Obi-Wan Kenobi and The Mandalorian Production Designer and Lucasfilm’s Vice President and Executive Creative Director Doug Chiang will present an in-depth talk about designing the characters, spaceships, and worlds for Obi-Wan Kenobi and The Mandalorian season 3. He will share the challenges they faced in revisiting iconic Star Wars characters like Obi-Wan and Darth Vader.

Panel Recap

The stream broadcasts a masterclass panel held at the Galaxy Stage, where Lucasfilm vice president and executive creative director Doug Chiang breaks down the visual philosophy and production design mechanics behind Obi-Wan Kenobi and The Mandalorian Season 3.

The Star Wars Design Recipe: Chiang details his seven-year apprenticeship under George Lucas to learn the franchise’s strict internal logic. He outlines Lucas’s foundational visual recipe: every successful Star Wars asset must be composed of 80% historical reality and 20% fresh invention.

This 80/20 balance forces designs to look instantly ordinary and lived-in while remaining subtly otherworldly, choosing simple, graphic silhouettes that a child could easily sketch from memory.

Animation to Live Action: Chiang details the visual challenge of translating stylized animated characters, like the Grand Inquisitor or the Mandalorians, into physical reality. His team reverse-engineered the animation models, designing an authentic live-action costume first and adapting the armor plates, collars, and facial prosthetics to align with the real proportions of actors like Rupert Friend or Moses Ingram.

LED Volume Architecture: He contrasts conventional blue screen work with virtual production layouts, explaining how virtual environments are modularly mapped in real time onto an LED stage. For the Daiyu marketplace and the Inquisitor conference room, the crew physically constructed only the floor and immediate props the actors touched, allowing the StageCraft volume to instantly render interactive lighting, reflections, and deep cityscapes straight through the camera lens.

Vader’s Assembly: Chiang showcases a frame-by-frame structural design analysis tracking Darth Vader’s complete mechanical suiting-up sequence, mapping out every sequential layer from his life-support harness to his final pauldrons and helmet to maintain total visual continuity with legacy assets.