Special FX
15 November 2005 in Blog | Comments enabled

This week on Adventures in Filmmaking, we showed a lot of our past special effects tests. As I was cataloging hours upon hours of footage for this podcast as well as future episodes, I was amazed at how much footage we actually have. We must have spent a very long time doing this stuff.

In 1994, I was given an 8mm Hitachi video camera. I first started out doing stop motion animation with my Star Wars figures. I was and still am a huge collector of action figures and was always amazed at the science fiction specials showing how Ray Harryhausen did his stuff. I also was fascinated by how the guys at ILM animated the AT-AT and the Taun taun. (Empire is my favorite Star Wars film. “Luke, I am your father.” Does it get much better than that?) So that is what sparked us to try and recreate those things. One short I did not show was a complete recreation of the cantina scene from A New Hope. Maybe we’ll throw that online in the coming weeks.

Then we moved on to forced perspective stuff. It really wasn’t practical to be used in one of our films but it was fun to play with. The thought of actually having a full size X-wing was very cool. One of my sister’s friends saw this week’s podcast and asked why the scene with the X-wing was so special. Jenny (my sister) had to inform her that the X-wing was a toy… we don’t actually have one that big. Fun.

And finally, the lightsabers. So much fun… to watch. Not fun to rotoscope. Thanks to theforce.net. They have a number of tutorials on there. That’s how I learned to do it way back then and that is how I still do it, though now I know a somewhat easier way using Adobe After Effects. There is nothing like seeing yourself holding a lightsaber and swinging it around. It’s almost worth the hours upon hours in front of the computer.

We’ve been getting some awesome feedback on the podcasts. Remember, you can email us at US@dawsbrothers.com. Ask questions, make comments, or just say hello and that you are watching.

Jeremiah