Saturday, May 4, 2013

BTS: The Tatooine Lightsaw Massacre


Welcome to the delightful world of Star Wars fan films! Er... Horror film homages! Uh... let's try that again:


Welcome to the world of Star Wars horror films. Awful, awful horror films:




The video today is a fun trip through the past. It marks almost two years since filming.

In the fancy days of May 2011, a group of friends and I set out to film a scene from a feature film called The Gilliam Effect. It was going to be directed by my co-writer Spencer and I. We both synced in what we wanted and it was a team effort from the beginning.

The scene was a small cutaway that would serve as a joke to the type of campy films that the filmmakers in the movie would make. It was only intended to be a 15-20 second spot in the whole feature-length film.

After traveling up to Utah, we gathered a small cast and crew. Spencer's co-worker Eric provided the costumes - and also played the menacing Tusken Raider.

We drove everyone out to the Little Sahara sand dune national park in Western Utah. After several hours of affixing the complex costumes to our actors, and after losing a lot of light, we were able to get the few shots that were needed to complete the video.

Because of the difficulty from the loss of light, both Spencer and I had to direct two different actions at the same time to finish up the last few shots. I directed the screams of the hopeless innocents. Spencer directed the terrible wrath of the lightsaw wielding menace.

We shot a majority of the footage on a Canon T2I that we borrowed from our good friend Anthony Ambriz, but when our battery ran out we had to resort to filming with a crappy Canon PowerShot camera I had brought along to take stills. When placed together, it's obvious which camera was better, but since it was supposed to look crappy (with a VHS filter) anyway, we didn't really care.

After the sun went down and we couldn't film any longer, we went through the process of taking off the complicated costume and wrapping everything up. We were all starving by this point. The few crackers and veggies we had for craft services didn't cut it. We all headed to a local diner to relax and enjoy the fun day. The owner of the diner was really cool and the food was super fantastic.

This was seriously the most fun I have had shooting a video since film school and unfortunately it didn't continue on like my initial filmmaking dreams (more of that story to come later). Hopefully this sort of magic can happen again soon, and I have now made a commitment to post at least one video each week on my YouTube page.

With the development of my YouTube channel, and all the exciting stuff that we've been filming lately, it looks like we'll have a lot more goodies for you in the near future.

Stay tuned, and hit subscribe on my YouTube channel :)

(Behind The Scenes photos and video below!)

BTS Photo Slideshow:

BTS Video:

1 comments:

Unknown said...

Awesome! I was wondering if I was ever going to see what you guys filmed. It was great!