Why It Took a Year to Produce One Second of Film For The Force Awakens’ Most Nostalgic Scene

Warning: Spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens are ahead.

For those of you who have seen Star Wars: The Force Awakens, you may have noticed the scene aboard the Millennium Falcon where Finn unknowingly activates a holographic board game known to fans as Dejarik. If you’re a Star Wars fan like many of us are, you may recall the scene from the original trilogy where Chewbacca and R2-D2 play the same game in A New Hope.

While that scene may have brought back memories and some nostalgia for the original film, what most people might not know is that the scene for The Force Awakens was created entirely using stop-motion photography, and took an entire year to produce.

While the scene may have only lasted a few moments, because the crew wanted to produce the scene using the original figurines, it took quite a bit of time to track them down, and unfortunately, once they did, they discovered that the original figurines were either too damaged or missing and could not be used. This meant that the team would need to use quite a bit of legwork and modern technology to re-create the original figurines for the scene.

If you would like to see how the stop-motion animation for the Force Awakens was created, take a look at the videos in this article. To learn more, see Wired’s excellent write up about the process referenced below.

H/T: Wired.