Light Saber????

[inveterate]

I'm doing a school projects on special effects in movies, and would really like to produce a short clip with Light Saber Battle. I'm not sure what it requires to do that. I have studio equipment and most editing software available and 3D studio. But i've got no idea how to chain them together to produce the light. Does anyone know the basic process, or even an elaborate one, THX...

 

[damonpip]

Try this: http://www.alienryderflex.com/rotoscope/

 

[Tu13erhead]

A friend of mine made a Star Wars movie using Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects. Took a lot of editing, but came out really well.

 

[azel]

Do not try this, though!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050525/ap_en_mo/star_wars_sabers

 

[fbrdphreak]

Heh, IIRC in the original Star Wars movies they used a long rod that had rotating mirrors on it and shined lights over the sabers to reflect the light just right. They used like a dozen D-cell batts and got very hot during usage apparently :Q

 

[AluminumStudios]

The most direct way to do it is a bit tedious but doesn't require a lot of editing skill.

Load your video clip into Adobe Premiere. Export it as Filmstrip (.flm), open it in Photoshop, then frame by frame you can just use the line tool to draw glowing lines over top of the sticks you used in the footage. Save the .flm (you'll need to flatten it, make sure not to save it as .psd by mistake or you'll never be able to get it into Premiere as video footage again.) Open the edited .flm in Premiere and viola - you have a lightsaber fight instead of a stick fight.

I recommend only saving a few seconds of footage as .flm at a time. If you do too much it will kill Photoshop while trying to open it. Also, if you experience a crash or mess up after editing 50 frames it's not as bad as having edited 300 in the same file.

 

[inveterate]

wo, THX lOTZ