Every once in awhile, you work your ass off on a project that ultimately never sees the light of day. This was one of them, and it still bothers me a little bit.
My friend Don Bies from White Room Artifacts – and former Senior Archivist of the Lucasfilm Archives – called me about doing a museum proposal for a new touring Star Wars exhibit. If you’ve seen his site, and the amazing work he and his team have been doing for NASA, and you consider that many of the original crew who actually worked on the models for Star Wars would’ve been a part of it, you start to get a sense for how amazing it might’ve been, had it been. The exhibit never happened, though. Nonetheless, we had fun working on the proposal.
The exhibit was to be called Creating Star Wars: A Cinematic Revolution. Our idea was to illustrate the entire process of film production – from concept to marketing, realized in separate “chapters”; one chapter per gallery of the exhibit. Don had come up with a cool modular layout which could be reconfigured to fit in virtually any exhibit space.
And while he was working on the practical side of things like integration, I went to work trying to come with a logo for the space, which would ultimately define the signage and color/material palette for what we wanted to do. I went through several iterations…
Of course, anytime I’m working on an official Star-Wars-related thing, I tend to have a lot of angst about really doing it justice, which actually works against creativity. It makes it hard to trust those first, often best, instincts.
Eventually I settled on a design which had a lot of flexibility to it, and most importantly, which everyone liked.
In our presentation of the separate Chapters/Galleries, I did a different title page for each section, mirroring the feel of each stage of production.
We did renderings of each of the galleries, and even had a cool idea for the look of the Visitor’s Map Stand which guided people through the exhibit (and which true fans will recognize!):
Ultimately, we printed up beautiful bound books, and presented them in these cool aluminum-hinged cases with the logo etched onto the front:
Ah, well. The Force was not with us, this time. But it was a great reminder that weeks or months of your life may be spent on a project which will not culminate in a World Premiere, so you’d better enjoy the time you spend on it, and make sure you’re proud of what you did!
We did, and we are. We’ll get ’em next time.