- Based on his memoir Cinema Alchemist, Galaxy Built on Hope recounts how Roger Christian created the used universe for the first Star Wars ; A New Hope Hope with Production Designer John Barry. Never before stories about he made Lukes light saber and R2D2 and all the props, weapons and sets, and how John Barry chose Tunisia to as the location for Lukes planet Tatooine and designed the sets and the Death Star.
- Today Star Wars is a massive global franchise, but once upon a time it was a fragile experiment in the hands of a few cinema revolutionaries. How did these pioneers create the look of a grand space fantasy epic on a small budget with no precedent to guide them?
For the original Star Wars film in 1977, Set Decorator and prop maker Roger Christian created a totally new look in sci-fi film by using found objects to give George Lucas' fantasy worlds a feeling of authenticity.
Christian dressed the Star Wars sets with airplane scrap and modified WWII guns to create menacing, realistic sci-fi weapons. He built the prop for Luke Skywalker's lightsaber out of vintage camera parts, creating a true cinema icon that has endured across four decades of the Star Wars saga. Christian's radically innovative approach won him an Oscar-and transformed the look of sci-fi cinema forever.
The story behind Roger Christian's realization of the Star Wars "used universe" has been a great missing chapter in the history of the Star Wars saga-until now. Christian's new feature-length documentary Galaxy Built on Hope gives us all the details in Roger's own words, a feast of exciting new stories for fans and film historians alike.
For featured interviews Christian and editor Daryl Davis used digital compositing to bring together on screen people who never saw each other in real life. Elements shot in different locations, even in different countries, are combined to give the appearance of conversations that never actually happened.
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