With the Official Episode III poster released yesterday, and the trailer
to be realeased tomorrow I've been on something of a Star Wars high
lately. Richie had promised himself he wouldn't get hyped for the
final Star Wars movie, but I preach about Star Wars with the same
enthusiasm a Christian might imagine Jesus talking about his dad
with. Even he is pumped now.
I was inhaling all the latest Star Wars news, as I do like the junky I
am, I noticed that something interesting had happened in Star Wars
Galaxies. Now, that is news. I played Star Wars
Galaxies quite fervently upon it's release, but it's sweetness quickly
wore off when I reached a little more than a month of gameplay.
It is boring, horribly boring, after that first month. There is an
Imperial Guild that has, apparently, become among the best in the
'galaxy.' In an event that is enough to make this Star Wars
junky's shorts wet, SOE did a wonderful thing. They sent Darth Vader to visit the guild. That link I just posted is filled with pictures and more detail of the event.
All this Star Warsyness has made me revisit the Star Wars movie that
Richie, Shadow, Beekz, and I made in 2002. For images from the
movie be sure to click Read More.
that alone is worth the price of admission.
I'm thinking about uploading it to the site for all to make fun of, but
I'm still not sure what I'm going to do with it. We had several
problems with it; I bought all the material for our costumes and gave
the material to our costume designer only to have her move to Germany
therefore no costumes, time with our main villain was severely limited,
and we had no money. We put together some lightsabers from pipes
and things we bought at the local hardware store, and that was the
extent of our props. None of us had any experience with ANYTHING.
I'm actually fairly proud of how it turned out. The framing of
shots, and most of what came of my directing (I think) turned out
really well. Most of the acting performances also turned out
really well. Unfortunately we didn't have a way of artificially
lighting anything, so it turned out a bit dark in some scenes.
Also, Shadow had a problem with laughing. This was exemplified in
this three second shot where Shadow had to run toward the camera,
towards my possibly dieing body. He could not do this without
laughing. We spent two hours, on this three second shot.
Even in the one that was the best you can see him smiling.
The peak of problems all culminated on the last day. Our Darth
Sakura had to leave, and the movie was going to be left
unfinished. I was going to edit the end to lead to a sequel, but
I was still pretty dissapointed. We had taken beeks car up to
this mountan (you can see a screen of what we did film in the picture
above) to film this last scene. Beeks grabbed the equipment and
threw it into his trunk, and he went to unlock the doors. At that
moment, he realized that he had thrown his keys in the trunk with the
equipment. We were stuck on the top of a mountain, locked out of
our car. We spent another two hours up there, until a guy that I
knew helped us break into his car. I kept my camera rolling
through all this crazyness at the end.
We thought of editing this all together with the bloopers and
everything as the fanfilm that went wrong. Still might be a good
idea. Who knows?
Ultimately though, this was one of the most fun experiences I ever
had. I still love the script, and am thinking about even trying
to redo it at some point. Last time my favorite scene didn't even
get filmed.
