Welcome! Today we are going to go over my SITH inspired Star Wars Editorial.
The ideas, the prep, the shoot, the post production. Come behind the scenes to see how I managed a fantasy editorial that would fit in such a well known pre-established setting.

Foreword

I’ve been a Star Wars fan forever, and since the beginning of my photographic journey, I’ve always wanted to create something in that world.
For years I’ve been putting it off: didn’t have the right model, couldn’t find the right props or the right location, didn’t have sufficient time in my schedule. Often a few of these combined.

I think often people don’t realize how challenging it is to create something good set in the world of Star Wars. With its unique aesthetic, you have strict rules to follow if you want to make your art feel authentic and believable.
The show Andor is possibly changing some of that by introducing places and cultures with different looks than what we as fans have been accustomed to, but that’s not here nor there.

Note: I think the same can be said for any other original work that refers to an already established setting.

Planning a shoot like this

So, in order to nail this shoot, the first thing would be to do a lot of planning.
I identified two requirements I needed to meet:

• the styling and makeup had to be both fitting and interesting – basically good character design
• the shots had to be achievable with as little CGI as possible – basically real talents, real clothing, accessories and props, real locations, real lighting.

Note: by real I don’t necessarily mean natural – I would be ok with artificial lighting for instance, what I cared about was to get it right in camera.

Creating the character: the Styling

The first thing I worked on, and this is usually the case, was the styling – how the character would look, what they would wear.

In Star Wars, the Sith are easily recognizable by their dark color palette. I marked down my colors of choice accordingly: black and red, with silver and gold as accents.

For the look I decided to go with long textured fabrics, leaving room for some skin to show here and there – this was a choice I made knowing that variations often make things more interesting. Think of the skin as a trick for me to add a lighter color to the palette, or like using negative space in a design. This is something I like to use a lot in styling.
The silver and gold accents would be achieved with accessories.

With some time, patience and my partner’s help, I could find everything I was after on Shein. Better yet, she had a dress from Toonzshop that fit the shoot perfectly, and she offered to use that instead of the one we got from Shein.

Note: we got a top from Shein anyway to check it out, but decided to keep it for a later project, using the Toonzshop dress for this shoot. So this shoot was not styled using only Shein products, but know that it could’ve been.
Neither brand sponsored this shoot, we paid for everything we used. This is not to be taken as an endorsement towards either of them.

This is how the Styling section of my moodboard looked.

Creating the character: The Makeup

Being much less experienced with makeup, when it came to it I was very lucky to have my partner’s help, and she really helped me a lot.
We both researched some references and inspirations to use before coming up with our own Sith makeup. You will see they all follow the main colors of our palette. We then made some drafts of our takes and, unsure about them, we tried them on.

It was immediately and painfully obvious how off the mark we were.

Instead of going back to the drawing board, we started physically experimenting with the makeup on our faces, changing one thing after another until we had a new design that worked. We took some pictures of it and drew it to have as references for the day of the shoot.

We started from these references

And ultimately landed on this makeup design

Choosing a location

Having decided to avoid CGI as much as possible, it would have been a dream for me to have access to some futuristic buildings or structures, to lean into the cold, industrial, brutalist look of the Empire, which I am personally quite fond of. But this wasn’t the case.

So I had to think of something else that felt like Star Wars, something that sold the idea of us being in that universe, something that belonged.

With the studio and urban settings out of the picture, what remained was the outdoors. Throughout the many series and movies we are shown many different planets, with all kinds of landscapes and sceneries. And many of those places are not that much inhabited.

Going somewhere with snow would have been lovely – everything is better with snow – but DESTINY was just a short while ago, and shooting in snow always comes with disadvantages too. [I’m so gonna do it sometime in the future though.]

But just going into the woods felt lazy, it was too little and too easy.

I consider THE PAST to be one of the Jedi and Sith’s themes, as we often see them look for relics of the past in search of ancient knowledge and artifacts that would increase their power – maybe replaying the original Knights of the Old Republic game recently also helped remind me of that.
So I chose a place – actually two – with real ancient ruins in them.
As a consequence, we ended up taking two days for this shoot.

The Shoot and Going with the Flow

What I think was very important in the shooting process of this project is this:

I had saved references for poses and framings, and written down shots I wanted to get.
During the two days of shooting I looked at none of it.

Why or how is that?

There are two elements here:
– no reference could account for the locations I shot in, so everything had to be adapted to work with those
– I didn’t actually need them

Now: this is not me being pretentious, but actually a core point I want to drive home.
I didn’t need any of it because it was all in my head already.
By taking the time to look up references, by drawing, by planning, by watching, by studying things – and by shooting of course – you build up a visual library in your brain.
This is what informs your vision. It’s what allows you to improvise. To go with the flow.

So having to deal with two different and very large locations that’s exactly what I did.

The post production

I have stretched how much I wanted to avoid CGI, but this doesn’t mean I could do away with it completely. I captured everything in camera as close to final as possible, but a few enhancements were still needed, at least in some shots (I’m basically talking about the lightsabers).

To better show what I’m saying, I want to share the before and after for a couple of shots.

This is to show you important it is, or can be, to get it right in camera.

You may also notice how I changed the aspect ratio, going for short and wide strips, to make the shots look more like stills from a movie. It is something I love to do, and it made a lot of sense for this project.

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So, what do you think about it? I’d love to know!