the art of paper crafting comes in many forms from origami sculpture to wearable
cosplay and architectural miniatures but there's one enduring type of paper craft
that sometimes gets overlooked the art of pop-up book design we visited the
studio of Matthew Reinhart award-winning pop-up book designer and paper engineer
to learn how he part types engineers and illustrates characters and scenes that
jump out of the page including the delightful pop-up scenes in the new book
Star Wars the ultimate pop-up galaxy Matthew thank you so much for walking us
here this is this is your workshop yes this is it this is this is where the
magic happens I guess it's just a you know messy desk and messy a little
office and you know I just cut in fold paper and turn it into into this I mean
really is a magical process pop-up books or things that we all grew up with and
not a lot of us think about the engineering really that goes into it so
I'd love to see if you can walk me through one of the spreads in this book
course its new Star Wars ultimate pop-up galaxy book there's so many different
pop-up what do you call them are they dioramas how do you think of that well
then this one there's just a lot of environments I guess diorama is a really
good thing there are these huge pop up sort of dioramas in this book now this
is my third Star Wars book that I've done over the years the first one I did
was back in 2007 and we just want to do something different you know so it's
like we're taking you to all the different worlds within the Star Wars
within this the Skywalker story you know in saga and I wanted to make you know
these dioramas but then we there had to be like an added extra thing that was a
surprise to this pop-up because this already is pretty intense you know this
is the Battle of Geonosis right and one of them add like sort of a surprise
aspect to it so there's always within every pop there's some movable
interactive motion so this one has a pull tab up here that you can just lift
back and it shows off these other you know characters in the battle on
Geonosis fighting the the separatist forces it's my job to know this pit
stuff people so you know getting to add in all these
little details I mean this was a nightmare to design I mean it's it's
cool because I kind of get into this weird sort of creative space of just
kind of cutting and folding and figuring out how this all works
but then there's many other steps afterwards where it kind of takes that
sort of artist sort of like you know I'm I'm inspired and I'm going in these
weird places and then you have to really you know sort of square your square
everything down and make sure that it works a thousand times over so you know
there's all these different pops within it I think this book has it I think it's
about let's see if there's five spreads I think there's at least 25 different
pops in this book and I was left to say so structurally when we think about
pop-up book they're very big but they're not that many quote-unquote pages right
because there's all that paper up needs to fold together and hide in between the
spread so while there are five main spreads with these five main scenes even
within each spread you have four or five separate little individual pops little
vignettes that tell different parts of the story yeah you know I'm designing
something big like this Death Star which is a really weird design for sphere when
you're making a sphere and a pop-up usually most of the time it's like
taking a basketball I'm flattening it you know that but this sphere it instead
of it not just only flattens well it actually flattens like this way and then
it folds in on itself so this was like really this is really really complex but
then like some of these other ones on the sides they're just as complex like
this little transforming Millennium Falcon here so that's the million Falcon
from solo and then when you pull the little tab it changes into the regular
Millennium Falcon that we all know and love so even small pops have that sort
of moment this is actually one of my favorite ones for this from this book
and it's it's it's still pretty complex I mean if we blew that out it could be
pretty
and it's so amazing because a project like this takes you know the better half
of a year and there is not only problem-solving and illustration and art
designers engineering it's a whole creative process let's start at the very
beginning so you know you're gonna do about five spreads you know there may be
five big scenes lots of small pops you know you want interactivity you want to
have little bit yet how does a scene like the battle on the moon of Endor how
does that formulate and can we walk through totally okay so it starts off
and I work with Lucasfilm we kind of come up with where we want to go and
everything we make up lists and then the next step which was very odd for this
but from my process usually I actually made sketches of kind of what would
happen now I don't know that the engineering is gonna work for anything
in these sketches but this kind of gave me an idea of what would happen on each
page since things changed I mean we didn't end up doing this pop here which
was going to be across instead of the Battle of Geonosis it was gonna actually
have the Battle of Geonosis happening and then on the other side of the main
pop there would be the Battle of Kashyyyk
because I wanted to all those wookies and the trees and everything that didn't
it would have been very confusing about what was going on so you know this is a
way that we've sort of come up with what would happen on the page like if you
look at this it's very very rough I don't even know that it's all gonna work
and it's kind of amazing that it came out relatively close to what you know
what's happening there you know there's the where it was just the placement now
so after I kind of came up with what was happening on each page I kind of took
those pages and put them together to sort of formulate how the map would work
and I when I did this I also had to build something at the same time so that
I had a lot of these little small spreads built out so I could see that it
would work and would fold and that all these pieces would fit together that's
how it all starts so you have the spreads and you're making forceps you
mentioned tiny versions is just you're taking scissors to paper yeah yeah you
don't tape together like that's where it all starts really I
mean it you have to figure out how all the paper and all the pieces are gonna
work together take our scissors you take out tape and
you just build this thing I mean that's you know you could I guess essentially
you could you know do some sort of computer program but I don't know that
program and there's a lot of other factors that go into making these books
that a computer wouldn't ever be able to you know figure out like friction of
paper and that the weight of paper you could figure out some of those things
mathematically but sometimes you need gravity you need all the real factors of
usability if someone's actually going to open and close it a thousand times and
lifespan of the book and yeah be durable yeah so these are some of the prototypes
here yeah so so early on after I've served kind of made this map of things
then it's like right down to the paper engineering and that's kind of a cool
stage I think my one of my favorite stages of of the process because it's
just like me in my studio cutting up paper and folding and figuring out how
things work so initially I knew I was going to make a battle of endor and you
know with all the the trees and everything and the Ewoks and on this top
and in particular there is a there's there are these Scout walkers
that are in the forest area and I had an idea about making vehicles move that
popped up so this is one of the original ones you can see how it's just awful
looking you know it's just scrap paper taped together it's really junky I don't
know that it it barely worked but we're gonna pull it and see this is just that
my first exercise I'm sort of making this mechanism and just to see like how
could I make something that goes flat so it's gonna it's supposed to go flat like
this and it may not even you can be on the whole page sometimes I'll work out
some of my engineering issues just like on its own by itself you know strong
piece of paper but I knew that I had to go flat and I needed to know that it
would always be able to stand up this piece would always you know go flat to
be the front of the a TST and you know this is one of the legs and I knew that
it would I wanted to make sure that I could make something that moved and also
still went flat and could be flat both ways so this is an early version of that
mechanism and then you know I have to rebuild it sometimes what I'll do is
I'll trace all the pieces in the computer and make dye lines at an early
stage like this or I'll just sort of rebuild another one so this is a sketch
pop this is using you know some of the things that I did with this early
pull-tab little Scout Walker this this has it included in the whole space and
this is all handmade I don't think yeah this is all just made
by hand but it's not the first time that I've done it sometimes what I'll do with
a pop-up like this it will be rebuilt over and over again to figure out how
all these pieces go together you can see it's really rough I mean I'm not really
trying too hard to sketch on it I just want to get an idea of what is it you
know these things in different places so this incorporates the pull-tab of this
Walker they're tying that movement that Mexican
to mother movements that's the cool engineering part of it well what I want
you know with like if you're using this if you have something that's coming
under the under the page that's moving just this I mean how why not use it a
million times over I mean that's kind of what my philosophy is with a lot of the
engineering that I do for books is you know we're working well when you're
making a pop up we're working off the energy of this single page and
everything is being built off of that you know with all these different
structures and everything and once you build one structure that there are so
many other opportunities just built on that one from that one structure that
you can work off of and so if you've got something that you're using for one
thing why not try to find a way to use it in another way and I thought that
would be really cool because one one pull tab and a lot of movement is a lot
more fun and and you know certain there's certain things that you learn as
as you work on this longer and longer but like the further away you get away
from the page the less energies that it's gonna be with some of the pop but
you're gonna get a lot more strength coming from the centerfold and as you
move further outward you don't have as much strength so if I build something
big and heavy over here it may not necessarily open as much as something
here but you know I've learned a lot of ways to push it I mean I feel like
everything my whole mantra is you got to learn the rules then you break the rules
then you've learned new rules and then you kind of start back over again you
kind of you want to keep kind of pushing it so everything I do won't necessarily
follow the exact paper engineering rule that might be based on but I'm kind of
forming up my new ones new ones based on those you have to push you know the
boundaries to make something different
so after I've made a pop like this what I'll do is I'll very carefully take it
apart with my exacto knife and scan all the pieces and bring them into the
computer and what I'll do is I'll actually make what are called dye lines
so these are the individual digital traces yeah that's what they exactly so
these are dye lines and what you can see with this
these are dye aligns to all the different pieces now for a book like
this or they're had there been like 300 different pieces so you can see that
there are two different types of lines there are these dotted lines and that's
gonna be where there's a fold and then the the solid line is where there's a
cut this is a tough part of the job because you have to make sure everything
works right and you have to work out all these issues I mean this is a 2d image
but the 2d image that needs to fold together in a 3d form and you add a
fourth dimension of the actual fold itself yeah that's a lot of layers of
thinking and if you saw like sometimes when I'm building this I'm actually
constructing it in the computer laying these different dye lines on top of each
other it's just it's it's a wreck and once I have the shapes that I sort of
know and once I'm sort of mapped out where everyone's gonna be whether it's
from my just roughly sketched you know pops like this I know there's gonna be a
speaker bike here I know there's gonna be whatever the next step is actually
making art guides for the artists I work with I worked on this book with Kevin
Wilson he's great and we're working on some more books together so it so we
have a great sort of rapport so I make these really rough there you can tell
that some of the the stuff is just like quickly painted and then some of it is
actual just you know sort of photos pulled from online and and movie clip
areas and things like that so I make all these notes for him to make artwork you
know the shapes of the trees and where they should be and I mean just like the
notes they're intense and there's even you know there's tons of characters
there's that you walk by the bag and I was talking about I didn't end up using
it but you know the side view of the shuttle tydirium sits just all this
stuff okay and then after I would make these art guides for Kevin he would you
know after a few weeks come back to me with all of this photo montage
painted art and sometimes you know they're very very small characters so he
really got into the weeds with all the detail and you can see like we could we
have this 80s tee from all these different angles there's Chewie that's
supposed to be coming out of the top all these extra biker Scouts and
stormtroopers that we can put in the forest but these are all the shapes that
I had asked him to make pretty close to it
so here's what here's what here's my notes of kind of what I needed just
rough and then that's what he did in the final so it's much you know obviously
it's much more beautiful it is the actual art for the book and but he does
he does all the pieces a lot of the stuff is in in layers so I can pull
apart this from the trees in the background and there were times when and
there even characters that didn't get used like these Marauders from the Ewok
television movies and this blurgh but you know he just made all the details
there were some times when I had to make a little bit more than what I needed
just in case I had some space to put something in and your work it's fun for
you yeah it's the fun of the whole thing you talked about playing as a kid with
your action figures like this is like the pieces so that you then make your
play set it it's it's a making a lie I think about a lot where where it's like
ah how did this I'm still doing this you know like I'm still playing with my toys
or playing with you know I'm still making stuff out of with my cutting your
cardboard but this is my job it's it's it's kind of surreal but is it you know
it's it's fun it still work you know I it's not it's not easy but I really you
know it I enjoy it I get a lot of satisfaction from from the process of
you know creating something and it's important for me I guess with the work I
do I wanna I hope that I can inspire other young artists I think art
education is extremely important as I think it's also like hopefully
inspire creativity not necessarily that's just what I do but just anything
just just get your hands dirty and just make stuff that's what it's about like
that's what this is this is that's what this all starts with it's not super fans
here you think you know I'm working with all these you know I'm working with
Disney I'm working all these things you know you think that it's this you know
I'm this big production and it's just me cutting up paper and folding and see how
it works and failing a lot but sometimes getting some good stuff