Here’s the real reason Porgs made their debut in ‘The Last Jedi’

Authored by nme.com and submitted by Blue59

The new creature has been a popular addition to the Star Wars universe

The origin of the popular new Star Wars creature, the Porg, has been revealed in a new interview with the creature concept designer for The Last Jedi.

With the new film hitting cinemas in the UK last week (December 14), many fans of the sci-fi franchise have found particular enjoyment in the introduction of the new creature from the planet Ahch-To.

The creative process behind the new creature has now been revealed in an interview with Jake Lunt Davies, who worked on The Last Jedi as the creature concept designer.

Davies has disclosed that director Rian Johnson was inspired to create the character from observing puffin birds on the island of Skellig Michael off the coast of Ireland, where some scenes in both the new film and The Force Awakens were filmed.

“From what I gathered, Rian had gone to shoot this sequence on Skellig Michael, which is the real island location that stands in for Ahch-To, and that island is covered in puffins,” Davies explained. “It’s a wildlife reserve and everywhere you look there are hundreds of birds dotted around the landscape.

“From what I gathered, Rian, in a positive spin on this, was looking at how can he work with this,” he continued. “You can’t remove them. You physically can’t get rid of them. And digitally removing them is an issue and a lot of work, so let’s just roll with it, play with it.

“And so I think he thought, ‘Well, that’s great, let’s have our own indigenous species.’ We’d already started work on the Caretakers, which again was a brief from Rian. We’d just been told ‘puffin people.’ Yeah, there was going to be this race of people and puffins again were a source of inspiration for Rian. The puffins were sort of a big influence on everything, really.”

Elsewhere in Star Wars news, the man who started a petition to have The Last Jedi deleted has now admitted that he regrets his actions.

RalphieRaccoon on October 6th, 2019 at 22:52 UTC »

There's YouTube video from David Sandberg (director of Shazam!) which explains that convoluted and sometimes downright weird additions to films are sometimes either disguised mistakes or solutions to logistical problems when filming (such as this case). He finds it funny when film buffs try to find hidden meaning behind them when they had no meaning beyond a director's hack to fix some problem.

Noerdy on October 6th, 2019 at 20:46 UTC »

“From what I gathered, Rian, in a positive spin on this, was looking at how can he work with this,” he continued. “You can’t remove them. You physically can’t get rid of them. And digitally removing them is an issue and a lot of work, so let’s just roll with it, play with it.

Technology is pretty funny. It's easier to build and animate little guys than to remove them. Makes sense, but imagine explaining it to someone 50 years ago.

notagoodboye on October 6th, 2019 at 20:43 UTC »

Skellig Michael. My wife and I went there on our honeymoon, jesus, ~20 years ago? Something.

She really wanted to see puffins, but we didn't see a single one on the walk to the top. We walked around the weird stone beehives, saw no puffins. Tried to imagine what the monks had felt like, living on that rock.

On the way down, we stopped for a rest, and I looked over to say something to her, and there was a puffin next to her.

I was sort of jerking my head at it, trying to get her to look, when another one landed right between us. Then about 100,000 more. Apparently they go out fishing first thing in the morning, and then all come back in a massive massive flock.

Massive number of puffins. They were everywhere.