Engineers to the Film and Entertainment Industries

 Norank Eng Co Ltd were the resident studio engineers at Elstree Film Studios throughout the 1970's. 80's and 90's. They worked on over 120 movies including all three original Star Wars, Indiana Jones, The Shining, Flash Gordon, Return To Oz, Superman, Bond and many more. A full filmography will be published soon. This site is under construction as a tribute to the work Norank carried out, and is owned by Norman Harrison who was the MD until he took the company public as Norank PLC. All pictures and content are the property of Norman Harrison, please do not use without permission.

here are some photos whilst the site is being built.


Although our overseas friends sometimes forget, all the best bits of Star Wars were British made. Sometimes when you read the archive books, Elstree is hardly mentioned. But we made R2-D2, C-3PO, the landspeeder, the X-wings, Y-Wings, Millenium Falcon and of course the lightsabers here in our workshop! Above are Malcolm Page, Geoff Burnstein and Harry Hankin adding the finishing touches to John Stears working R2 in Norank's workshop. His workshop was next door, but much smaller, we had all the lathes, mills, welding kit and expertise for all the metalwork.

All the costumes were made here in Elstree, Yoda is English thanks to Stuart and Frank, and of course big Dave made Darth Vader his own. Kenny brought the hollow R2 to life, Anthony Daniels was C-3PO and John Stears was the ONLY person to win an Oscar. Ok, it was George Lucas's creation, but we gave it life and personality which is missing from all the CGI stuff that followed. 

C-3PO's original aluminium arms all hand-built by Norank. This picture shows the sets for the second movie Star Wars Episode V The Empire Strikes back. The original arm from the first film is in the foreground. We only built one set for the original costume for the first movie and had to keep hand forming them as Anthony was complaining they pinched. Once he got to the desert and started shedding weight, they were perfect. However, we built them to actually swivel and straighten as you can see, the sand soon stopped that. Of course we managed to free it up!