Three years ago at Star Wars Celebration in Anaheim, California, fan attendees and special guests alike were delighted by a particular droid. RX-91L – known affectionately as “Gil” – appeared at first to be a standard RX droid, known to many fans as the original pilots in the Star Tours attraction at the Disney Parks. But Gil wasn’t a pilot, at least not anymore. He had a new job.
Rolling onto the Celebration LIVE! Stage, the RX droid had a camera mounted on his right arm, allowing him to capture his own point-of-view for those watching over the livestream. Speaking with a characteristic high-pitched voice, he greeted fans as a member of the crew. Gil was in fact a camera droid who is (quite appropriately) a little shaky at his new job, a common RX droid trait. And soon Gil will return to the LIVE! Stage at Star Wars Celebration Japan.
Created specifically for Celebration by a dedicated crew of droid builders, Gil has since appeared at multiple conventions around the world. But there was a tense moment just days before his Celebration Anaheim debut when Gil had yet to move one servo-assisted inch. Luckily for the droid, and for the fans, nothing was going to stop Gil's moment in the spotlight.
First Steps
The first iteration of Gil came together quickly over some three and a half months before Celebration Anaheim in May 2022. Lucasfilm had originated the idea for a camera droid, named in honor of the first real-world Star Wars camera operator, Gilbert Taylor. The late British cinematographer had shot Star Wars: A New Hope (1977). With the cleverly-devised “91L” suffix to imply the nickname, “Gil,” Lucasfilm then sought out members of the international droid builder community of fans to help bring the concept to reality.
Based within driving distance of each other in Virginia and North Carolina, respectively, David Ferreira and Chris Stroud had just completed a batch of RX droids for use in the production of The Book of Boba Fett (2021-22), working alongside fellow droid builders Michael McMaster and Gordon Tarpley. McMaster recommended the pair for the Celebration project. An engineer and machinist, Ferreira had been involved in robotics work of varying kinds for nearly 30 years. A software developer, Stroud was a relative newcomer, inspired to build droids by his first glimpse of BB-8 rolling onstage at an earlier Celebration.
At the time, RX fans had recently enjoyed the debut of DJ-R3X at Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge at the Disney Parks. This distinctive DJ droid was “our closest reference for Gil,” as Stroud tells StarWars.com. “It’s heavily inspired by that droid, but Gil is also a different character, so how much do we replicate and how much do we change?”
Before they’d been approached about the Gil project, Ferreira had been collaborating with Patrick Gray, a Georgia-based droid builder, on their own DJ-R3X. The basic design elements of this model would be adapted into Gil, but from there all sorts of new variations would be added, not least of which was his camera, inspired in part by the Republic Senate camera droid first seen in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999). “Lucasfilm really gave us [go ahead] to play with the coloring and add different features,” explains Ferreira. “For example, there’s the aperture on his visor. What’s great about these pilot droids is that they have so many different hats or visors they can wear, so it allows us to play into the character and their role. The mannerisms play off of the character. Gil moves differently from DJ-R3X or RX-24 from Star Tours.”
Team-Building & Droid-Building
Back in 2017, Gray had first been inspired to create a mouse droid after seeing one at Celebration in Orlando. Teaching himself 3D-modeling, he rapidly expanded his capabilities, and would assist with Gil’s new design. It was personal for him, as he’d started his career in broadcast television as a camera operator himself.
“The camera was a lot of fun in terms of how it needed to fit,” Gray comments. “Originally, it was going to be a GoPro, so we designed something around that. For the side components, we threw in elements from the data parts that you see across Galaxy’s Edge. At a later stage, they had to change the type of camera to a certain kind of drone camera. We adjusted the housing to fit those and built mounts to fit the units inside. The live video guys could patch the signal directly into the truck.”
With a very short timeline to finish the original version of Gil, Ferreira, Stroud, and Gray quickly recruited other members of the droid-building community to assist. Working from his home in Canada, electronics designer Trevor Zaharichuk made customized boards to provide Gil with an elaborate system of lights. Tim Bolt 3D-printed components and donated his space to paint the droid. Matthew Hammer also provided help with 3D-printing, and both he and Bolt contributed early funds to the project. Using computer-aided design software, commonly known as CAD, Psy DeLacy also created digital models to help refine some of Gil’s head movements, noting that “there’s definitely a jump between what you can do digitally vs physically, but our team is awesome at working together to come up with ideas and solutions that let us really bring the droids to life.”
In tandem, Stroud developed the main software to inform the droid’s overall movements. “I asked questions such as, ‘What is the character?’ So, as we build the puppeteering scheme, we know how it needs to behave. ‘What needs to be specific for this character as a camera operator? How do we make it easy to move, but make the movements natural?’ We had a lot of discussions about that. It was fun because it made us all think about it more. For example, it’s not a traditional camera gimbal, it’s on an armature, so how do we pull that off in a way that makes sense? There was a lot to figure out. Gil has about 13 motors, which is much more than BB-8 has. It was a different order of magnitude. Figuring out how to make all of that work together was nuts, but it’s all in service of the character.”
The Anaheim Debut
“Right up until a couple days before Celebration Anaheim, Gil still hadn’t moved yet,” recalls Stroud. “In those last 48 hours, the final pieces came together and he started working. It was pretty cool and a lot of that original stuff holds up.”
Gil spent his first day of Celebration behind the scenes at the Celebration LIVE! Stage, entertaining the crew and special guests, including Hayden Christensen, who, like Gil, was making his first appearance at the convention that year. “He was really interested in Gil,” Ferreira recalls about the Anakin Skywalker actor. “He walked up and had a moment with him, and he asked us all sorts of questions about him. It was very humbling to have that happen. It was really special to see him be a fan and take an interest in something like that.”
On the LIVE! Stage, Gil would be operated by two people in unison, often Ferreira and Gray. “Dave would drive him and I’d focus on the movement of the arms and head,” notes Gray. “The camera is on his lower arm, so I made sure it was working as it should be. Having worked with robotic cameras before in my career, I was able to incorporate that.”
In between stage appearances (including a memorable interaction with C-3PO actor Anthony Daniels), Gil delighted fans of all ages across the show floor, sporting “a wicked sound system,” according to Ferreira, that played music from Oga’s Cantina. Among the attendees to meet Gil were Disney Imagineers Chris Runco and Sonny Nguyen, who created the original RX-24 and DJ-R3X, respectively, for the Disney Parks. “We had been keeping him a secret the whole time,” says Ferreira. “So to be able to share him with everyone was so much fun. Wherever Gil was, it was a rolling dance party.”
Finding a Voice in London
Though Anaheim was a success, the droid builders planned multiple enhancements to Gil for the next year’s Celebration overseas at Star Wars Celebration Europe 2023 in London . “I think we all hit our stride in London where we brought everything that we wanted to the table — the motion, voice, and character,” notes Ferreira.
To perform Gil’s voice, the operator would speak directly into a microphone, which then translated their own voice into the appropriate tenor and style for the droid. “We also added lighting for the mouth to allow for better interaction and more expressability,” notes Zaharichuk, an element first achieved for the RX droids seen in The Book of Boba Fett. Gil took the integration of functions to the next level.
Stroud and Zaharichuk devised a system by which the droid’s voice automatically triggers complementary movements in the character’s head and blinking lights in his mouth. “We’re not aware of anyone else using this kind of technology,” Stroud explains. “It’s all custom-built, and it came off much better than I think even all of us were expecting. I spent a couple of days trying to make the mouth movement look correct, and I ended up making an error in the math by accident, and it just happened to give this nice glow. I haven’t touched it since,” he says with a laugh.
“It’s doing a real-time analysis of the voice,” Stroud continues. “As someone speaks, it’s reading the microphone input directly and splitting it into each frequency band. When you look at an equalizer on your computer, you see lots of different bars going up and down. It’s analyzing those and using them as inputs into the machine instead of the joystick input. So, as you speak, this animation follows along with his voice without the operator having to both speak and operate the movements at the same time. You’re getting a lot of movement for free, which frees up the operator. It was kind of a moon shot, but it worked out great.”
New Country, New Camera
Looking ahead to this year’s Celebration in Tokyo, Gray has led the effort to refine Gil’s camera to be in line with his Super 8-inspired vision for the design. “Initially when we created Gil, I was never fully pleased with the way the camera looked,” he says. “I wanted it to look more like a Super 8 camera, just because of the general time period. Whenever Star Wars uses real-world greeblies, they often come from items in the 1970s or early 80s. I also had the idea to incorporate the data disk that Leia gives to R2-D2, sort of inspired by the SD cards or other discs that go into cameras. It’s a little Easter egg.”
To allow for improved interactions with a large audience, the builders hope to improve Gil’s full integration with the audio system on the LIVE! Stage. For those performances, they operate in what Ferreira calls “two-player mode,” where one takes control of the camera arm and the other positions the entire droid body.
“The interesting part about the RX droids compared to the astromechs is that they have a lot more ability to interact with people because they can speak,” notes Zaharichuk. “It’s a real-time character that can respond to people. It’s not just a show playing on a stage. People are having real interactions.”
Ferreira adds that each person brings their own personality to the droid performance. “When I voice him, he’s very sassy, has a short attention span, and he treats everyone like they're 10 years old. It’s quirky and innocent. He always asks people, ‘What’s your favorite color?’ We use Star Tours lines like ‘Hi there!’ or we use ‘Lightspeed!’ for photo-ups. The character is in a galaxy far, far away, so we maintain as much integrity as we can when we perform.”
A Community Effort
The more than three years of work dedicated to RX-91L has been a distinctive undertaking in the droid-building community. Whereas some builders are often working in relative isolation, Gil required an international collaboration with thousands of miles of distance between certain crew members. “It’s very rare to have such a diverse group of people as we have here spread across different places,” says Ferreira. “We all have the same passion and we’re pushing the boundaries to create these immersive experiences.”
“Others might build something like an R2 that has 20 years of knowledge that you can learn from,” comments Zaharichuk. “The droids we’re building haven’t existed before. We’re building them from the ground up. There are no kits.” And Stroud concludes that “for us, it’s natural that we need each other to see projects through, so it makes sense to work together and bring in people who are experts in different areas. We’ve built strong friendships and bonds as a result of how closely we work together.”
Don’t miss RX-91L’s next appearance at Star Wars Celebration Japan, April 18-20, 2025, at the Makuhari Messe in Japan. Whether you’re attending in person or watching online, Gil will be on hand to say “Hi there!” to all of his friends.
