sent from: London, UK. destination: Petaluma, California, USA

I’ve watched the new Bombay airport terminal being built for the last few years. Its central structure is a massive saucer-shaped building, the super-structure like a space ship. This is especially so at night, the girders and scaffolding lit with a thousand tiny bulbs. Welding arcs burning blue-bright light up many corners, workers too small to see, dropping sparks far, far to the ground. It reminds me inevitably of a shot at the start of Return of the Jedi, when Darth Vader’s shuttle is seen approaching the new under-construction Death Star. You see the shuttle from the side, approaching the massive docking bay, and in the foreground a tiny gantry moves with parallax. Your eye picks out a flickering bright spark, welding, and the shape of someone working and another person walking towards them. It conveys scope, scale, story, all in that moment. It don’t remember if I saw the detail of the workers when I first saw the film, but after I had, it was all I could see. It told you something human about the people building this huge thing (a notion taken later to comedic gold by Kevin Smith riffing on the poor contract workers on the doomed Death Star 2), and I obsessed about HOW they achieved the illusion, and WHO had the idea to put these workers in the shot; was it always part of the design? Nowadays we would fill the frame with construction ships and workers, over-sell the point, and lose the people and your connection to them.