With all the hype that May The 4th Be With You – aka Star Wars Day – gets it’s fair to say that most LEGO fans know what to expect when it comes to celebrating one of the most important dates in the Star Wars calendar – but there was one year when LEGO tacked on an extra day to the festivities.
It was way back in 2012 when Lucasfilm and LEGO combined forces to launch their first officially (and properly branded) May The 4th Be With You co-promotion ever – that’s right, the annual May The 4th Be With You only came into being 10 years ago!
The extra date was May 5th, which the marketing heads at Lucasfilm and LEGO dubbed Revenge Of The 5th – and as well as carrying over the previous day’s offers, this date was used to reveal the digital mosaic project that the LEGO Star Wars community in the United States were able to contribute to.
New of the community-sourced virtual mosaic started on April 30th when the Star Wars Day: May The 4th Be With You plans were shared online and fans were made aware that a special project was being planned.
We’re creating the galaxy’s largest virtual LEGO Star Wars mosaic and we need your help to make it happen! On May 4th, go online to starwars.lego.com/creations or to your local LEGO Store to upload pictures of your LEGO Star Wars creations. We’ll use those pictures to create a massive virtual mosaic that will be revealed on May 5th.
The project’s terms and conditions were more restrictive than they are today, with a hard deck of 18 years being the minimum age requirement, images could only be in JPG format, not exceed 8 Mb in size, and had to be uploaded between 12:01 am and 11:59 pm EST on May 4th. And unlike the recent LEGO Ideas activity, renders were not permitted.
The second digital flyer promised that one image would be selected at random and whoever submitted it would win “(1) Grand Prize, consisting of one (1) first-edition 2 foot LEGO® Star Wars™ Darth Maul™ model, designed and built by a LEGO Master Builder. The approximate retail value of the prize is $1,000 USD.” (Unfortunately the identity of the winner and the fate of the unique model has been lost to time – if you know who won it, or has it now please contact us and we’ll do our best to follow up this missing chapter.)
The resulting one-off digital artwork was made accessible at legostarwarsmosaic.com (a website that is now defunct and redundant) on the morning of May 5th, once all the images had been collated by The ID Corp, a digital production house specialized in “digital the online out of internet thinktastic with pixel development processery”, who processed the thousands of images in less than one day.
The IDC has been making sweet sweet Lego love with Liquid Thread for a while now…and when they came to us with an idea for May 4th…an icon in the Star Wars community as a day of epic Ewok-like celebration. The idea for this project was simple. Have Lego fans from all over the world upload images of their favorite Lego sets on May the 4th, and repost them in a cool new way on May the 5th. Images were taken from home cameras, in participating stores, and from existing Lego fan pages. Thousands of fan images (all collected and processed in one day mind you)…were then analyzed, color encoded and pixel pushed into position against an image of the newest Lego Star Wars set…Jaba’s Palace. Did we also mention it is searchable, zoomable, and can dynamically correct details?
Source: The ID Corp (via WBM)
As promised it was searchable – and anyone with their LEGO ID could find the pictures they submitted. Interactivity was enhanced by with a number of hidden images of upcoming sets in the Summer wave, as well as ten Darth Maul minifigures. The only prize for finding these was bragging rights though!
Since then LEGO has only conducted two more community-sourced digital mosaic projects – one in 2019 that resulted in vertical banners, depicting numerous collections, MOC and dioramas from LEGO Star Wars fans around the world, that were displayed in a number of flagship LEGO stores in Europe, and the recent LEGO Ideas activity in 2021 that drew in just over 200 photos. The outcome (if there is one) of this call to action hasn’t been revealed yet.
Did you take part in the Revenge of the 5th virtual mosaic build? We’d love to hear your memories, so please share them in the comments below.
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