Charles Apple

I wrote extensively on Monday about my latest free-lance project: A series of full-page infographics on the science demonstrated by — or, in some cases, not demonstrated by — the Star Wars movies.

The graphics ran this week in the Times of Huntsville, Ala., as a walk-up to the opening of a big Star Wars science exhibit at the NASA center there. Editor Kevin Wendt and design director Paul Wallen engaged me to research, write and design the graphics, with the aid of Times staff writers Lee Roop and Kenneth Kesnet, who interviewed NASA scientists and other Huntsville-area technological brains. The quotes they brought back formed the meat of our graphic centerpiece each day.

And I was only only too glad to be a part of this project. Because it’s Star Wars, y’know? And real, live NASA scientists. And really cool people like Kevin and Lee and Kenneth and Paul Wallen.

How often does a project like this come along? Exactly.

I’ve posted these first two before. But here they are again, for completeness’ sake.

The first graphic ran Sunday. The main topic was lightsabers and the secondary topic was levitating vehicles, such as Anakin’s podracer (Click any of these for a much larger view):

The sidebar on the right recapped one movie each day. This one, naturally, recapped Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

The second one ran Monday. The main topic was robotics; the secondary topic was cloning. And, of course, the sidebar recapped Episode II: Attack of the Clones:

Tuesday was Day Three. The topic: Blasters. The Lucasfilm archives was a bit short on blaster art from Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, so I had to resort to the best photo I could find:

Yes, that’s Princess Lei from Episode V. I tried tying it all in with a smaller, secondary shot of the big space battle from the beginning of Episode III. Of course, my sidebar photos on the right are from Episode III.

In particular, I enjoyed working up the sidebar on the cybernetic replacements Darth Vader finds himself with in the closing moments of the film:

On Wednesday, we hit Day Four — the day of our recap of the original Star Wars movie from 1977. I managed to use only photos from that movie — truly, one of the best movies ever made:

My main topic for the day was those cute little dogfighting spaceships. How can they be swooping around in space if there is no air in space? And the answer, of course, is: They can’t.

I wrote brief pieces on holographic projection and binary star systems for the left-side sidebar.

For Day Five, I found myself short on photos, once again. For our mainbar on faster-than-light travel, I wanted lead art of Han Solo’s ship, the Millennium Falcon – which, you’ll remember from Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, they spend the entire movie trying to get the ship’s faster-than-light engines working.

But there was nothing in the Lucasfilm archives I could use. Nothing at all. So I went scrounging around the web, hunting for JPGs that a) were large enough to run as lead art without pixellating, and b) included original Lucasfilm images — so I wouldn’t be infringing upon anyone’s copyright.

First, the result. Here’s Thursday’s graphic:

And here’s the source of that lead art:

Yep: A vintage model kit box top that someone had scanned and posted in an insanely high resolution.

If you get the time, zoom in on that one and read the explanation of how “hyperspace drive” might work. That’s all pieced together using quotes from a Huntsville-based NASA scientist, other tidbits I found elsewhere (and attributed, of course) and a cool demonstration using a piece of paper.

I spent a lot of time on Thursday’s sidebar, a comparison of sizes of spacecraft in the Star Wars universe. The grey rocket at the top is the Saturn V, developed there in Huntsville in the 1960s to put Apollo spacecraft on the moon.

And finally, here is today’s graphic:

The primary topic was artificial gravity, which I thought went well with a scrounged picture of the under-construction-Death Star from Episode VI.

But let’s be honest. All my male readers don’t give a crap about the Death Star or artificial gravity, do you? No, you saw slave girl Leia standing there and your mind went blank.

So here’s the entire sidebar that I wrote:

The fine folks at the Times posted online versions of each of my Star Wars graphics.

Day One: Sunday
Day Two: Monday
Day Three: Tuesday
Day Four: Wednesday
Day Five: Thursday
Day Six: Today

In addition, they also posted PDF versions, just in case you’d like to get a much, much larger view. Of Carrie Fisher.

Sunday: Lightsabers Levitating vehicles. Episode I.
Monday: Robotics. Cloning.
Tuesday: Blasters. Cybernetic replacement body parts
Wednesday: Aerodynamics (or lack thereof). Holograms. Binary suns.
Thursday: Faster-than-light travel. Comparative sizes.
Today: Artificial gravity. Carrie Fisher’s skimpy costume.

These graphics were but just one part of Kevin and Paul’s coverage of the science exhibit opening. Paul kept readers laughing with a series of humorous lead-up teasers (Find a bunch of them at the bottom of this post). Here’s one I left out the other day — it ran as Sunday’s features front:

Here was Tuesday’s front page:

On Wednesday, the skybox disappeared and the rail of character profiles moved inside while a story about Star Wars merchandising at the NASA center’s gift shop took over the centerpiece position on A1.

Paul really hit the ol’ funnybone with this one:

Thursday, the page one story was about the NASA museum employees. They’re dressing up as Jedi, evidently:

And today, the page-one story is about last night’s gala opening:

Read my previous Star Wars graphics post — in which I walked you through the research and conceptualization process — here.

Find all the Huntsville Times‘ Star Wars coverage — including my pieces, various stories and photos of the exhibit — here.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 25th, 2010 at 2:18 pm and is filed under Charles Apple, Free-lance, Graphics, Huntsville Times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.