Skerret wrote:

from the bottom of my heart, fuck you pal!

poprock wrote:

Yossarian wrote:

Phantom Menace came with a huge weight of expectation, though.

Is it time for my Star Wars story? It might be time for my Star Wars story. I hope I haven’t already told it around here.

In ’98 I took a break from art school and went to America to do an internship with a really cool design co-operative. Total dream gig. I got to work with local musicians and artists (like Miranda July and Quasi) as well as some amazing corporate clients like Nike, MTV, and Lucasfilm. Yes, Lucasfilm, in ’98. You can see where this is going.

One of the principal designers in the co-op had a secret project. He’d signed an NDA and wasn’t even allowed to tell us what he was working on, or who for. The project had a codename for filing purposes and that was it. But he just couldn’t keep it to himself. He started leaving bits and pieces around the studio ‘by accident’. A mocked-up letterhead design for George Lucas (featuring a shiny chrome spacecraft). A transparency of someone with a lightsaber against a greenscreen background. That sort of thing.

One evening, he sat a few of us down in the pub and spilled the beans. Said he was stuck and needed help. Working alone just wasn’t how we did things, and he needed the team. He admitted that he’d been to Skywalker Ranch and Lucas has shown him a rough cut of The Phantom Menace. His project was to design poster campaigns for the movie. Not THE movie poster, but the accompanying promo stuff. Posters you might see on bus shelters, billboards, as magazine ads, etc. He got a ton of beers in, told us the plot of the movie, and asked if we could all brainstorm for a couple of hours around the table and help him get a variety of ideas down, then back off and pretend we’d never worked on the project – he didn’t want to fuck things up by getting caught breaking the NDA.

You have to remember the context here. The whole world was excited about more Star Wars films. Nobody knew yet that it was going to be shit. Nobody. As Yoss said, the weight of expectation was huge.

I ended up scribbling a little boy with his shadow in the unmistakable shape of Darth Vader, with notes to the side that it should be in the desert, vaguely recognisable as the same place Skywalker was first seen in A New Hope, and as real a photo as possible, reportage style. Everyone around the table agreed it was cool, and nailed the plot in one go. It was torn out of my notebook and went on the pile of ‘maybes’.

I headed home to England a couple of weeks later and thought little more about it. But when the very first teaser posters arrived in UK cinemas, months later, there was my idea. And it became THE poster. It’s the one everyone remembers.

Shame the film was shit. Shame the following two were even more shit. Shame shame shame.

But fuck it, the Simpsons even parodied my poster concept. Career high point, right there. Doubt I’m ever going to top that.