The People vs. George Lucas

Premiering on March 12th at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival in Austin, Texas, The People vs. George Lucas explores the often conflicted dynamic between Lucas and his fans. I'm looking forward to seeing this, but what's even more exciting is the fact that my first Star Wars: Uncut animation in the opening and closing montages of the trailer.

Star Wars Uncut - Scene 134

Here's my third and final submission to the Star Wars: Uncut project, this time in the style of Terry Gilliam's Monty Python animations. I've been planning on trying out Gilliam's style for a while now and this scene (taken from the Leia hologram sequence) was visually quite straight forward which allowed me to take it out of context and drop in a couple of silly gags. All of the images used were culled from various sites (see links below) and the vinyl crackle and yawn were sourced, again, from Soundsnap. There's minimal animation, so it was a lot quicker to put together than my previous submissions. Great fun though, I'm raring to try this style out on some other ideas.

Original images - Alec Guiness, Man in chair, Gramophone, Yoda, record sleeve, wallpaper, carpet, table, Lady in bonnet.

Star Wars Uncut: Scene 248

Here's my second submission to Star Wars: Uncut project, inspired by The Beatles film, Yellow Submarine, directed by George Dunning. It was great fun to re-design the characters in the style of the film, especially Chewbacca in the part of Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D. There's a bit more movement in the figures as opposed to my last submission, but I've yet to graduate to any fully-fledged acrobatics. All of the interiors and backgrounds are taken from the film and 're-imaging' in Photoshop and the whole thing was put together in Flash. Sound effects where obtained from the rather marvellous Soundsnap.com and the voices where provided by myself (with apologies to any Liverpudlians out there wondering why the cast have Birmingham accents!). Not sure just yet if I'll take on another scene, but I have a few ideas on how I'd like to render it, so watch this space.

Star Wars Uncut

Busy on my second animation for Star Wars: Uncut. Here's a sneak preview.

Star Wars: Uncut

Star Wars: Uncut is the brainchild of Vimeo and Boxee creator Casey Pugh. The idea is to re-create the film, fifteen seconds at a time. How does it work? First, you claim your scene, there are 473 to choose from, you then have thirty days to make it in whatever fashion you want. Viewer's can then rate the videos with the Vimeo's 'Like' system and the most popular will be edited together to form an entirely fan-made version of the film. Here's my submission.

I chose to base my animation on the manga comic adaption by Hisao Tamaki to reflect the close relationship Star Wars has always had with the comic medium. From the original Marvel adaption by Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin, to the current selection of titles published by Dark Horse, Star Wars comics are often as cherished as the films themselves. I selected and loosely re-drew various figures from Tamaki's books and then created individual background's in Photoshop. For the TIE fighter, I sourced a 3D model on the excellent Google SketchUp and re-drew the desired angle. The animation was then put together in Adobe Flash. To abide with the submission rules I recorded all the sound effects and speaking parts myself (please forgive my Alec Guinness impersonation). It's been a really rewarding project to create and I've already bagged my next scene, which I promise will be something completely different.