Video of the Week: The Fight

To the literally several people who frequent my blog, I have decided to spotlight one of our videos per week, and just go through the process of how we made it. So here it goes.

This week's Video of the Week goes to The Fight. We filmed this back around Christmas of 2005 (back when we had a dial-up connection!). Just a bunch of guys fighting with lightsabers. This was originally made for the first ever "Noob Film Competition" at the Star Wars Fan Site TheForce.net, which it won.



We filmed this in an afternoon at our local church. Back then we were shooting on the Canon GL-1, which was an excellent camera. I loved the manual controls on that thing. Anyway. There were only three of us there, and so when all three of us were in the shot, the camera was just on a tripod, and then when Brian "died", he operated the camera.

Props were just the plastic lightsabers that you can get at Walmart, with the blades taken out and 3/4" PVC stuck in there as the blades. I then painted the blades with bright orange construction paint so that the blades would be easier to see in post when it came time to rotoscope them. I then used packing tape (one strip to go up the whole length of the blade) to protect the orange paint from chipping. It's been a long time, but I think I even poured sand into the lightsaber handles and poured hot-glue on top of that to add some weight to the handles so that it was more balanced when you were swinging them around.

The force choke effect was done by me standing on a chair while Tyler acted like he was choking me, and then we filmed a background plate (all with the camera on a tripod), and then in post I just roto'd the chair out.

The opening logo was made in 3DS Max. Editing was done in Premiere, and the rotoscoping was done in After Effects (back then it was version 5.5!), using Ryan Wieber's first lightsaber method. (He has since updated that method with a more precise and less monotonous method). This was on our Christmas break from school, and so I sat down and knocked out the rotoscoping in about 4 days.

We all had a lot of fun making this one, and maybe one day we'll do a sequel?

Some other great lightsaber fight videos include Ryan vs. Dorkman I and II:





And Duality: