My brother Phil wanted to enter a film for the Westwood Community High School (the high school I graduated from) Film Festival based on a short film he did for drama in Grade 8 called Space Wars: Episode Dumb. The original Episode Dumb was a spoof on the just released for video movie Star Wars: Episode One. I had done some titling for the original Episode Dumb, and helped Phil with all the technical stuff - using the camera, recording the titles onto the tape, etc... This time around, he chose to remake the film with a much longer (20 min.) and more detailed plot, and he wanted to see what I could do on the special effect end of things. After some research and the generous efforts of my friend Matt Rogers (he helped provide the software), I was able to guarantee that we could do light sabers, at least, and maybe even some cgi composites. What followed was an intense period of work in Adobe Premier and Photoshop. Using a process similar to the process used in the original Star Wars movies called "rotoscoping", we (Phil and I) took every frame of the light saber scene and added the saber effect over the stick props that Phil and the other actor were using. (Phil is the one on the right in the thumb above.) Phil and I often consider the many late nights we spent rotoscoping to be one of the hardest things we've ever done. I also figured out how to work composites in Bryce 5, and using Adobe Premier's powerful chromakey features, we were able to add cgi elements and backgrounds (via "green screen") to the film. Phil directed, his friends acted (without a script - it shows!), and after all the film was shot, I got to edit the whole thing in Premier, with Phil at my shoulder to tell me what he wanted. Titles were done in Premier, and we engineered all the sound effects and the musical score in Syntrillium's Cool Edit. The final film was burnt to DVD using 321 Studio's DVD X MAKER. When Phil presented the film at the Westwood Film Festival, the audience went nuts over the special effects and the obvious fun their peers were having. Phil took first prize at the festival, and Phil and I both agreed that this film would be the center piece of my portfolio. Continued...