STAR WARS
Super 8 Animation

Running Length - 3 min. 30 sec.

Production Details

This was the very first film I ever made. I was a member of the media club in junior high school grade 7. A classmate of mine Jeff Kushner and I had high aspirations and wanted to make our own STAR WARS movie. We would use Kenner's action figures as actors. It would be shot on Super 8 film. We only had three and a half minutes to work with, so we chose our favorite scenes from STAR WARS and we would recreate them. The camera had a single-frame feature, so we would animate our toys and ships.

• I drew my own 20th Century Fox logo and colored it with pencil crayons for the fanfare. We shot this.
• For the famous phrase "A Long Time Ago In A Galaxy Far Far Away..." I applied blue stick-on letters to a piece of black cardboard and shot it with the camera. It turned out grey
• We shot the letters from the STAR WARS soundtrack album for the main title. We couldn't make it zoom away like on the real movie, but it did the job.
• Starfields were simply a black piece of fabric with white dots drawn on it.
• Laser beams and lightsabers were created in post-production by scratching a line across the emulsion of each film frame with a sharp pin at the proper places. The light of the projector shon through the scratches, giving the effect of white beams of light. We filled in some of the scratch lines with ink to have different colours of lasers.
• Luke's landspeeder was shown speeding across the desert floor thanks to an off-camera push and the expansive yellow carpet of our school libary.
• The famous scene of Han Solo shooting Greedo in the Cantina was recreated with the appropriate action figures, and the Kenner Cantina Playset backdrop. We used single-frame animation with the figures, which were not very articulate.
• We also did the lightsaber duel with Ben Kenobi and Darth Vader, making sure to color Vader's lightsaber beam pink in post-production.
• The surface of our Death Star was created with white styrofoam packing materials. We had one diecast X-Wing ship and one TIE Fighter for the small-scale battle.
• We included a preview of The Empire Strikes Back by shooting a Boba Fette and Lando figure against the cover of an early-release novel-sized Empire comic adaptation.
• The movie was shown with the audio accompaniment of Meco's Star Wars disco theme played on cassette.
• A copy of this movie no longer exists. One of our cats got ahold of the reel of Super-8 film and tore it apart. I was disappointed at the time.