The High Republic may predominantly be a fiction and comic led endeavour, but that didn’t stop model maker James Eaton from bringing Starlight Beacon to life, under request from Lucasfilm.
Jason Eaton grew up worshipping at the altar of Joe Johnston and the wizards of Industrial Light & Magic. Eaton saw Star Wars: A New Hope in 1977 at age four, spurring a lifelong love of the galaxy far, far away — but it was the behind-the-scenes model making magic that truly captured his imagination. Over the years he developed incredible skill at the craft, building his own models from nothing just like his ILM heroes; the results, as documented previously on StarWars.com and Lucasfilm’s Our Star Wars Stories digital series, are often astounding. Still, model making has served mostly as a (time-consuming and physically demanding) hobby for Eaton, who never thought his interest and gifts would go any farther. “I want to walk a mile in the shoes of the ILM model maker. You can’t. That world doesn’t exist anymore. But you can get kinda close,” Eaton said on Our Star Wars Stories. Except he was wrong.
Lucasfilm has hired Eaton to build a model of the Starlight Beacon, a massive space station recently introduced in Star Wars: The High Republic, to be used for the StarWars.com team’s Star Wars: The High Republic Show. Revealed on the latest episode of the digital series, it’s a stunning realization of the Starlight Beacon, filled with detail and a few surprises — an elegant space station for a more civilized age.
The opportunity was one he ever expected, to say the least.
“I got the call asking if I wanted to do it. There was that initial [thought], ‘Wait, are you asking me to do what I’ve dreamt about since I was four years old? I had to process it for a second,” Eaton tells StarWars.com. “The idea, to me, of making something official for Star Wars from concept art, I thought was unattainable.”
