Five years ago, LucasFilms opened an animation studio in Singapore that has been instrumental in the Star Wars: The Clone Wars animation tasks, including animation, visual effects, and video game production. But the production facility has always been housed in various places, rather than in a central location. LucasFilms is planning on rectifying that by building a whole new studio that will be able to accommodate all of the divisions of the production house, making room for 1000 or more employees.
But this would not really be big news if it weren’t for the design. Buildings are built every day, but not like this. If you remember back to Star Wars Episode I: A New Hope with the scene with the Jawas, they travelled in a rather huge looking vehicle that looked a cross between a junk yard crusher and a tank. They called it a sandcrawler. Well now LucasFilm has taken that design and created a building blueprint for their new facility. The building will be the shape of the crawler, but instead of rusty metal, the building exterior will be made of a ton of glass windows.
The complex should make it easier for the integration of the various departments of the studio and make production quicker. It is rumored that they are currently working on a huge project that will be announced at some point. It’s said that the project has to do with faeries, perhaps taking a cue from Disney, but that’s just a guess and hasn’t been confirmed.
Work is currently being done on the building, which Lucas hopes to open in 2012.
