all right tell me what your what your job is here awesome yeah um so my job as a conservator
here or really anywhere is to deal with the physical aspect of what the artifacts are
so looking at deep into the materials of what they're made of and how they interact
and how those are going to interact with whatever materials we need to use to preserve them i see
right because it's going out in the air there's the materials are going to deteriorate in some
predictable ways but your job is to figure out what those ways are exactly yeah and with things
like this that are multi-material that's a huge challenge but also it's really exciting because
those materials sometimes they interact perfectly well together and they're really happy
and other times they're not so happy it's been a little bit of a journey of discovery and a lot of
looking closely looking and using kind of experience to figure out like okay well what's
that and what's that and what is that possibly and when you're inspecting it you're looking your
goal is to hang it up in the most filming ready like it's just plucked out of the film reality as
much as that as you can is that right exactly yeah that's kind of the intent that we came up
with with margaret of course in consultation with lucasfilm so it's really a collaborative group
project uh to figure out the best way to present it and what to address and what not to address
can you talk to me about some of the difficult decision making sure yeah so a lot of it has to
do with like i said how the materials are going to interact so um this is though it looks like a nice
solid piece uh with that's been painted nicely in the colors it's not that's not how it was made
yeah and so with those interactions you have some inherently flexible materials and you have some
yeah and you have some inherently inflexible materials resins paint primers and so as
anything would happen when you move you get vibration you get movement and the flexible
materials they're cool with that right and the inflexible ones are not so great with it and then
cool at different rates and work away yeah and so eventually they just kind of crack
in various ways is that what i'm seeing here sometimes like that kind of thing exactly so
we don't exactly know but there's probably a join here or something else it's part of
the construction so it's an artifact of the construction coming through the top finishing
layers of those that paint but i can imagine that like if you had to patch that all the way are you
guys going to do that and patch and paint match so we're not it can be done um but uh we do also
have to consider how that's going to weather and age through the rest of the life of the x-wing so
this is not its final resting place it's going we're going to move it several times we're
going to do other things so to put another fill material in there that might just end up doing
the same exact thing exactly or even if we if we make which we're not going to but if we make
the exact wrong decision you could put a material that's too hard and it would make it worse because
it would act as a wedge in that crack and then just amazing i had i knew that you guys
always strove to choose a state to bring it to but it never occurred to me that you will
also have to plan for the years it will be here and that's a whole nother set of states exactly
that's incredible it's kind of the idea of conservation preservation is really to
bring it to the most appropriate state for it and ensure it's going to stay in that state for as
long as possible i mean we're not magic entropy exists but um as long as possible so one of my
favorite parts about building stuff is there there's always a specific moment when at the
beginning of the build everything's overwhelming and i'm just kind of making lists and trying to
tame the beast but there's a moment when the whole thing gets in my head
and i'm assuming that same thing happens with your team 100 yes and that's why it's great to have a
team because you can kind of reign each other in and bring different perspectives from different
past experiences because one of you might be like oh my god we have to patch this thing uh maybe
we can uh exactly and it's really easy to get into that zone especially if you're like
moving along and doing okay i'm patching this i'm patching this and patching this and you're
like oh well now that i've dealt with the big glaringly bad areas then because of how our
minds work you start to see the other little things that were not a big deal before because
you had these other glaring areas of damage that needed to be addressed but now that it looks a lot
better you're saying like well what about that tiny oh it's like aliens you made a clean spot
exactly um i and also there's a couple all that coupled with the fact that the lucas film the i
the star wars aesthetic is beat to crap so i remember finishing when i was making my own r2d2
and i was finishing them up i was getting really in the weeds about precision and i was thinking
why am i being so precise i've seen the real r2 i've seen five of the real r2s and they're
pieces of garbage they're beat to hell so i stopped worrying so much yes he has yeah
i hear you guys are getting putting an r2 in this one yes i'm very excited oh my god i
can't even well if there's any parts that you don't have i'm sure i can help you guys out
reyna this is just i mean is it thrilling to work on this oh it's superb i'm a big sci-fi fan in
general um so i was very excited when i heard it was coming and then i got to work on it which was
even more exciting and i mean i'm even seeing some of the classic ilm weathering techniques
there's one i saw it on the other side they take a sting and metal metal paint in the middle and
then a lighter color that looks like primer around the outer perimeter it's like it's funny
seeing some of the techniques i learned at this scale applied to this scale those are some of my
favorite spots as well because in conservation you learn a lot of different techniques to
paint things out so that they're invisible and so the idea of taking those same skills
and making things visible is just fascinating that's really amazing thank you my pleasure
you