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!

JJ Abrams is Directing Star Wars Episode VII, and Why that's a Good Thing

News broke today that JJ Abrams will be taking the helm of the newest Star Wars film, Episode VII. Due to Abrams' list of directing credits and his storytelling capabilities, this is a very good thing.

One of the things that I like about Abrams' style is that he shoots on film. Real film. The stuff that people keep saying is extinct. This is hopeful for Star Wars fans, because the series went south once Uncle George started shooting the films on his shiny new HD cameras:

Now I'm not saying that HD makes things bad. Only partly though. I'm saying that shooting in HD is easier to do than shooting with film. The turnaround time is faster. The image is cleaner. You can get 14+ stops of Dynamic Range with the RED EPIC. You can review what you're shooting as soon as it's been shot. It's just easier. And that easiness leads to complacency, and complacency shows when you're making a film.

The above image shows the stark contrast between the Original Trilogy and the prequel trilogy (it's not capitalized because it doesn't deserve it). I hope JJ Abrams uses actual models in his film, rather than just saying to throw in some CG and calling it good. The fans deserve more than that.

One of the things that I am concerned about with JJ Abrams taking the helm of this film is his excessive use of lens flares everywhere, and so our movie could end up looking like this:

I hope not. I hope he leaves those in the Star Trek universe where they belong. I trust that he'll make the right decisions when it comes to things like this.

And so there you have it. I can't wait for 2015 (seems like forever away). Make us pround, JJ, make us proud.

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: