A lot of people find this kind of stuff interesting (I know I do) so I've tried to make the explanations pretty straightforward - hopefully it's easy enough to follow. You might want to fluff your pillows a bit first or adjust your seat, it's pretty long.

One thing I should point out: keep in mind that both the movie (trailer, whatever) and the comments below were made BEFORE the actual Episode III came out.

The Making of Rise of the Empire

 

Text created in Freehand and popped into Photoshop. The fonts are Arial (16.5pt) and Arial Black (20pt.)

The fades were done with the opacity settings in After Effects.

 

 

Unprocessed footage

This was one of the hardest shots to do, probably because it's the only one that required actual camera movement. I really wanted it because it focuses in on Anakin the way a simple zoom just can't match. I shot it three times (once because of a crappy bluescreen setup and once because Anakin's hand was the wrong colour) and each time it took roughly an hour and a half. Each movement was less than a millimetre.

The bluescreen in this case actually was blue (so any spillover/reflections would be more sky-coloured) and has had multiple chromakey passes applied to it. There are still a few spots that twinkle a bit as the keys take out bits they shouldn't and put them back but overall it was much easier than doing it by hand. Yoda's head was particularly hard to work around, as the colour isn't too far removed from blue.

The background ships were drawn and multiplied in Freehand and set up on repeating motion paths in After Effects. These ones are lightened slightly, had their contrast reduced and had an overall blur applied. They are the same ones that appear in every other Coruscant scene although at different angles and levels of brightness.

The floor was drawn in Freehand (using The Phantom Menace for reference) and printed on glossy 12x18 cardstock at a local copyshop. The cost was about $3.50CDN but the design, reflections and ease-of-use made it worth it.

I made a Plo Koon and some other guy who are sitting in here but you don't really get a good look at them.

 

 

Originally I had another shot here where Mace leaned forward and gestured as he spoke but I didn't like how the bluescreen worked on it and I didn't have time to do even this short a bit by hand.

So I used this one. I made the mask myself in Photoshop so it's sharp and rock-solid.

Same buildings and ships (although the ships are on slightly different angles to account for the change in camera angle).

The yellow top of the minifig's chest was visible so I made a brown overlay to cover it up. His mouth is also an overlay - his eyes I had drawn on before the shot with a transparency marker.

The cushions on the chairs are a cheap knock-off of Play-Doh I picked up at a dollar store. It had some neat colours but would get rock hard in about twenty minutes. I put it a container with some damp paper towel to soften it up again.

The voice is my friend Alex, who miraculously filled in at a moment's notice when I realized I couldn't get my original Mace voice in time.

 

 

The mask here is a combo of hand-done and computed. The background is masked out by a shape I made in Photoshop but immediately surrounding Kenobi is an After Effects key. I like the haze around his head and shoulders - it really feels like there a lot of light streaming in.

I don't mind how Obi-wan's cape moves but his hair twitch drives me crazy. I just can't bring myself to use glue.

Yareel (with the neck), although chronologically inaccurate, was someone I just HAD to stick in there.

 

Another Photoshop mask. One of the real strengths in After Effects is that you can import stuff from Photoshop with transparency intact. It saves a lot of time and effort. After Effects can also take vector artwork like Illustrator and Freehand files (although mine kept crashing if I switched to it with vector stuff in the clipboard), again keeping the transparent parts intact.

I painted out the existing eyebrows with the rubber stamp tool in Photoshop and made new ones which I animated in After Effects.

 

 

Palpatine's office, as close as I could get it. The window is deliberately blocked so I didn't have to do any more compositing. There's a cool lamp just to the left but I couldn't back up enough without showing some window. I like the reflection in the table this way better anyhow.

The blue guy was made from more cheap blue clay stuff with cheap clay horns that I allowed to dry and stiffen on purpose. I was really happy with how well the blues matched. You might also noticed he's got little shoulder pads, just like in the movies. I was looking for something else entirely when I stumbled across the brown epaulets (sp?) that I always thought were completely useless.

He also gestures a bit more than I would like (I hate the style of animating minifigs talking by making their arms flail around) but I was beginning to realize I didn't have a lot of animation going on elsewhere so I made hime move a bit.

Palpatine's hair is made of Fimo.

Blue guy's voice is my friend Mark, who also read for Bail Organa (Jimmy Smits).

 

 

Unprocessed footage

The background was drawn & duped in Freehand and exported to Photoshop for glows and the adding of 'senator-like blobs'. The spherizing (which is what really sells the effect), blurring and motion added in After Effects, adjusted to match the foreground.

The foreground was shot against a green background a moved on a Lego turntable. I'm really happy with how smoothly it turned out and that I didn't get a big obvious reflection of myself or the camera in it. I personally don't care for all the motion in the Phantom Menace senate scenes but my pal Dave mentioned that it may be intended as the P.O.V. of one of the little camera droids. So I added one to the scene for extra effect.

I was annoyed that I couldn't get blue guy's top horns to come in any better but it's the best I could get it. In fact, they are way better than how I originally had them. In this case, chroma keying worked much better than colour keys.

The white woman was a hand-drawn face (the back is a skull - and her cape is the bat-lord's - EVIL!)

There's a slight echo on his voice but it's not quite the right reverb. It still adds that little touch, though.

Voice by my old roommate, Dave.

 

 

The planets were generated separately by a handy Photoshop plugin, as was the background. (LunarCell and Glitterato)

The ships are three different shots of one model, set on different motion paths in After Effects. They give a really strong feeling of dimension as they spread out - the one that begins to cut across the field of view at the end of the shot is quite omnious (there's a deep rumble added to help that along).

 

 

Unprocessed footage

Unsurpringly, this is one of the most complicated of all the shots in the trailer. Pretty much everything was shot individually, trimmed in Photoshop and pasted together in After Effects.

The troopers, for example, are a loop of the same four positions, staggered slightly so that they don't all look like robots marching in time. The jumping out animation was a separate bit, timed to line up with the beginning of a walking trooper cycle. I gave them different depths by changing size and blurriness.

It's also how I did the gunships in the background; they are still shots (with the contrast lowered) moved in After Effects. I filled them up with Stormtroopers and Biker Scouts to make them seem more full.

The AT-TE was left over from the following shot (which I did first) and since I spent a ridiculous amount of time on it for such a bad angle and short screen time I decided to reuse it here.I shot the body, turret and two leg portions separately and animated them together in After Effects. No matter how many times I watched the AOTC trailer, I couldn't get the legs to move right so I eventually left it.

The grain and sky were made in Photoshop, the mountains came from a stock photo I found online.

The lasers are by an After Effects plugin called Laser. I'm not overly fond of how they turned out so I might try AlamDV if I ever do lasers again.

 

 

Originally this was to be a few troopers harassing the populace of a planet. I animated them tossing around a shopkeeper in the background but you can hardly see it. In the end it just looked like marching so I put in a marching noise and it works. See how little of the AT-TE you can see here?

I really like how the Mary Jane face worked in this shot.

One thing I didn't care for was the puny guns that come with the clone minifigs. Mine are sporting some seriously hefty rifles, as they should be.

The blue part of the sky was real, but the sun, flare and Republic ship were all added in After Effects.

I tried to give some of the different locations different colour schemes, as they might in a real Star Wars movie. This planet featured orange in with some earth tones and hopefully doesn't look too much like Tattooine.

 

 

The Bail Organa custom was my favourite. His little Fimo turtleneck came out so much better than I had hoped for and the goatee was just too easy (drawn on with a tranparency marker).

His hand motion skips a bit because I had originally planned on an establishing shot of Bilbringi to play during the latter part of his line but I didn't have time for it so I had to repeat a bit of animation.

This hallway set was one of a few I whipped up to give variety to the different shots.

The voice is my friend Cal, who also let me use his DV camera.

 

 

Unfortunately I don't have as many smooth, dark grey 1x8s as I thought I did so the top half of the blinds are a little disjointed. I had also wanted to make the lighting on the characters look like it came through blinds but I didn't think I really had the time to figure out how to pull it off.

I've got overlays on Mace again to give him eyes, a mouth and a dark chest.

There's no animation in this scene because they're just sitting on tires and I didn't think I could keep them steady enough.

 

 

I really like the way the animation fits the dialogue in this shot. More of a happy accident than anything else. Yoda was attatched to an older style 1x2 bending block to allow for his smooth head bow.

Voice by me.

 

 

Unprocessed footage

This one took a while, both to build and to shoot. I found it tricky to give a sense of immensity with only the limited supply of bricks that I had on hand. As it is, you can see that the staircase is a bit unfinished on the far right.

Shooting took too long because I originally intended to have a low-flying speeder zip by along the top of the frame and I animated a moving blue glow across the scene. it involved sliding the headlight from my bike sliding along a stick I had hanging from the ceiling. You can see the light briefly in the movie, and in this sample pic - just behind the two figures. I never got around to the speeder.

To make it worse, I shot it with two yellow hands on Anakin. Luckily, this was particularly easy (if time consuming) to change in Photoshop.

The streetlamp was actually there for the shoot. I added the glow in After Effects and then masked out the lamp shape.

The background buildings are small Lego buildings, light from below, shot up close and blurred. The lights were drawn over stills in Freehand and exported to Photoshop. The traffic, of course, is the same traffic as earlier but darker and on different angles.

 

 

Nothing really interesting here, other than the cool depth-of-field stuff. having both Anakin and the background out of focus draws all the viewer's attention to Palpatine straight away.

 

 

Quality difference, compared to my old iBot webcam. It would have made bluescreening almost impossible.

Padme and Anakin's apartment was a tricky set to build. I wanted it to look comfortable, which I find hard with sharp-edged plastic bricks. I opted for some soft lights, relaxing colours, windows and a plant (of sorts).

This is one of those shots where I really wanted to have the mouth moving.

I removed the knife and throwing star from the minifig in Photoshop but didn't bother adding on the belly, figuring it was close enough to the bottom of the frame that it wouldn't really matter.

I wish I'd had another option for hair.

The voice is by my girlfriend, Aimee. I think it's a really good match..

 

 

The hand is blue(pink, actually)screened in. The motion up into frame was done in After Effects. I didn't pay much attention to matching the lighting but I think it came out pretty well.

It is a bit jarring though - your brain just instantly knows that something doesn't jive sizewise.

Another shot that desperately need mouth animation. I had also hoped to have him appear to look down at the hand.

 

 

The first set I built. I tried shooting the bluescreen with my iBot but the colour and picture quality are so poor that it just wouldn't work. Even with the DV camera, I still had to trim some of it frame-by-frame around the characters because of some reflections.

The background pic was really only meant to be temporary but I ran out of time and it got the idea across so I left it.

The lights are all little lens flares.

Dooku is wearing little lifts to make him taller.

 

 

This shot is cheated a bit. Dooku is actually standing a bit right of the walkway centre to give better framing on Boba. I had originally wrote Boba saying "Windu." when he stops in front of Dooku but I scrapped it later because it seemed silly.

Shot with a wall of fake cotton stuffing material behind it to give a cloud look without more bluescreening.

 

 

Unused shot

Sky by me and Photoshop. Ki Adi Mundi's head is yellow Fimo (same colour as Lego yellow!) and his beard is white Fimo. Nobody moves because the chairs weren't attatched to anything and I didn't want them 'drifting' everywhere.

Yoda's feet (aren't they adorable?) should have been green but I didn't have those pieces in olive green.

I cannot believe how well the music matches up here.

 

 

Unprocessed footage

More Lego buildings in the background. (My favourites, incidentally.) You can just see the incoming laser under the saber blade. I had intended that the viewer would see more clearly where the shot comes from but I forgot about the fanning, which blocks the view. The explosion is a dark lens flare.

The lightsaber was made by making a white mask and applying a slight blur and a glow to it. There are tutorials in the fan films section of theForce.net but I had to modify the After Effects one to account for the older version of After Effects I have.

I found the best way to do fanning is to keep the leading edge tight to the saber and having the trailing edge halfway between the saber's old position and the new. This jedi gets a green saber for variety's sake.

The scene as shot was a lot more jerky. I did some cuts, some reordering and some doubling-up with the Quicktime player and then changed my numbering of the actual animation frames for After Effects. It's a bluescreen shot, by the way.

 

 

The droid against bluescreen

This scene took a while to shoot because it has the most moving characters of any scene in the trailer. I think that one of the trickiest parts was figuring out how to make the crowd part in such a way that you notice the Jedi even before the droid closes in. More people might have been nice, but I didn't have time.

The rotation of the droid was shot separately against a greenscreen and had its position and size modified in After Effects. The shadow it casts was added in After Effects by keyframing a semi-transparent oval to match the position of the droid.

The background and streetlight glow were done just like previous scenes.

I was reluctant to use the Lego martian but added him as a stoned/drunk street alien, inspired by the greenies in Splinter of the Mind's Eye.

 

 

This shot was a bit harder than it needed to be. In order to get in close enough, I had to tear the set from the previous scene off of its baseplate and try and rebuild it with the camera in mind. Then I had trouble with the speed of the Jedi's turn.

Finally, I was confronted with trying to make an explosion. I didn't have AlamDV (and have yet to try it out) but I needed to come up with something. In the end, I used an explosion from the actual Clones trailier that is revealed by an expanding soft-edged round mask. I would really have preferred harder edges but it was a bit beyond me.

This is the same head I used for Yareel in the Jedi Council chamber but I had planned on it being here so I left it.

The sound comes from some Mac shareware game that I lost after I ripped a bunch of sounds from it.

 

 

Buildings lit from below

Apparently, the most annoying scene in my trailer, because of my loose attention to gravity.

This is the second time I shot it, because I felt the first went too fast. I thought the viewer would need that extra second to determine that the falling figure was a Jedi, and that the one left standing wasn't. The figure's head was pure black, to avoid anything showing up.

There was an armature attached to the foot of the Jedi that allowed me to lower him in stages, which I Photoshopped out later.

This was a particularly hard pinkscreen to wrestle with. In the end, I left a slight pink cast on it and threw the pinky light in the background to help justify it somewhat.

 

 

Ki Adi Mundi's closeup! The Fimo was a bit grungy but it was really late on the last night (this was the second last thing I shot, at about 2:00 on that Monday night) and I couldn't be picky.

Voice by Ben Jeddrie. I had originally asked Ben to do it more sing-song because of that weird way that Mundi talks, but went with Ben's suggestion of a more straightforward reading.

 

 

The rocking motion that these stupid things make when they open up was really hard to duplicate smoothly. The front one (shot separately against a green screen) just opens up directly because it was firmly attached to a baseplate. The background droideka, shot along with the wall, is shakier because I had it roll in and expand, which I found much more difficult.

I shot them separately because it was easier to co-ordinate the motions of both of them in post than to guess at what stage one would be when the other was doing something else as I was animating. The closer one also serves to distract the eye from the shifting of the farther one, which wasn't fixed to the baseplate.

The shields were made from a cloud effect with a fisheye applied and two masks: one to remove the inside (with a feathered edge) and the other to remove the outside. Sound directly from The Phantom Menace, used in the interests of time.

 

 

Originally planned to mislead the viewer into thinking that Anakin was the mysterious Jedi-assassinating figure, which wasn't the case. I still think it serves that purpose somewhat.

 

 

Anakin's ship

Hangar

Pretty standard shot. This also comes very close to crossing the axis. (Assuming that this and the last shot go together.)

It was to be followed by a shot of Anakin leaving the hangar and another of him strafing the dark figure.

I wish one of those had made it in because the ship is actually pretty cool. It's a mix between the Sith Infliltrator and his own distinctive TIE fighter design.

The sound is "Industrial Machinery", slowed down a bit.

 

 

 

 

Shot on the last night. I had already done all the trooper hallway stuff but needed a bit of explanation to set it all up. I had already wrecked the apartment set and didn't have time to rebuild it. As it is, it feels like it might be part of the hallway shown in the next scene.

I really like her slow turn away from Obi-wan but I wish I hadn't hit that stupid bowl. And even though I kept her in a plastic box, that belly still got dust on it.

I recorded the Obi-wan voice in about six takes but I was in such a rush that I used one of the earlier, not-as-good ones.

 

 

I swear that this was the best painted helmet I had to work with. I wanted the extreme closeup because it has a nice jarring effect to start the chase scene with. I wish the voice was a little louder, but that's my fault, not Iain's.

Voice by Iain Macleod.

 

 

This end of the hall was built after I destroyed the other end, which had the elevator in it. The whole building was supposed to be very clean and elegant looking. Padme and Anakin's apartment has more blue than white, the hall more white than blue to make it feel larger and more airy. The Cloud City-like design was probably more than subconcious.

The trooper on the right bangs his gun on one of the columns because I didn't realize he'd be right beside one as he brought it up to fire. It bugs me, but not a lot.

The procedure for making a lightsaber blade go behind something is simple, but time-consuming. It's basically putting the blade on a separate layer and masking it out of where it shouldn't be, frame-by-frame. Unfortunately, the coloured glow is still there but it adds a touch of realism as the light flares around the blocking object.

 

 

When I built the elevator end of the hall I knew exactly the sort of feel it should have but it took me a very long time to actually build something that had that feel. It's pretty rickety. There was supposed to be a button or something to the right of the door but I forgot it so you can see the door moving through the hole.

The little explosions on the floor are the flame from The Gauntlet.

I had a separate lght source bounced into the elevator from behind. Before I did it was pretty dark in there.

 

 

This is the scene that almost made me give it all up. It was he first one I tested the blaster effects on and the only one where I used the sparky explosions. It took me a long time to set up in After Effects (luckily I didn't have to mask out Padme because she was pinkscreened in*).

When I went back to re-render it with the final settings all of my After Effects work was gone! I must have crashed before I saved the actual file and had just not noticed. After much stamping of feet I decided my test render was good enough to use anyway so it stayed.

 

*I find it works REALLY well to shoot one element of a scene and then to shoot the second without moving the camera, lights or the baseplate. This doesn't let you do some of the more remarkable things available by bluescreening (adding giants or miniatures), but it can allow you to do some things (that would be effortless with real actors) easier and have it look flawless.

 

 

Scorch marks by Photoshop, smoke by After Effects. These I put together on a single layer and manually matched as best as I could to the moving footage I was lazy enough to shoot. The early part of this shot moves and couldn't be cut because of the length of the line.

Aimee, my girlfriend and the voice actress for this scene, cannot let it lie that I made her speak a grammatical error. Padme SHOULD say, "There ARE too many of them." but I held her down and forced her to say, "There's too many of them.", a contraction of "There IS."

I argued that being hunted down and shot at might be having some stressful effects on Padme and she might use slang in such a situation, but Aimee insists she's too proper and well-schooled for that.

I had to mention it, at any rate.

 

 

There was no blade in this scene, I just guessed where it would be when I added the saber effect. There's a pounding noise on the door that is only partially distinguishable - it's the troopers banging on it. ("Open up in there!")

This is the worst line I spoke as Obi-wan. Another case of doing twenty takes and using the first one anyway because I'm lazy.

 

 

This set took waaay too long to build for the amount of time it appears and for the lack of detail that shows up in the final shot.

As the hatch opens, the far end lights up. There are actually three openings down there - the hatch itself, to the left in front of the stacked wheels and to the right. I carefully let light in all three so that I had as much access as possible when the whole thing was lit. It wasn't much.

I filmed it twice because in the first version, Obi-wan was already down when the scene started and I wanted a bit more time in here. I also hit the stacked tires as I was animating. The second time around I was too quick at the end and had to double-up some frames. (Arguably, a fall like that would probably have made the first trilogy a moot point but I think Obi-wan was helping her down with the Force.)

Water was a junky After Effects plug-in. What really sells the sewer idea is the ambient sound.

 

 

The last shot captured. The lighting is terrible.

Luckily, the ambient sound is enough to carry the sewer feel without needing any actual water dripping on anything.

The roar, I believe, is a baby elephant, slowed down.

Padme was supposed to say, "I have a bad feeling about this." but I ran out of time and I think the scene works better without the line and being that much shorter without it.

 

 

Setup shot (with my other camera)

Another huge set used only for a few seconds. There's no floor behind Boba, the droids are standing on independent platforms. I had originally planned this one to be at a different angle to show off the hangar more but it didn't do much for the main players in it.

The lighting is also a bit blah.

I wanted the dish to glow more but felt it was too distracting. The scene really needed some droids to be marching by in the background but I didn't have enough and had no idea how I would make them march anyway.

Sidious was shot against a bluescreen and added in semi-transparently. I increased his contrast, made him blue and but some static-y bars moving up and down over him.

 

 

 

 

More of the same. I shot Sidious on a Lego turntable I built. The background was the same as the previous scene, only on a slightly different angle and without Dooku and Boba. I blurred it and did the matching motion in After Effects by eye.

The other most annoying shot in the trailer, because of the emperor head. It just never occurred to me.

 

 

Unprocessed footage

Originally, the monster was much more serpentine and came down on the hapless pair from above. This proved to be my own personal hell so I changed the monster to something that I could animate half-decently and on the same level as Obi-wan.

At the last minute, I put a blue cast on everything and added a layer of black over the whole scene with a feathered hole in it, which follows the saber. It fakes the look of the scene lit by the saber pretty well and adds a great deal to the claustrophobia and scariness.

I wish I'd been a bit more careful about animating the big eye. It moves around quite independently of anything else.

 

 

 

 

 

More of the same. Obi-wan's flip was done with an armature that he was stuck to with Silly Putty. The chopped arms are also held up for a frame or two with Silly Putty. However, I was too stupid to take a master shot of the background first and spent a long time building one from all the various bits in various shots not occupied by tentacle or Jedi.

The arms are no longer attached to the actual monster - they're just stacked in a small wall offscreen. It took a few live-action walkthroughs to get down what I wanted to be going where and when. The whole thing is still a bit speedy but works because it's such an action scene.

I had to do a lot of masking in this one to get the lightsaber going behind the arms.

 

 

Planet by LunarCell, stars by Glitterato.

The ship is, of course, a bluescreened still that I moved and scaled in After Effects. Try as I might, I could not get the little swoop any smoother than it is now - there's still a small "hitch" in it as Anakin makes the turn. Motion blur adds a lot.

The engine glows are lens flares, keyframed by hand to match the ship.

The slight spin on the background puts a lot more energy into this shot, a technique used in the Star Wars movies.

Anakin returns to Tattooine, one last time. Finally freeing those slaves, maybe?

 

 

I tried a long time to get this angle exactly the way I wanted it. It had to show Anakin as being an imposing, threatening figure but not be shot from too low as too reveal my small set.

This happens to be one of my favourite sets, cobbled together in about a half-hour, because it has so many shapes and angles you don't see anywhere else in the trailer.

I realized too late that I didn't have any sort of proper interior behind Anakin but it turned out to be too dark when I lit the whole thing for anyone to see the jumble of support struts back there anyway.

It's supposed to be a Sith temple.

 

 

Basic stuff. Kenobi likes his saber twirls - I thought that this and the former shot would give a sense of them both bristling up for the fight of their lives, which neither of them really wants.

This actually happens later in the movie, away from the temple.

 

 

Angle test

Unused shot

I didn't really care for the sudden jump between this shot and the last. They're too similar and it's very distracting. I did shoot another bit of fight scene but didn't have the time to do the sabers.

The storyboard originally was framed much lower, Anakin's leg on the left and his hand with the saber in the top center, showing Obi-wan in a very threatened position at the bottom of the frame. This proved extremely difficult to get just right at Lego size, particularly where Anakin has to move into frame from offscreen. I abandoned the idea.

 

 

This was the most time-consuming shot. I considered bluescreening the pipes and whatnot in later but decided that they probably wouln't match up well, particularly where the whole thing was shot on an angle.

So, I had to do the sabers frame-by-frame (sometime guessing where they were) and then go back and mask them each out frame-by-frame. Then the same thing with the flares. Augh!

I'm very happy with how it turned out, though, except for the very end. Anakin is moving too fast for you to get a sense that he's really hacking at Kenobi.

 

 

Basic stuff. Love the giant swing. Very Vader getting annoyed, I thought.

 

 

I wasn't sure if a minifig could really express this motion well, but I was pleasantly surprised. I think turning the hand sideways was half the battle. The little lean did the rest.

 

 

I hadn't realized when I first built the hallway for the fight that I would need to look back along it for this shot. I faked it by blurring some black stuff and leaving a grey stretch that looks about as long as the space Anakin and Obi-wan have just fought in.

Notice the pylon from Dooku's hangar reappearing as a handy prop.

 

 

I'm not entirely sure this shot is necessary, but I was nervous about how well the two preceeding it would work so I put it in to help. The sound effect, I'll agree, isn't quite bang on.

 

 

Another super close up. Gotta love the minimum focal length on those Canon miniDV cameras.

I thought it necessary to emphasize how angry and frustrated he was getting, which is his weakness and the only chance Obi-wan had of walking away alive.

 

 

Text created in Freehand (lined up over the Clones title to get it just right) and imported in Photoshop and then After Effects. All animation and glowing done in After Effects.

 

 

Originally animated for an unused line ("To save the future, make sacrifices we must."), but it worked so much better with this line that I swtiched it. I haven't used Yoda's legs here, his waist is attached directly to a bendy piece to give him that extra degree of movement.

 

 

I did this one fairly early on and have forgotten a lot about it.

I've always liked swordfights that break off mid-way and that the combatants are forced to hunt for each other. Plus it was chance to throw in a cool Jedi jump. Anakin was held by an armature but since he's hardly on-screen for the leap it was easy to take out.

I added a yellow-orange colourcast in After Effects.

I ran into a problem in scenes where lightsabers extended beyond the end of the frame - the feathering of the core would start near the edge and the glow would apply itself, sometimes partway along the blade. You can see it here in the top right. The answer was to make the saber creation layers bigger and then combine and crop them on a separate layer that sat above the footage. Although occaisonally I forgot my miracle cure.

 

 

Early setup test

This one was set up on a light table and lit entirely from below, through layers of red and orange acetate (red only made it a pinky glow). The shot looks a bit rougher because it's darker overall (video needs as much light as possible) and it's red, which most commercial cameras don't seem to handle very well.

I adjusted the levels a bit in After Effects afterward but that's pretty much all there was to it.

Steam was an After Effects plugin.

 

 

The Republic ship I shot on a dolly that I moved past a stationary camera. It was mounted on a blob of Silly Putty that allowed me to angle it as it approached the camera. Greenscreen.

The Starfighter was mounted on a stick with Silly Putty and tilted around. Greenscreen and some hand-masking. The engines are a particular sort of lens flare.

The Death Star construction was originally shot for a Bilbringi establishing shot that was axed but blew up quite well for this shot. Handmasked in Photoshop.

The sun was a lens flare.

I think one of the things that works really well here is that the elements of the background (Republic ship, Death Star, starry background) all move, and move at slightly different speeds to give a sense of moving around in a space.

The version that played at Brickfest didn't have the sun or the Death Star and suffered for it. I love this shot now.

 

 

Shot at a bizarre and irreproduceable angle. I could have tried it straight up but it just would have been a hassle. Lit from the side and below with acetate-covered lights.

A slight variation over the course of shooting made it really hard to take out the armature that lowered Anakin from the background on the left. Luckily, the steam covers up a lot of the wavering. Go steam!

 

 

The unfinished poster

So there were a lot of things that I wanted in this thing that I didn't manage to do. One I haven't mentioned yet is a sequence where the newborns are separated and Luke is taken away. Aimee did a really great emotional reading but I didn't have the time to animate it or, as it turned out, the space for it in the trailer. Thankfully I didn't have any vacation time coming up or I would have made the whole damn movie and just selected clips for the trailer afterward.

 

The happiest accident of all: the music

I knew I wanted that opening music. I knew I wanted that Republic theme. I figured Duel of the Fates would finish it off but I didn't like just leaving it like that. In the real trailers, the music changes quite often and since I'd managed about as many cuts visually speaking I figured I could at least try it musically as well. The problem was that I didn't have any time left. I thought the trailer was just a bunch of junk thrown together and had no cohesive thread at all.

So after staying up all night, I came home from work at lunch on postmark day and sorted through everything I had for Star Wars music, even checking a track of Shadows of the Empire I have. I listened to the beginning of each track for a few seconds, then the middle, then the end. Nothing. Finally, there was a bit from ESB that sounded promising so I slapped it in after the battle sequence and adjusted Duel of the Fates to accommodate it.

It fit perfectly! I have not moved it since then. The fact that it falls exactly on the scene changes as it does is entirely happenstance. I immediately reversed my whole opinion of the thing and sent it to Todd Thuma for Brickfest! (And then sent it again after I realized I had left the lightsaber effects switched off for the final scene.)

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