This project is a range of Star Wars posters to herald the forthcoming film, Episode 7: The Force Awakens. Each design has its own meaning, be it a scene from past films or the role it depicts. Read on and enjoy!

I regularly produce personal projects that help me flex my creative muscles and about a month before the release of Star Wars Episode 7, I started to feel the hype and decided to produce some little designer posters. The name “It’s All True” comes from a line from the film, in which they hint on the past being somewhat secret or forgotten, leading onto an idea that developed into the designs I created.

The idea was simple. I wanted to create a series based on relics, along the lines of artefacts found in the great pyramids or ancient sites. Each poster features a dark, monumental style environment and at the centre of each scene is a cryptic sculpture based on the events of the original 1970’s/80’s films, A New Hope to Return of the Jedi. To create these, I needed to come up with a basic language that could be used across each design, for example, gold and silver represents something precious, marble represents high technology, wood means workforce and copper is something of primary target.

So baring these in mind, you can piece some idea together of the representation of each of the posters. For example, the AT-AT design can be seen wading through numerous types of materials, which is representative of it’s All Terrain aspect. In Boba Fetts design, we can see the Slave One flying into a tree. The tree itself is made out of gold and has some silver fruit laying below, that represents Mr Fett profession as a bounty hunter (The ship is wood, which means workforce, or the people that do the dirty work), Han Solo is his bounty and he’ll stop at nothing to get his prize. The mirrors reflect on his past as an unaltered clone.

The Death Star design is by far the most complex. The moon sized space station is coated in gold to depict its value and how sort after information is to destroy it. The ribcage that surrounds it, is symbolic for how high tech (Marble material) and impenetrable the superstructure is. The black skull that resided inside is touching on how things come to an end with the death of the Emperor and Darth Vader. Finally, the arm that rests below is a memorial of how many people lost their hand during the making of Star Wars. We salute you arms! The rest I’ll leave to the imagination, but they’re all symbolic in one way or another.

- Jodie Rudge

In truth, after the new prequels, I’d lost any hope (Not even A New One) that if they actually did continue the story, whether they’d be any good. I think after the amount of hype surrounding Episode 7, my faith was partially restored, which lead on to me wanting to design something whilst the hype was still pumping through my veins.

I’ve been in the creative industry for well over a decade now (coming up to two decades…), so in designs such as this, there’s not a great deal of initial design involved, I had an idea of what each poster needed to represent, so it was a matter of playing about and getting everything built.

- Jodie Rudge

My 3D weapon of choice is and has always been Modo (By the foundry, previously developed by Luxology) and is by far one of the best programs I’ve used for ease of use, understanding and efficient workflow, its a great tool that has made me happy for about 8 years now, I really can’t big it up any more. I’ve used Maya in the past, but at the time, it always seems overly complex and mind-bogglingly hard to understand in terms of function. In fairness though, that was years ago and I was just starting out in the world of 3D which is probably why my head exploded on numerous occasions.

Anyways! Process wise was a simple task, get everything built and in scene, then experiment with materials. I really wanted the main sculptures to pop off the screen, so I opted for the near black background to add a nice sense of contrast, allowing delicate materials like wood and marble to compete with gold, silver and copper.

- Jodie Rudge

Once everything was in scene and complete, it was just a matter of adding lighting in strategically placed areas and I was done! Generally, the main look and feel to these plays a tribute to modern industrial/interior design, as you can see in some of the posters with a more abstract feel with either symbols, simplistic structures or framework. Copper and gold are very lavish materials used by a lot of designers in the contemporary world, especially trending at the moment with 3D designers as you’ll see from various artists and their material studies.

By all means, this isn’t supposed to be a highly modernistic piece of work, rather, using elements as a way to communicate with people and if it causes someone to stop and stare for a few moments, I feel my job is done.

- Jodie Rudge

I have a mild tendency to get bored really quickly if something isn’t going the way I like it… I say ‘mild', its more like a full on temper tantrum that I’ve spent time developing something that is slowly dwindling into the world of high velocity toilets. So with that said, I try any do my best with every project I endeavour to keep my sanity in check.

If I was to think of one brick wall, it would be the main bane of every 3D designers life… Render Time… It’s literally like watching paint dry. In fact, I think paint dries quicker. The longest estimate I’ve had for one single frame render weighted in at 17 days and 9 hours on another project I was working on. Needless to say my patience dropped to zero and I swiftly deleted it from existence. If any level of profanity was to be used at this point, I would choose top level.

Revision wise, I’m not sure. I like to picture multiple options in my mind as I go along. But some times a certain amount of experimentation needs to be done. For this project, it was a case of first come, first served.

- Jodie Rudge

About Jodie Rudge

Jodie Rudge is a graphic designer, illustrator, craftsmen, web designer/developer and 3D artist for a very long time. It all started from when he was drawing constantly as a young child, then moving on to building robots out of the cardboard part of toilet roll. Later on in life, he decided not to take up toilet roll sculpting and target more towards something a little more professional. Currently, he works for an international creative agency in Manchester, England, but also have my side endeavours that he goes by the name Ngon. You can find more of his works on his Behance profile or website.