The corridors of Industrial Light & Magic are filled with examples of their work from iconic movies like Star Wars, Jurassic Park, and Terminator 2. So a poster of Darth Vader recruiting for the evil imperial army doesn’t draw too much attention, even though it stretches from floor to ceiling. And that’s just the point. Slide behind the poster when no-one’s looking, and you’re in a secret Rebel Hideout built behind enemy lines.
Photography by Sam Freeman.
Stepping into the Hideout feels like stepping right into a Star Wars movie. In some literal ways, you are. There’s a title crawl greeting newcomers, explaining the slice of story they’re in. Ambient engine sounds from the actual production library hum in the background. And almost everything you see or touch came from a film set.
A long time ago
Staff R&D engineer Mike Jutan and Head of Computer Graphics Michael DiComo pushed for a theme lounge for decades. They never gave up hope, but it took a global pandemic to finally get it started. It got added to an office remodel, if somewhat under the radar. Occasionally people looked at the remodeling plans and wondered what was so special about this particular conference room, or why it had a sink. But thankfully nobody stopped them.
It takes a team
The Hideout is the result of a lot of people’s effort. Systems engineer Trent Bateman figured out the electronics along with Tim Dobbert and built out the software. Bateman, Paul DeBaun, and former AV design engineer Greg St. Germain got the speakers working. “There was a day when they turned on the soundtrack, and everybody in the room was like, oh my God, it just came to life” says R&D engineer David Hirschfield.
None of them built props full-time; these were employees who were also fans working on a dream fan project. Former workplace services specialist Kyle Johnson, who built the custom entryway, helped make it possible. He got the team access to a workshop on campus so they could use tools like a table saw and drill press, and enough space to actually paint everything.
A few of the employees behind the Hideout had toured tech companies and seen rooms with a cool secret entrance, but the inside was just boring furniture. They knew they wanted their lounge to be something more.
Where to begin?
With the Star Wars universe spanning hundreds of hours of media, the number of possible settings was daunting. How do you choose between a Rebel base, a seedy cantina, or an Imperial starship? That was a challenge they faced before getting a call from the Lucasfilm archives that basically said, “Hey, we’ve got some extra set pieces here, do you want any before we let them go?”
It turns out practical sets take up a lot of space. Keeping every prop and set piece productions create is impractical. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Andor season 2, Solo: A Star Wars Story, and Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker had all finished shooting, without immediate plans to revisit their respective stories. What do you do with a leftover Ghorman computer terminal? They sent the team a PDF catalog of more items than they ever imagined, each with a low-resolution thumbnail image and a really technical description of its set use and current status. It was a goldmine. The problem switched from what to create, to what to leave out.
The team looked through the photos, made guesses at scale, and asked to look at about 30 different pieces. They ended up with (among other things) the Millennium Falcon’s navigation console from Solo, radar screens from Rogue One, and a vending machine they dubbed Admiral Snackbar. The props available placed the dramatic setting of the room sometime during the original trilogy, with a mix of Rebel and Imperial accoutrements.
Kitbashing
The replica makers at Regal Robot were initially contacted to build custom furniture for the Hideout, like a Millennium Falcon holochess table. But once the props landed in their lap, their role switched to helping curate what was available. They helped validate the interior design, and guided the team on how to decorate and weather stuff that was too clean (including the room itself). Anything too shiny got a good coat of lived-in grime from Senior Look Development Technical Director Rebecca Forth’s team of volunteers.
When laying out the space, the story was central. No piece of furniture was brought in if it didn’t make sense, even if it looked really, really cool. To figure out how everything could fit, they made a virtual layout they could rearrange to quickly see where items could work. They didn’t want a conference room with a bunch of Star Wars stuff — they wanted a hideout ripped straight out of the Star Wars universe.
Sometimes flimsy props were reinforced and retrofitted to match the space. Originally built for just seconds of on-screen use, many came with dead LEDs, broken switches, or unlabeled wires sticking out the back. Everything had to be reverse-engineered before it could be functional, and many switches were false prop buttons that needed to be replaced. The entryway got a whole new facade to disguise the Earth-door shape, with a proximity-sensor “intruder detector” for kicks.
The room also had to work as a real room. That meant keeping pathways 36 inches wide, even if they had to saw a couch in half to do it. The safety and accessibility measures still blend in with the space. A blast hole in the ceiling reveals a required fire sprinkler, and enables access to the computer running the show.
It’s all in the details
It’s a big show to run. They could have left the props static, but instead made them a functional part of the room. Switches do things when you flick them. Sliders do (sometimes surprising) things when you move them. Even the door detects movement and occasionally throws the Hideout into “red alert” mode. Everywhere there’re buttons, lights, and speakers, all networked and controlled by custom hardware.
The coffee table is Babu Frik’s workbench from Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker. They didn’t know until they took it apart that there was a wheelchair base inside. Principal graphics engineer Lutz Latta tracked down the German instruction manual, got it running over radio control, and almost ran over a colleague’s toe. Once they dialed down the speed, it moved at a comfortable pace for drink delivery.
“I think it was running at five, and we lowered it to one, so we didn’t kill anyone” says Mike Jutan.
The lounge took the team about a year to finally build, with an intense six months spent physically constructing it during the day while still doing actual ILM work at night. They triumphantly hosted the opening party to celebrate May 4th, 2024.
Of course, once you spend a year building a sci-fi room, you can’t just not work on it again (ask anyone who’s built an R2-D2). And once you have a room full of sci-fi stuff, people want to push all the buttons.
Behind the scenes
The sound effects, blinking lights, and various video screens are all controlled by a Mac Mini running QLab. There’s at least one custom PCB in every prop. The cost to supply everything with off-the-shelf dev boards was intimidating, so they figured they’d make their own. Several spins later, with the help of the ILM Electronics Club, they finally had a design. They needed 20 boards to cover all the control panels in the room, so they hosted soldering parties where anyone interested in learning the craft was put to work. But they now have a modular system with support for daughter boards so each panel can be expanded on and communicate via OSC (Open Sound Control).
Each panel is programmed with a default show, so when nothing’s happening the Mac doesn’t need to broadcast anything. With a combination of shift registers and daughter boards, they can daisy-chain up to 10 panels before running into the current limit.
Easter eggs
In space, nothing’s labeled in English. But if you know what to push, you can turn a nav console into a synthesizer, or a jukebox. One button triggers a party mode, and there’s even a trivia game built into one wall.
When the archive sent over the props, they added a few extra boxes filled with random other stuff, including a couple of chrome handles. These were from Solo: A Star Wars Story, and looked 10x smaller in the photos. But once they were mounted on the wall, they begged for interaction. Of course the handles were built as static props, with no consideration for connection to a potentiometer or rotary encoder. After mulling over how to go about it with gears or pulleys, the team wisely stuck on accelerometers and got reliable angle detection for just a few dollars of parts. There’s a chance they’ll be important when the escape room game is finished.
The walls are alive
The ambient hum and occasional rumbles tell your subconscious you’re in space, and it’s only when they’re muted that you realize you’re in an office. But the lounge is also alive in how it keeps evolving. The crew are constantly adding new modes and Easter eggs. Like any good project, it’s never really done.
It’s been ages in the making, but the Rebel Hideout technically isn’t the oldest theme room at ILM. There is another, and unlike the Rebel Hideout, this one really is a secret outside the company (until now).
All aboard Calypso
Near the Hideout is a door marked by a wooden cephalopod. Through it is Calypso, a pirate captain’s quarters on a wrecked ship that’s run ashore.
An even longer time ago
Designed in 2012 by Steven Knipping at Pacific Data Images (which was part of DreamWorks), this theme room moved when PDI shut down and Knipping moved to Visceral Games. Visceral was part of EA, which worked on Star Wars games after Disney closed LucasArts. When Visceral shut down, Calypso moved to Knipping’s storage and waited for a new home. Knipping joined ILM and, after the success of the Hideout, Calypso was rebuilt in a conference room nearby.
Commandeering the space
Calypso already had a bar and a lot of piratey things. But since ILM worked the on Pirates of the Caribbean films 1–4, they had to add some screen-used props. There are now yardarms from a model ship used in the films, and a full-size anchor. One wall is lined with gunport lids that formerly covered cannons, and cannon models of various sizes are everywhere.
There are also non-screen-used production pieces, like a glorious bust of Davy Jones used for checking lighting during production. And a barnacle-covered skeleton, while absolutely fitting the theme, is actually from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
Since Calypso isn’t constrained to being an immersive lounge, crew shirts and other celebrations of time spent building Pirates worlds adorn the walls. A TV frame, which will eventually be a window to the outside world, was made from scratch for the space. The team’s carpenter friend Kyle made the squid sign outside the room.
It’s not pillaging if it’s donated
They’ve also received a lot of donations from “people whose spouses don’t appreciate their pirate decorations.” From skeleton arms to tiki mugs, pirate puns to guns and swords, Calypso is a celebration of adventures on the sea.
Practical effects
Never missing a chance to build in some interaction, there’s also an escape-room-type game built from old-timey bottles for one of ILM’s legendary Halloween parties.
I played a Mastermind/Wordle-type game where I’d been poisoned and needed to figure out the right combination of potions to find the antidote. I managed to survive on my last chance. There’s another game where you have to find which bottle has a soul in it. The display acts like a balance scale, and the soul is either lighter or heavier depending on whether it’s getting lifted up or pulled down.
Though Bateman keeps tinkering and adding new modes, the games always fit the theme.
On the horizon
Calypso is a slow work-in-progress. While the Rebel Hideout was built behind semi-closed doors and unveiled on Star Wars Day, Calypso is already a success. Unlike the hideout, this room has a table you can sit around. It’s laid out like an ordinary room, so it’s frequently booked for ordinary meetings, even without sound or lighting effects.
That doesn’t mean there’s no desire to expand. An electronic system to run the show was being worked on offsite at the time of our visit, but once that’s done, they’d like to make that TV a window, add lights for stars to the ceiling, and add an immersive ambient soundtrack with waves, birds, and audio from the actual Pirates of the Caribbean ride. Cove lighting would have a day/night lighting cycle and the glow of a fire in the distance. There’s even an idea to add projection mapping to the Davy Jones bust.
While it is technically possible to have a meeting without the ominous glow of a distant burning city, I’m sure most meetings would be better with it.
See you space pirates….
ILM’s theme rooms are dream projects to work on, or in. And they weren’t put together by professional prop builders or set designers. They’re the result of decades of pushing and an incredible amount of effort by fans who believed they could make it happen. Creative output benefits from creative surroundings, and theirs are enviable.
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