The movies that Aaron McBride has worked on as a concept artist and designer or art director read like a list of the most popular releases of recent years.

The credits for McBride, who grew up in Ledyard, include: “The Avengers.” “Iron Man.” “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.” “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” The “Pirates of the Caribbean” series.

McBride is now senior art director at the iconic Industrial Light & Magic/Lucasfilm, where he has worked for 22 years. His most recent “Star Wars” projects have been two virtual reality pieces, “Tales from Galaxy’s Edge” and “Vader Immortal."

McBride is giving a Zoom presentation via The Bill Memorial Library on Saturday afternoon. He’ll talk about and provide visuals of his work at ILM/Lucasfilm.

After graduating from Pine Point School in Stonington and The Williams School in New London, McBride went on to major in illustration/animation at the Rhode Island School of Design. After earning his BFA there in 1996, he eventually started at ILM, interning for a summer and then becoming a production assistant before getting to do concept art.

Here are a few examples of what he has done in the past several years:

For “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” released in 2016, he worked on a lot of the early design for the droid K-2SO.

For “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” (2017), he was involved in designing some alien creatures, including the racehorses (more details on that follow).

For “Solo: A Star Wars Story” (2018), he helped develop a giant space monster — it resembles a giant jelly fish with tentacles that have electrical arcs sparking between them — that is in the Kessel Run sequence.

“Sometimes, you’re designing a character or creature from scratch; sometimes, you’re just designing a tail or teeth on an existing design,” he says.

McBride — who lives in San Francisco with his wife, Nancy, and their children Cillian, 12, and Riordan, 9 — spoke by phone earlier this week about “Star Wars” and beyond.

McBride’s first job as an art director was on the original “Pirates of the Caribbean” film — and inspiration for one of his creations came from an unlikely source:

“They were trying to come up with a look for the zombie pirates that was not gory and not bloody, and they wanted it to look real and not cartoony. My wife had packed me some turkey jerky for a train ride I took across country. I was looking at that stuff for, like, three days on this cross-country train ride. When I came back, they said, ‘They’re making a movie of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, and we need you to help out for two days on it.’ I was like OK, I’ll just experiment with taking photos of turkey jerky. I did that, and after two days, they liked where it was going. That was how I got my first gig as an art director. They kept me on for the rest of the movie, and then there were, like, four movies after that.”

One of his more recent responsibilities involved developing the look of the racehorses in the city of Canto Bight for “The Last Jedi”:

“I tried a lot of different versions. I tried mixing and matching different animals, like a rhino and a giraffe, and a whale and a swan — all these different combinations. The one that first struck a chord with the director (Rian Johnson) was a lion and a snow owl and a koala bear. I’ve noticed with other creatures I’ve seen people work on, sometimes when you combine a lot of different things successfully, it can look familiar but you can’t quite place it. I think a lot of times, you have to find that sweet spot in ‘Star Wars’ where you recognize parts of something, but they’re so lost in the mix that you can’t quite place where it’s from.

“So (the racehorse design) is a combination of a koala and lion and a barn owl, and then we pulled the ears out to be almost like fins on a race car or on a jet. The idea was that this animal can run so fast that it needs these rigid ears to act as like a rudder or a keel to kind of lock its head in and keep it steady as it’s going so fast. It became an emotional expression feature — when it wasn’t running and it was just in its stall, its ears would flop down like a lop-eared bunny.

“It was interesting to me — I was only involved in it in the beginning, doing some design work, and then when I started seeing it later on, it was hard to place where the animal was coming from. When they built the full-scale puppet of it … it almost looked like a goat —  in some instances, it looked like a lamb or a goat or a bunny. I thought, ‘Oh, that’s good because it doesn’t look like the things I started with.’ … That was kind of pleasing, where became its own thing.”

It's a team effort:

“Early on, a lot of people work on the same design to get a large sampling of different ideas. There have been times where I’ve contributed designs to things, and I’m one of 20 people contributing a couple of designs. And then one person kind of takes it to the end, to the finish line. ... For the horse, for example, I took it to the finish, but then it was ultimately built by a practical effects team over in London, where they were filming. They also did it digitally at ILM, so there was a digital version of it and a practical version of it for different shots.”

The importance of being a problem solver:

“Over the years, I’ve come to realize what any version of the job is: you just have to be a problem solver, whatever it is. People start to value you if you’re a problem solver ... Every project I work on is different, and every project has a unique set of challenges. So it’s just thinking creatively and being able to solve whatever problem comes up during the course of a production.”

The first time McBride watched the original “Star Wars” didn’t go well:

“I saw it was when I was 3 in the Mystic Village Cinema. I got really scared in the trash compactor scene (where the heroes are trapped in a giant trash compactor) — I got so scared, my dad had to take me out of the theater because I was so upset. Then, when he got me home, I really wanted to see how the movie ended, and so did he. My sister and my mom both got to see the whole movie … I begged him to take me back to see it, and the poor guy, he just wanted to see how it ended, too. And I still got upset at the trash compactor scene. I kept promising him that I’d be brave and I’d be able to sit through that scene. And I never could get through it. I think we went back maybe three or four times.”

(Aaron and his father finally saw the entire movie about five years later on VHS.)

He drew and did a DIY version of creature art design as a kid:

“I liked to draw, but I didn’t have a way to see if how I drew or the way I did art was valid to the process of making film. I knew I liked to draw, and I did it constantly. It was pretty much all I did in my free time. I think around 6th grade and 7th grade, my dad had a Super 8 camera, and I would play with G.I. Joe figures and ‘Star Wars’ figures, making little movies, setting up just how those scenes looked — you’re sort of trying to figure out art direction, how a set looks and how a character looks. I work as an art director quite a bit, but I specialize primarily in creature art direction and design. A lot of times growing up, I’d be augmenting or customizing action figures that I had; with an X-acto knife, (I'd be) shaving them down to look at certain way, or adding clay or putty or something to make them look differently.”

When McBride started at ILM, he worked with a lot of model makers who were part of the original “Star Wars”:

“They were so interesting because they just knew what worked because they had worked on so many films. You would say, ‘Oh, this is going to be a miniature beach set.’ They would say, ‘Well, we need to order this grain of sand from the hardware store, the landscaping store, because that grain of sand is the right scale for a 12-inch scale miniature beach set.’ They had all these techniques memorized.”

Event info

Who: Talk by Aaron McBride

When: 1 p.m. Saturday

Event for: The Bill Memorial Library

Cost: Free

Registration: Required

To reserve a space: Call the library at (860) 445-0392 to get info for logging into the secure Zoom meeting