Like many in his generation, stop-motion animator Tom “Gibby” Gibbons took inspiration for his ultimate career when he saw Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) as a child. Unlike his peers however, one very particular sequence became his obsession: the dejarik holochess monsters. Little did he know that nearly 40 years later, he’d be among the artists to work on the revival of the sequence for Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015).

“How weird is it that I got to work on this?” Gibbons says with a laugh. “It was probably one of the weirdest synchronicities, cosmic accidents, that’s ever happened in my life — that I had that relationship with the chess set as a kid, and decades later I got to animate it.”

Growing up loving the films of Ray Harryhausen, the original holochess sequence from Star Wars had an outsized impact on Gibbons. “There had been a gap in films where I hadn’t seen the things I particularly loved in them — puppets and monsters — for a while,” he recalls. “Then Star Wars came out and the chess set appeared. That was the moment when I decided I wanted to do that. I realized there must be new people doing this kind of work. It’s still a thing.”…

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