steelberg and Quyen Tran leaned hard into the fearful symmetry of wide shots where we can feel the space between the fighters and anticipate the impossibly fast movements where those will close.
This is evident in a fight like the one in Episode 4, where Steelberg treats the ruins in which Ahsoka duels with fallen Jedi Baylon Skoll (Ray Stevenson) like theater in the round, arcing the camera over and around the fighters with the same energy they’re putting into their lightsaber attacks. It’s especially palpable in Episode 5, where Tran used dueling techno-cranes to follow their movements back and forth across an otherwordly force bridge. The shadow realm Ahsoka finds herself in looks very consciously like Kurosawa’s “Kagemusha,” too.
“It’s red, it’s orange, it’s very heavily saturated, but with silhouettes,” Tran told IndieWire. “It was a huge collaborative effort between lighting, ILM, grip, camera… Everyone was so involved and really invested in making it the vision that Dave wanted. “
In the video above, watch how Tran and Steelberg upped the visual scale of the action in “Ahsoka,” which in turn expanded how dramatic the confrontations between the show’s erstwhile Jedi and forgotten foes feel.
The Makeup and Hair Design of ‘Ahsoka’
Animation usually gets to be a lot more expressive than live-action. It can be brighter, it can be weirder, it doesn’t have to actually obey the laws of physics. The hair and makeup approach to the live-action version of “Ahsoka” drew on the spirit of the animated designs and the lessons of previous live-action series in order to craft looks that honored previous versions of the characters while also putting them in a different, slightly funkier place.
“Our job is to match what the animated [design] is and to make it practical and execute this textured feel. Everybody’s involved in that to get that character to look a certain way,” makeup designer Alexei Dmitriew told IndieWire. Whether giving Ahsoka herself a new, longer, sleeker, 3D-printed lekku (the white/blue head-tails) or designing a more intense form for the witches of Dathomir, the makeup on “Ahsoka” creates versions of the characters that are more weathered, and more powerful than ever before.
It holds true for the hairstyles, too. Hair designer Maria Sandoval took a different approach with Morgan Elsbeth to demonstrate her growing power as she gets painfully close to her goal of connecting with the elusive Nightsisters. “She may or may not have been an actual Nightsister, therefore from Dathomir, and I wanted to have some hint of silver in her hair,” Sandoval told IndieWire. “I had crimped her hair with a mini crimper, so it gives it almost a yarn-like texture. It looks like human hair, but it looks just a little fuzzy and kind of alien and kind of not of this world.”
In the video above, watch how Sandoval and Dmitriew built hair and makeup designs that could withstand the action and communicate how the characters on “Ahsoka” have grown and changed.
The Production Design of ‘Ahsoka’
Production designers Doug Chiang and Andrew L. Jones have great archives of “Star Wars” knowledge between them, but their task for “Ahsoka” was to create an expanded universe that drew on “Rebels” and “Clone Wars” animated designs along with the look of the prequels, originals, and “The Mandalorian” while also taking the audience to completely new worlds.
The risk of designs that are either too outside the “Star Wars” aesthetic or too similar is high. But the key for both Chiang and Jones was to find the ways that shape language, color, textures, and hardware (“Ahsoka” features sleek new versions of both the T6 Jedi Cruiser and Hera Syndulla’s Ghost) could all connect to the story.
“Each of the planets has a very distinct personality — for example, the fact that we had red leaves on Seatos may seem like just an aesthetically interesting choice, but it ties into the witches and it hints at where we’re going,” Chiang said. “Those are the things we always think about when we design, so that when you actually end up on Peridea and you meet the witches, you get that connection. All these little things start to come together to build this world that makes it very cohesive. We never explained it. It’s always told visually.”
In the video above, watch how Chiang and Jones wove together adaptations of the core animated and live-action elements to fully connect all the disparate pieces of the galaxy in “Ahsoka.”
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