Visual Effects Artist Reveals Star Wars Death Star Trench Secret

Visual effects artist Todd Vaziri posted a story about the Star Wars Death Star on his blog and it revealed some previously unknown information. Most people would figure the trench that contained the first Death Star's exhaust port was the big obvious seam running around the middle. But Vaziri revealed this is not the case.

Apparently, even the people working on Star Wars visual effects at Industrial Light and Magic thought the trench was located in that horizontal seam. It wasn't until they were working on Rogue One that they learned the truth. You can read the story below:

Can you point to the trench that Luke and the Rebels flew down to fire upon the exhaust port that would ultimately destroy the space station?

Nearly everybody points at the equatorial trench of the Death Star. I asked dozens of die-hard fans, including many co-workers at Industrial Light & Magic, and nearly every single person pointed to the equatorial trench. If you asked me, I would also have said the equatorial trench.

In fact, this came up during ILM "Rogue One" dailies one day. Computer Graphics Supervisor Vick Schutz and Visual Effects Supervisor John Knoll were chatting about the details of our computer graphics version of the Death Star, and Knoll casually remarked that the trench run in "Star Wars" is a longitudinal line on the Death Star (meaning, a north-south trench).

Most of us in the room were dumbfounded. "What did he say?"

But if you think about it, Vaziri writes, it actually makes sense and was literally shown in the movie. The equatorial trench is several times wider than the final trench Luke flew through. And we were actually shown it was a north-south trench in one of the movies meeting scenes:

The scene of General Dodonna briefing the Rebel troops contains some computer graphics displayed at the front of the room. As Dodonna describes the challenges ahead, the audience can see quite clearly that the trench that contains the exhaust port is perpendicular to the equator. It was there the whole time.

The gif he includes demonstrates this:

So what do you think of this revelation? That was a lot of detail and explaining on Vaziri's part, so I'm impressed. What about you? Was your mind blown?

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