“A lot people really underestimate how much attention is paid when doing this,” Davis continues. “It’s not a random collection of pieces – you’re actually trying to connect hoses to boxes to fans to vents to things that look like they’re serving a purpose. The other part of it is to make it look aesthetically pleasing, so one of the biggest mistakes you’ll see on relatively a low-budget movie made by people who are not professional model makers is, you can spot that they don’t put that thought into it. They also try to fill entire areas.”

There can be a practical aspect to applying greebles to a space craft, too. Take the Millennium Falcon, for example – that incredible detailing you can see running around the side of the ship? That’s there, in large part, to disguise a seam where the top of the miniature can be lifted off between takes.

“We have to work with the lighting and some of the details we put inside the model: we have to paint all that, we have to light it, we have to put electronics in it, we have umbilical cords coming out of it running to the power. So the way you do that is, you have two shells of the spacecraft that are body panels, and you can separate them. If you can take the whole top off, then you can get to the inside of the spacecraft. So the best way to do that is to have a seam that is really noisy and filled with detail, so you can’t tell there’s a break. That’s part of what drives where we put the details. We want it to be aesthetically pleasing, but we have to balance that with functionality.”

The use of parts from model kits not only speeds up the building process but also provides the audience with a subconscious link between the real world and the fantastical one on the screen. The use of utilitarian-looking bits and pieces, reworked and put together in new ways on a miniature, creates a subtle bond between the military vehicles most of us are familiar with and the more outlandish mecha dreamed up by George Lucas and his artists.

The At-St Scout Walker’s feet, for example, are said to be taken from a Tank Destroyer. The engine panels on the back of the Millennium Falcon, Fon Davis tells us, are the shovels from a bulldozer model. We may not recognize those parts for what they actually are, but they immediately give the craft and vehicles a sense of weight and presence, just like a real tank or a bulldozer.