I’ve taken on a side project lately. A year or more ago I came across a website that sold official recreations of Star Wars props. Among sets of Stormtrooper armor and more, a helmets caught my eye, in particular a plain rebel X-wing pilot helmet with a few sheets of decals for the owner to apply as they wished.
Now look, I love the pilot helmets and the customizations on each one. Luke’s helmet is iconic, the big grey-green blocks of Wedge’s are starkly cool, and I love how Garven Dreis’ is so different. But one of the fun parts of Star Wars is that it’s such a big world — and in my mind the fun of getting a rebel helmet would be to be able to customize it. Make it my helmet.
Hence, the blank helmet.
Anyway, when pining after it again I saw that it was on sale and did the thing that childless millennials with disposable income do and bought the damn thing.
And so has begun a deep dive into how to paint and weather props and cosplay. There’s a wealth of resources out there, from the 501st and other Star Wars costuming groups to forums on making custom Spartan armor from Halo. It’s a reminder of the good internet, of folks who make stuff showing others how to make stuff too. It’s the way I learnt to make gif animations, to make flash videos, to do CGI modeling. It brings me such joy to find websites and forums with this information out there. Plus it’s all readable instructions, not a video I have to scrub through when I’m trying to reference back to something I half remember.
As I’ve continued down the rabbit hole of how to paint and weather this helmet, I’ve naturally also been thinking about how I want it to look. So I’ve grabbed references from the movies and even swung by my local library to borrow the Visual Guide to Rogue One that has a gallery of pilot helmets for the movie. I wanted a way to visualize and try out a design, to test paint schemes and sticker placement. Some googling told me that Disney had put out a helmet customizer in the lead up to Rogue One, but it is now defunct. Alas for the etherealness of internet marketing campaigns.
Undeterred, I had an idea. Surely someone has a 3D model of an X-wing pilot helmet out there. I could bring it into Blender and apply my own textures and decals to it. Indeed there are and so over the course of a few days I learned to retexture a model and apply decals to it. I measured the real-world helmet and decals to get the so the model would be a good approximation of the real thing, even if some of the model’s details weren’t quite right. Then, resuscitating an old passion for VFX, I had the idea to try and superimpose the CGI helmet on my head. So I took a picture of myself in the helmet, got the color temperature of the light, and even held spray-painted swatches next to my head in a second photo to get the color matching right.
I am definitely doing a lot more prep and pre-vis than I need to, something that I admitted to a dear friend of mine while talking about my project. But here’s the other thing: I’m having fun doing all these extra things. Learning to sand and spray paint and weather, doing CGI mockups, simulating real-world lighting to color match. It’s all fun. Is it the most effective, ‘optimized,’ way to do this? Absolutely not; I’m pushing the old adage of measuring twice well past its breaking point.
I hate that the capitalist need for everything to be ‘productive’ has so deeply wormed its way into my psyche that I chide myself for putting so much effort into this side project that I’m doing for no other reason than that I want to. Trying something new, something without any ‘practical’ applications feels almost taboo. But it’s fun to try something I’m not good at, it’s fun to push myself to learn something new. There is no true ‘point’ to this project, certainly not in that way that society pressures me to make use of every living moment. It is, without question, a silly little side quest. But then, those silly little side quests are the point of life, they are where we find those pockets of joy that truly make life worth living. Throwing myself into something like this feels almost rebellious in a day and age where a machine summarizing your loved ones’ text messages so you don’t have to read them all is advertised as a way to get more done. So yes, I am putting way more effort into this that I need to — and what of it? I’m having fun.
Essays, Not Rants! 