Saturday, December 15, 2018

Let's Talk About STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI Behind The Scenes

If you follow my social media, you may or may not have seen that I made a video essay abut Star Wars: The Last Jedi. If you haven't heard and are interested in watching it, I'll embed it right here for you:
Now that you've hopefully watched it, I'd like to share some fun factoids, sources of inspiration, and any other Behind The Scenes content that may interest you! For starters, I made this video because I love The Last Jedi and felt like I had a lot to say on it which couldn't be expressed through a blog post. Secondly, I'd been considering making the foray back into YouTube and decided this might be a good start. I made it my goal to find something about the film which I hadn't seen covered extensively online while sharing my own interpretation of the film, and I think I was successful.

I figured I'd start with a script because an unscripted ramble would probably be disastrous and go on for far too long. That took about a week, I shared it with some people via social media, took their feedback into account, and then made revisions from there. That went on for about two-three weeks before I began recording. I was honestly surprised how long I wound up recording some sections due to mispronunciations and me fumbling over my own words. 

Here's a funny example:
On that note, an interesting tidbit is that I scrapped all my narration audio earlier this week and rerecorded the entire thing because I wasn't satisfied with the audio quality. It's honestly still not quite at the level I'd like, but I was pleased enough with it and wanted to meet the deadline of December 15th so I settled. I did this multiple times to be honest...
For those wondering, The Art of The Last Jedi was probably the best resource for me when writing the script aside from the film itself and requisite bonus features. I found a lot of information in there which helped the idea of the video take shape. If you loved The Last Jedi, I highly recommend the book as it's very insightful. It has plenty of gorgeous concept art and lots fascinating commentary from the filmmakers.

Other factoids:  

-I included many of the Star Wars trademarks such as an opening crawl and wipe transitions. The end credits are even in the style of a Star Wars film as well. In order to do that though, I knew I'd have to somehow use John Williams' main theme... Only if I used the actual audio, the video would surely get a copyright strike. I then decided to put together an a cappella arrangement as a work around by enlisting help from some vocalists at my local church. We recorded during the week of Thanksgiving break and it was the first part of the video which was finalized.
-Early on in the process I made the thumbnail and crawl. When writing the opening crawl, I looked to The Last Jedi's crawl as inspiration for the proper wording. As for the thumbnail, I made a more simplistic version, but it was recommended for me to work in a person's face because that would help the video get more views. I decided to impose Luke on top and then changed the lighting and coloring to better blend everything together. 
-If you watch Star Wars Rebels, you may have caught onto how the World Between Worlds aesthetic influenced this particular graphic. 

-The most time-consuming part of the process was probably searching for specific footage on the Internet. You would be amazed at how difficult it was to find certain clips without a watermark, and in some cases, I had to settle for standard definition because there was no HD version available. 

Otherwise, I don't have much else to share with you. I hope you enjoyed the video as well as this post, and I'll catch up on all my film reviews soon as I've seen about ten films since my last review.

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