Ancient Web: S. Fujita Spent 2,500 Hours Shooting LEGO Star Wars

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Before anyone could buy a licensed LEGO Millennium Falcon, one determined fan had already spent years turning the original Star Wars films into brick-built photographic stories.

Visit the surviving LEGO Star Wars Trilogy homepage.

The old Japanese personal site belongs to a builder identifying himself as maestro S. Fujita. The landing page retains a badge announcing it as LUGNET's Cool LEGO Site of the Week for January 30–February 5, 2000. That is a concrete trace of the network of independent LEGO enthusiasts through which such work circulated.

The English-language introduction insists that the photographs are a personal project and have no official connection with LEGO or Lucasfilm. There is no modern storefront, community ranking system or slick template—just a handmade invitation to explore another person's work.

The original trilogy, one photograph at a time

Fujita's December 10, 1999 explanation is wonderfully specific. He began taking the pictures in the summer of 1992, spent about 155 weeks on the undertaking and completed the full trilogy in autumn 1996. His first version contained 48 photographs; the expanded work became three series of 60 pictures each. He estimates that the project consumed around 2,500 hours of his free time.

The production was emphatically physical. Fujita used an ordinary camera rather than digital effects. He arranged brick-built characters, props and scenery, altered only four LEGO heads, and experimented with backgrounds made from ordinary materials. Real snow served for a snow scene. Objects too enormous to construct, such as the Death Star, appeared through handmade collages photographed again after being cut and assembled.

His explanation adds a useful wrinkle: he did not photograph scenes in movie order. As more bricks became available, later-built scenes could be more elaborate than earlier ones. The resulting trilogy was therefore assembled as much like a small film production as a toy collection.

Fujita also mentions unpublished photographs of the making process and plans for vehicles including the Millennium Falcon and Star Destroyer. Those references do not establish that the additional material remains downloadable.

The site predates the mass availability of official themed sets, and its preserved captions capture a period when fans often had to invent their own bricks-and-camera solutions.

Read Fujita's explanation of how the trilogy was made.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.