Gavin Bocquet, Production Designer: These sort of decisions are always made collectively by a number of people. This would include George Lucas, Rick McCallum, the guys from ILM, Doug Chiang and myself. Every set or location had many different considerations, and it was always a fine balance between what we could achieve as a real set, from a visual, functional, and economic point of view, against how we could achieve those same results in the computer or with miniatures.
Despite the large use of the digital technology on EPISODE I, we still built approximately 64 sets, which sometimes filled whole stages at Leavesden. Maybe on Episode II different decisions will be made as technology has again moved on.
For the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Production Designer Gavin Bocquet turned ideas and concept art into three-dimensional sets. "Generally my role is to produce any constructed background that you see behind the actors," he says, "whether it's an in-studio set or on location, including props and set dressing. In short, we deal with any inanimate objects." He is a graduate of Newcastle Polytechnic, where he studied product design, and the Royal College of Art receiving a Master of Design degree in 1979. He started his motion picture career as an art department draftsman on The Elephant Man and Return of the Jedi.
