The idea to build a large scale section model of the interior and exterior landing bay of the Star Destroyer came about when I was planning out which twelve final widescreen pictures I wanted to end up taking of the Star Destroyer model. I had always wished that the Star Wars trilogy had included some nice panning shots of ships interacting with the landing bays of a Star Destroyer, but they never showed any. I decided that I wanted to show some ships interacting with this very interesting part of the ship.
The problem with this idea is that the landing bay on my 6' model will only be about seven inches long and five and a half inches wide. And since the camera will have to get very close to the model to get a close-up shot, this distance simply won't provide my camera with enough room to hold the focus. Plus, outside of using a mirror, it will simply be impossible to get the camera up into the exterior landing bay in order to shoot directly into the interior landing bay. One solution to this problem is to build a large scale section model of just that part of the ship. This will allow me to get the camera into the various nooks and crannies of the exterior landing bay, and I can even shoot from within the interior landing bay looking back out into space.
The first thing that I had to do was decide on what size I wanted to model to be. After some thought, I decided that a model of the landing bays that was 16 times as large as the 6' model's landing bays would suffice. This meant that the model would need to be 4'-6" long, 22" wide and 5" tall. Below is a picture of the completed prototype model with a foot scale below it to help give you some perspective.
I officially started building the prototype model on August 30, 1997, and I had the model completed on November 22, 1997. The model took me about 120 hours to build, and it cost me about $100 in raw materials. The model is made up of dual-ply cardboard, architectural foam board, picture frame matte board, and about four bottles of wood glue. The model was lit by just focusing two transparency projectors onto the outside of the external bay and one light on the top of the model to illuminate the interior landing bay's ceiling lights.
As soon as the model was completed I scheduled myself some "studio" time to shoot the model. I shot the model on November 23rd and the 27th in a kitchen at work. I then spent the next couple of weeks scanning negatives and doing the image processing to produce the resulting composite images that now appear on the Finished Widescreen Format Effects Photos web page. I ended up using the large scale landing bay model completely by itself in two of the twelve final widescreen photos, and I composited the landing bay prototype with the full size prototype Star Destroyer model in three other photos appearing on that web page. The model currently hangs in my office at work. Below is a photo of me with the final prototype model on the first day of shooting.
