Timeline of Ainsworth’s changing historyTwo articles that were set up as links on Ainsworth’s SDS website under
‘Frequently Asked Questions’
2005 Article featured in Model and Collectors Mart – February 2005 (Talking about his involvement in Star Wars)
I took on the work to subsidise the work on my cars which took a lot of money. I used to give friends of mine a hand to paint scenery and one of them was a friend of John Mollo (costume designer on Star Wars). John asked him if he could make something 3 dimensional which he didn’t know how to do , but he knew a man who could…. and I’m the man who could!
He brought over some images and colour plates from John Mollo and said ‘Can you make this?’. So I knocked him up something very quickly. I thought it was for his kids or something. It was a fairly early effort and I knocked out about half a dozen Stormtrooper helmets. My friend then said ‘Well actually they’re not for me. They’re for a film for John Mollo. Here’s the contact if anything comes of it just buy me a drink. He certainly got that drink.
I think what happened next was that George Lucas took them back to America. Got the film funded. Came back and said, ‘We like that. We’ll have a lot more!’ John Mollo then got in touch with us directly and realised we could produce anything in any format overnight and away we went.
Feature – Collectible Stormtrooper Helmets Rebelscum.com: Rebelscum Home Page At the beginning of January in 1976 Mollo approached Shepperton Design Studios with a vague brief – to produce a plastic helmet – and a copy of one of McQuarrie’s final proofs. Working from scratch Ainsworth built a clay sculpt of the helmet, broke it up into castable parts and pulled sheets of heated acrrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS) plastic using a vacuum pump. The completed helmet was rushed to John Mollo who passed it to Lucas. So pleased with the job, Lucas requested that Mollo ordered 62 helmets and the body armour suits (56 stunt Stormtroopers and 6 hero Stormtroopers to go with them.
2007 Ainsworth’s final statement for court case
52. Nick said that a customer of his had asked him to produce a helmet as a prop for an actor to wear. Nick said that his customer had given him 2 pictures to guide him and he showed me the helmet made out of clay which he said he had produced.
69. My recollection is that I had an accident with Nick’s helmet early on in which the helmet was destroyed. It was the result of the rush involved in producing the helmets.
71. I had spent a lot of time thinking about how I would make the helmet. I could have made it in lots of different ways. I did not have to do it by vacuum-forming sheets of ABS material. I could have cast it in polyurethane or resins or rotationally moulded it, or slush moulded it, but these methods would have required more expensive and time consuming techniques. I decided to knock up some tools using the method taught by the foundry in order to produce a vacuum-formed helmet.
(If he had ‘destroyed ‘ the clay helmet as he says then why was he supposedly contemplating any sort of moulding?)
2010 Ainsworth’s new website Original Stormtrooper: genuine, authentic, quality
Nick was approached by the Star Wars 'buyer' to make various helmets and ancillary items for the film. As Nick recalls, 'the film was just another no hoper'; he was also very busy at the time on a large puppetry job for Tyne Tees television in Newcastle.
Nevertheless he took the job on, with the intention of convincing Andrew to produce the characters as Nick was impressed with the plastic moulding techniques that Andrew was developing, just a couple of doors away (see image below).
Nick's diary states that at first, he only had contact with George Lucas, as at that early stage, there really wasn't anyone else - John Mollo (ANH Costume Designer) had not been employed at that stage - and in any event Mollo`s remit did not include the Stormtrooper
(John Mollo and John Barry both started on the film on 15th December 1975 and Pemberton wasn’t contacted until January 6th 1976)

In 1976, Andrew Ainsworth and his friend Nick Pemberton were living in Twickenham, London. Nick, a successful scenic artist, had been given the go ahead by George Lucas to produce the Stormtrooper helmets for ANH. Now it was down to Andrew to create the helmet prototype.
"I made no sketches, no models, no engineering drawings.I sculpted the production moulds directly, using my own blends of resins, fillers and metal dusts. The production moulds were the sculptures - they were positives,negatives and reverse engineered. They incorporated undercuts and tumblehomes and produced a moulded finished article that caught the highlights and shadows of an organically formed being. It wrapped around the body as if it had grown." Andrew Ainsworth describing his approach to sculpting the Stormtrooper helmet mould in 1976.
Andrew's task was to take his friend Nick's clay model and Ralph McQuarrie's concept drawings and sculpt the moulds which would form the iconic white plastic helmets worn by the Stormtroopers in ANH. Andrew recalls "The concept drawings from Ralph McQuarrie suggested that the Stormtrooper was a futuristic being that had evolved through continuous genetic modification, and perhaps able to operate in adverse pungent climatic conditions. The helmet would therefore be able to filter noxious gases and the armour be so flexible that it could have actually grown on the character that way - much the same as an armadillo has natural armour."
It was obvious to Andrew that no joins or fabricated parts should be seen, the character should be homogeneous and so the head must flow into the body and be undercut to disguise any suggestion of an actor inside the costume. The surface of the character was to be hard and protective, but flexible with a smooth, slick finish. The drawing suggested a silver, metallic look. Producing a prototype with all these features would be a challenge, given the non-paying, speculative nature of the job.