Director Rian Johnson knows that fans will do anything for a glimpse of Star Wars: Episode VIII. To that end, the director has kindly given us a couple glimpses of the set, explained the importance of having a good microfiber cloth man on hand, and given us a status update on filming, all with a single brief post.
http://rcjohnso.tumblr.com/post/143544707315/good-bad-im-the-guy-with-the-microfiber
The first shot, posted to the director's Tumblr, gives us a close-up view of an X-wing fighter. It’s getting its windows cleaned, because really when you’re in the middle of a space battle the last thing you want if for some dirt on the windscreen to make it difficult to see the TIE fighters around you.
The second image shows us the other side of the conflict. The First Order has people that dust off their computers with shammies too. It’s good to know that the professional housekeeping industry is still going strong in a galaxy far, far away. Here we see what looks to be a First Order soldier, in his incredibly large helmet, waiting to get his workstation cleaned up. He’s very intently staring at his screen. We can’t really tell what he’s looking at. This could be of vital importance, or it could be the coffee maker. While we’ve seen crew members that look like this before, as noted in the photo below, this is actually the closest look we’ve had of this particular uniform style. Maybe we’ll learn more about what they do in Star Wars: Episode VIII.
The other interesting piece of information, is that Star Wars: Episode VIII has reached the halfway point in their filming schedule. As it’s only been a couple of months since they started filming, this means that they likely only have a couple of months left. This would put the end of principal photography somewhere around the end of June or early July. While there will almost certainly be some amount of reshoots after that, from there the movie will go into its long post-production process. In this case, it will last almost a year and half, as Episode 8 won’t hit screens until December of 2017. It honestly seems like an awfully fast shoot, especially considering the talk of significant script rewrites that were coming up just as the filming was about to start.
If nothing else, this means we can likely expect the rumors to really begin to fly in a couple of months. Once filming has wrapped and more people have actually seen the film, and then it starts to get into the hands of visual effects people, editors and others, we can expect that some of them may start to talk about what’s actually going on inside the film itself. We’re still excited for Star Wars: Episode VIII. How about you?
