Project: Wookiee battle shield (part 1)

While (yet again) leafing through the Complete Visual Dictionary, looking at artifacts, I happened upon a particularly fascinating example. I was attracted to its vaguely Polynesian(?) design—kinda like a giant pouwhenua—as well as the stylized tiki-style iconography. I actually vaguely remember seeing the prop in person at Celebration 3 back in 2005(!), and being pretty impressed. As I’ve been building up my woodcarving skillset over the years, I thought it might be time for some large-scale work—and what’s larger scale than an heirloom Wookiee shield from the Battle of Kachirho?:

But a question was quickly raised—how large was it? The Visual Dictionary has a great straight-on image, but frustratingly, there’s nothing for scale.
Remembering the LucasFilm Archives exhibit from 2005, I dug out and stitched a few pictures together.

After some close scrutinizing and rudimentary trigonometry I decided that the shield looked to be roughly as tall as the Chewbacca costume—and Peter Mayhew is (according to wikipedia) ~7 feet 3 inches. If that’s the case, then the Wookiee most clearly seen holding a shield in Episode III must be an absolute runt:

In fact, if we assume the shield prop is 7.5′ and do a little cross-multiplication, then he’s actually a bit less than 6′! (I think our vertically-challenged Wookiee is a result of Lucas putting a regular-size person in a costume and having him hold a prop scaled for a seven-foot character.)
On the other hand, if we assume that the fellow with the shield is meant to be a regular size (7’+) Wookiee, then the shield is almost nine feet tall!

(I ran into similar issues when I was building my GS-221 (the M60-based machinegun from Cameron’s AVATAR) back in 2010. Functional props were built by Weta to human scale, which were then carried by actors doing Na’vi mo-cap, which when put into the computer made the gun a little larger than usual. Suffice to say that scaling gets a bit wonky when filmmaking gets digital.)

While it would be awesome to have a massive Wookiee-scaled shield, I thought I should stick with copying the real-world artifact from the exhibit, which is quite more manageable!

The first step was to adjust the image from the Visual Dictionary to make it more simplified and easier to see what needed to be carved. I traced over the carvings in MSPaint (no school like the old school), then tweaked the brightness and contrast to make the lines easier to see.
I then plugged the image into an overhead projector, and traced it onto a piece of bulletin board paper.

Scaling any artifact always takes some trial and error, and this was no exception. The first time I projected and traced, I somehow wound up with a gigantic eleven-foot monster (seen below in yellow). The second time, I scaled based on a 7.5’ Wookiee – giving a 9’4” shield (seen below in blue). It reached all the way to my ceiling, but still looked…off. That’s when I noticed my projector could project in different aspect ratios…and all of my graphics work had been done on a 16:9 widescreen laptop. I adjusted the scale to fit the approximate size of the archive artifact (7.5’) and made sure the projector was in 16:9 mode. This time, I got a much more reasonable tracing (white below)

The next step will be to figure out how to actually make the blasted thing. Based on examination of the print image and the few seconds such shields appear onscreen, I deduced that they were not—as I had initially assumed—all carved wood, but a combination of wood and tooled leather panels. Someone on the Rebel Legion’s Wookiee forum claimed that the original prop was sculpted in clay and then cast and only painted to look wooden… but woodwork has always seemed a major component of Wookiee culture, and I like to do things accurate to the culture depicted.

“The Wookiee language contains over 150 words for wood, many of them devoted to grain, moisture content, and factors that can influence warping, twisting, and checking. Shipboard logs cite instances of Wookiees effecting temporary repairs of starship drives using pieces of wood. Commentators have classified even their blasters as “art,” and yet the language has no word for “artist.” Wookiees view their innate talents for carving and engraving as mere survival skills.” (SW Complete Visual Dictionary, p. 180)

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