The Official Star Wars Site has information on some Episode III locations that we can expect to see. Though it is still early in Episode III's development, deadlines are looming ever closer as this summer's start date for principal photography begins to draw near. George Lucas is still assembling the story, but Production Designer Gavin Bocquet and his team have already begun transforming stage-space at Fox Studios Australia into familiar otherworldly locales.

"We've been in Sydney for about four weeks now, and the department is about fifty percent up and running in terms of personnel," says Bocquet. He currently heads a team of about 35 workers, and departments like construction, props, special effects and plaster are beginning to form. To meet the schedule, his team has tackled the returning environments first rather than the brand new locales, which are still being developed.

"We do have four or five sets that are being repeated from Clones and a couple of the other Episodes, which gives us a chance to work quite quickly on those. They don't need any great design input or even technical drawings, because they have existed before," he says.

In addition to the Jedi Council chambers, the Senate Rotunda and Palpatine's office, two environments from the original trilogy are being carefully recreated for this earlier era in Star Wars history, much like the Lars Homestead was faithfully reconstructed for Episode II.

"It's always quite interesting going back to those historic elements of the saga," says Bocquet. "I think these ones are a little bit easier than the homestead, because they're studio-based and not location-based. They have quite precise drawings that we managed to extricate from the archives, although the archive isn't quite as full for A New Hope as it is for Empire and Jedi, simply because nobody knew what the films were going to become! We're working from the few drawings they do have, plus the stills and looking at the films, and breaking things down and trying to reproduce it."

While there is a sense of nostalgia in recreating environments from the original trilogy, for one of the sets it's particularly personal for Bocquet. "It's quite interesting for me, because I was on Jedi years ago, as a draftsman. So, occasionally some of these drawings that come through are actually mine! All the Art Department suddenly scours around my drawings to see how good they were at that age, but I do stress to them that I was only a junior at that point."

Aside from these two classic environments, Bocquet's team has begun preliminary work on two new locales -- one space-based and one planet-based -- that will each be the stage for intricate action sequences. "We know from a set-building point of view that will be a fair amount of building for us. In fact, Dan Gregoire, Erik Tiemens, Ryan Church and Ben Burtt are working up the animatics for those action sequences, because we need that information to suggest what and how much we should build."