Star Wars: The Force Awakens Teaser Trailer!

Wow. Two years after LucasFilm was acquired by Disney and a new Star Wars film was announced, we finally have a teaser trailer for it! There has been a lot of speculation up until this point, but now we finally have some concrete moments from the film. What follows were the highlights for me.

First up is the soccer-ball droid. The design of its dome feel very 1970s inspired. Very minimalist in details and reminiscent of the droids from the original Star Wars. I think it's great!

Next up is the Stormtroopers. They're definitely not clones, because they're all different heights. This is a good thing. Shows that the Imperial Academy is still recruiting, even 30 years after the fall of the Empire. Also, the design looks futuristic enough, while still maintaining the resemblance to the original troopers. 

Next up is the X-Wing pilot. Apparently the pilot is Oscar Isaac's character, but I can't really tell. Haven't really seen him in a lot of stuff. But first things first. What's up with that helmet?! It looks like a bad fan-film, for Pete's sake! Almost like an old leather football helmet the way his cheeks are being hugged. I definitely would have preferred that they stick with the original design. But then again, a lot can happen in 30 years of design and use. I love the angle of this shot, though. It hearkens back to the original trilogy where you felt like you're in the cockpit with our heroes, rather that just observing from a distance, ala Prequels.

The reveal of the new X-Wings is awesome. The frame above looks like a great piece of concept art, but it is in fact a frame from the movie. I don't much care for how the wings split apart as they do, but it could grow on me. I do, however, like the blue paint jobs this time around. Red is awesome, but I prefer blue. The technology has evolved to the point where you can shoot a blue object on a bluescreen (who knows, maybe they used greenscreen instead?) I'm actually building a Blue Squadron right now, which I think is very timely. I love the composition of this shot as well. The layers are built up by the X-Wings themselves,  and to have them skimming across the surface of the water like that is great. Best shot in the trailer, for me.

And then we come to this shot. A dark-cloaked character stumbling through the snow, who then angrily ignites his lightsaber. We don't really know who this character is yet, but we know he wields the red, flame-like lightsaber that has a sort-of cross-guard on it, for some reason. Again, this shot feels like it was ripped straight from a mediocre fan-film, although the atmosphere in those woods looks pretty sweet.

 And lastly, we come to this shot. The good old Millennium Falcon, performing a high-G turn in the atmosphere of this desert planet, and getting shot at by TIE Fighters. You'll notice the radar dish is different in this film, because Lando knocked it off on their Death Star run in the Battle of Endor. The ship also looks proportioned a bit differently, as well. It looks like it's been on a diet, and is slimmer through the whole of the ship. Looks great though.

And that's pretty much everything that I liked about the teaser. This has definitely piqued my interest, and the interest of millions of people around the world since it came out yesterday. Stay tuned for more!

Video of the Week: Film Noir Storyboarding Assignment

This week's Video of the Week is my Film Noir Storyboarding Assignment. Check it out below:

Story Boarding Assignment from Bills Films on Vimeo.

I made this video last year as an assignment for my storyboarding class at BYU. The assignment was to take 10 words (which the professor gave us), and then put them together in an order that made sense, storyboard out the shots, shoot it, and edit it.

This assignment was a lot of fun for me to do, because there was no genre attached to the assignment, just cryptic words such as "eye," "gun," "light switch," etc... It was fun to associate a genre and a mood to these words, and then to storyboard the actual process. I had previously done a blog post about concept art and storyboarding, which has actually seen a lot of traffic for this blog, so if you're interested in reading it again, go here. Anyway.

I decided on a moody black and white (very grainy) look, hearkening back to the classic film noir films of the 1940s and 50s. I'm not saying that I achieved anything like unto those films (for one, those films are 4:3, not 2.35:1), but the mood comes across well. The idea for the girl's lips to be the only thing in color was taken from a few different sources, but mainly Schindler's List, where the only color in the film is the girl's red coat (not counting the ending scene). 

I shot the first three shots at night in our apartment. Instead of using smoke in order to see the light in shot #2, I used baby-powder. Turns out that with the grain you can barely see it. Oh well. Shots 4-8, and 10 were shot at BYU in the longest hallway I could find, and shot 9 was back at our apartment, for obvious reasons (although it doesn't really match the background. Probably should have filmed a background plate and then shot Brian in front of a greenscreen so that it would match better. Hindsight is 20-20).

Below are the storyboards that I came up with. And just a disclaimer, I don't claim to have any skill with drawing or any of that. Anyway:

Very rudimentary drawings, but they get the point across.

The smaller frame with the arrows on it means to zoom in. I didn't end up zooming in the film, but simply used a closeup instead.

As you can see, it's a very simple sequence. I originally storyboarded it a little out of order. And while I'm not that great at math, you'll notice there are only 9 boards, not 10. Couldn't find the other one.

Technical bits about the video: it was shot on the Panasonic GH2 with the (extremely slow) 14-140mm f/4-5.8 and the (a lot faster) 20mm f/1.7. Edited in Sony Vegas, and the music is from The Bourne Identity. Used the new Steadicam for one shot, and, as you can tell, I needed to do a LOT more practice with it.

Concept Art and Storyboarding

Not everything revolves around post-production, as much as I would like it to. In fact, most films spend the majority of their time pre-production, or the development stage. This is where lots of fun stuff (an some not-so-fun stuff) happens, and one of those things is storyboarding. Used more often in the "old" days of making movies, drawing storyboards is the process of drawing what each shot will look like, so as to convey the director's vision to the rest of the crew.

George Lucas did this in the 1970's when nobody knew what he was talking about when he discussed his big ideas for the Star Wars Universe. He contracted Ralph McQuarrie to paint some concept art so he could convince the studio execs at Fox what he was talking about. Below are some examples of his first concept paintings from Star Wars:

Very cool stuff. Obviously, it worked for George Lucas. 

Now on to some storyboard examples:

Anyway. I am taking a storyboarding class right now and we have to storyboard a scene for our final project, and so I went into Adobe Illustrator and created a 9.4"x4" storyboard template (which is a 2.35:1 aspect ratio) with room for a scene number and some lines for a description. And that's free for you to download and use in the production of your film! It's on an 8.5"x11" piece of paper to make it easy. So just right-click, and save image as...