CREATING A TEASER poster for Episode I, one of the most anticipated films in movie history, was a huge deal for Ellen Moon Lee. She’d seen the original Star Wars some 30 times and was given carte blanche to find The Phantom Menace’s defining image.
“It was a dream project,” she says now. “I could come up with anything I wanted.” Working within the Lucasfilm Art Department, Lee was hired for the job 18 months before the film’s release. She worked up around 15 ideas, including variations on ‘SWI’, Lucasfilm’s inside name for the project, and “some ideas with the double lightsaber in there”.