Concept designer Ryan Church’s work on Episode III required some 900 paintings and a couple of years of his life. All Star Wars: Episode III images © ™Lucasfilm Ltd. Digital work by ILM.

This has been a summer of unconventional war movies, and concept designer Ryan Church has been in the thick of the battles. Church co-supervised the concept art for George Lucas’ Star Wars: Episode III —Revenge of the Sith, and he designed the towering Tripods for Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. The former required about 900 paintings and a couple of years of Church’s life, while the latter took four months, start to finish.

Church studied at Pasadena’s acclaimed Art Center College of Design, and his industrial design training is evident in both films. His aesthetic is also on display in a series of instructive DVDs for The Gnomon Workshop. Six volumes of The Techniques of Ryan Church have been published through Gnomon and the Design Studio Press.

Ellen Wolff: Star Wars: Episode III opens with a massive battle involving a huge, intricate space cruiser. Did you design it in pieces, knowing that it would have to break apart into interesting debris?

Ryan Church.

Ryan Church: That was a big consideration in the design of the Separatist cruiser, which is General Grievous’ flagship. I wanted a different look for the space battle. I thought it would be good to set this battle really close to the surface of the planet. When battles are out in the black star fields, what you get — which is completely legitimate — is that when something is hit, it has this omni-directional, zero-G pop. I wanted to make it more like a World War II naval battle, where, when something gets hit, it lists and it trails smoke. Because we’re close to the planet, there is gravity and the fringes of the upper atmosphere are interacting with it. I just thought that would be a neat opportunity to give this battle a completely different look. So I did a bunch of paintings, which looked — maybe a little bit too much — like Victory at Sea. Those films have crazy, frenzied looks, with shrapnel flying — they make Star Wars look tame!

I was thinking Episode III, which is a galaxy-wide war, was a lot like WWII. If you look closely at the paint jobs on the big ships in this movie, they’re inspired by the camouflage that the Germans had on their ships. The Wookiee catamaran has got these black and white stripes on them like the Allied airplanes had. Some of those details are subliminal but we really wanted to tie that in.

EW: Since this movie brings the saga back to where the original Star Wars began, we see the old familiar Wookiees. But the stormtroopers look more diverse. Why are they sporting colors on their familiar white uniforms?

RC: George kept saying, “These guys have been out fighting the war for the last three years, and they’ve started to personalize their uniforms.” He wanted to subliminally refer to what troops do — they paint insignia markings on their crafts that refer to their squads. It’s another WWII analogy.

EW: This film moves quickly from one planet to another — from the Wookiees’ Polynesian-looking planet to a place full of hydra-styled plants. How did you develop visual identities for these places so that the audience would recognize where different events were happening?

RC: That was precisely the design challenge of Episode III. It was George saying, “I need a bunch of planets that the Clone Wars happen on.” He didn’t say what the planets had to be. He just said, “Make sure they’re as visually distinct from one another as possible in color, form, shape and technology. We’re crosscutting and the audience needs to be instantly oriented.”

That was pretty neat, because I thought we were going to do a morph between Episodes II and IV (the original Star Wars). But, in fact, George wanted to do all these different things. The use of wood on the Wookiees’ planet was a great example of that. I thought of it as a kind of high technology Frank Lloyd Wright. Wood is a high-tech material if you use it that way. I did a lot of research into laminated substances and stuff like that. I thought this could be a really unique aesthetic and still be in Star Wars.