It was roughly 2003. I was in ninth grade, and my friend Chris, several years older, approached me for help with his short film. He called it Star Wars: The Gifted, and it was an attempt to bring Star Wars into the real world (as we know it). There’s a slow and ongoing effort to remaster the film, to build out the bones of the larger story that we had initially planned. But more important than the film itself or the story behind it is what it represents. It was…
Tag: swtg
Vanity Project: First Hurdles
No small part of the issue with remastering Star Wars: The Gifted is what’s left of it. There’s no original footage—only the final cut of the film. That means that everything we did to the original tape—capturing, rendering, visual effects, the whole shebang—is there to be worked around. SWTG was shot on NTSC VHS tape, which in and of itself is a poor medium to capture from. Wikipedia tells me that VHS records 333×480 pixels per frame at 30 frames per second. The source footage was captured by Chris in…
Vanity Project
2012-2013 is the 10-year anniversary of the first student film I made. I did choreo, cinematography and visual effects for my buddy Chris’ Star Wars fan film in the second half of grade nine. Armed with a VHS camcorder and Photoshop 6, we put together 17 minutes of fanboy magic that have formed some of my fondest memories of high school. Chris posited in the film that George Lucas was a historian and activist, not a fiction writer, and came to Earth from Coruscant to spread knowledge of the Force and…