Vimeo user Outside Hollywood has made a video showing the timelapse construction of the Imperial Death Star.

“I enjoyed watching a little bit of Death Star assembly in Rogue One, but I wanted to see more,” he says. “I came up with a very simple method of revealing geometry with Lightwave’s instancing tool, and then started building the underlying parts of the fully armed and operational battlestation. Since there was a lot of procedural animation, I was seeing a lot of interesting shapes appear that I hadn’t planned, but the thing that really pulls it together is the new score by Ben Botkin.”

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away… we might have seen a version of Star Wars that featured a Han Solo with green skin and gills, Stormtroopers with lightsabers and a female heroine named Luka Starkiller. Vimeo user The Dave School has made a Star Wars: concept trailer fanfilm using Ralph McQuarrie’s early illustrations and concept artwork.

It’s well known that what’s now referred to as Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope went through a number of drafts and re-writes from the original screenplay that Lucas wrote in 1975. The first two drafts of the screenplay apparently ripped off Flash Gordon and Frank Herbert’s Dune, respectively. George Lucas had to rework the draft several times when the rights holders (King Features and Herbert) balked. Even then, Herbert tried to sue because they were still similar, but he relented when the film became a hit in its own right.

“Many of these anomalies can be seen in concept artist, Ralph McQuarrie’s early illustrations of the Star Wars universe. While looking back at these early paintings we can’t help but wonder what Star Wars would have been like had it remained loyal to the concept art and early drafts of the script,” he says.

In early drafts of the script, R2-D2 could speak standard English, and he had a rather foul vocabulary. Although all of R2’s English speech was removed, many of C-3PO’s reactions to it were left in.

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