Surfer Dude Studios

Not another Star Wars spoof?

Traditionally September, marking the return to university and prior to any serious course work, was the time when less serious video projects would be undertaken. September 1999 was the start of 3rd year and thus with extensive experience now gained by the team, any project under taken had to feel like a challenge, and part of a continuing learning curve. The opportunity for continued learing was available as the video society had purchased a pc with Adobe software (Adobe Premier 5 and Adobe Photoshop 5 - this was before Adobe content was delivered in the Creative suite collections), in an effort to improve the societies offering and perceived seriousness as a legitimate video production society capable of matching other external university media production societies.

The major release of the summer of 1999 was Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. It was inevitable that its critical mauling versus its box office success, and the teams childhood enthusiasim for the original trilogy rendered it a prime candidate for satirical commentary. In short, to express our disappointment with it, it would be the target of our vengeful mirth.

It did also present an opportunity to embrace the possibilities offered by the new digital editing suite. A visual effects heavy movie, would require a visual effects heavy parody. However this was our first time using the digital editing suite. Whatever we attempted, apart from being a learning experience had to be light enough to learn, but heavy enough to achieve a recognisable Star Wars visual motif, and to demonstrate and evolution in skills and talent.

Up until this point, all our editing had been undertaken in a linear Super-VHS to Super-VHS editing suite. This had limited functionality, the most successful project we had undertaken in this respect was the bond spoof The Goodie never Dies. The new editing suite was equiped with a Super-VHS video recorder connected via an internal capture card to a customised pc, installed with the new software. The video society's former president had spent the summer setting up the editing suite and had gained the most experience from it in a short time. He was also starting on a post-graduate course at the university, so was still available to ensure a smooth hand over to the new society management.

Pre-production

Star Wars (TPM) had been an early summer release so we had plenty of material already in our heads, enabling us to hit the ground running upon our return and get content shot quickly. There would be no in-depth script, and the film outline was thrashed out quickly over an evening in the student union. Focus would go on capturing the spirit of the Star Wars films, and gaining experience in the digital editing suite, while other student teams focused on writing and filming, our aim was to get the jump on the others and get into the new editing suite first. We also had the advantage that the new students, first year and second year, joining the society were to be enforced to use the standard linear set up, partly to train them in the basics, partly because there was not enough time for everyone to get access to the digital suite, and to weed out anyone with no long term interest in the society.

The decision was taken to focus on a few key digital effects.

• Opening and closing titles
• Opening narrative crawl
• Wipes for scene transitions
• A scene with a ghostly figure
• A lightsaber fight

These we were reasonably confident of acheiving, with the lightsaber scene deemed the hardest. Clearly first time using the suite we were not going to deliver an epic space battle, but topping and tailing whatever we delivered with Star Wars branded opening and closing titles and a scrawling narrative would set the mood and the parody subject effectively. Use of the scene transition wipes and use of the Star Wars: TMP soundtrack, would further suspend disbelief and achieve the necessary motifs and aesthetics.

Production - and a broom fight in a car park

The scenario decided on was simply two rival street sweepers meet, use their brooms like lightsabers to fight it out over the right to clean an area. The protagonist is almost defeated, but after a visitation from an advice giving ghost, turns the fight around, vanquishes the antagonist, and carries on with his work. Nothing too complicated or dialogue heavy, perfect for a short film.

The original idea was based into some online research. A tutorial, viewable here, demonstrated how to rotoscope a lightsaber effect by exporting the footage to adobe photoshop as a filmclip format, creating a new layer, and then animating a white bar, frame by frame, over where the lightsaber should be.

This layer could then be manipulated with a few photoshop effects (blur, and colour lighting prominantly), then imported back into Adobe Premier. An initial test revealed several issues with this:

1. Capture - Importing the video content was a long process. This required playing the VHS-C footage via a cassette adaptor while the computer captured it in real time. This was preferable to directly linking the VHS-C camcorder as it resulted in a higher resolution capture.
2. Exporting - The process of outputting the captured video footage to an editable photoshop file.
3. Office hours - Well the union staff do have homes to go to.
4. Storage space - The new digital suite was shared between several groups and projects, there was unlikely to be enough storage space.

Basically we did not have enough time, and enough HDD storage space on the digital editing suite to accomplish our full vision. A decision was taken to completely reduce the lightsaber effect down to one single sequence. The antagonist towards the end of the fight would accidentally turn his broom into a lightsaber, shocking himself and the protagonist. He would silently apologise, turn the lightsaber off, and they would carry on fighting with normal brooms.

Filming for the main broom fight was completed over a Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday in early September. With no real script, or martial arts training, other than a few ideas and a few simple roughly practiced moves, mostly consisting of hit high, hit low, repeat three times then jump or duck. It's a miracle no one got injured.

The location for the shoot was the university flats car park. It was largely empty over the course of the three days shooting, and in keeping with the theme, was a wide road space with no risk of fast moving traffic. The intention was to quickly move off this to the lawn space behind the flats, as this was more private and the police were less likely to be called to three guys hitting each other with brooms in this space (if that was a risk at all).

Follow up shots were filmed the following week, with the night time arrival of the antagonist, and the interior shots of the protagonist receiving his naan bread (an in joke at the time) for the finale. With everything in place production was closed and the editing process began.

Editing and effects - or "The Bar's closed!"

Three of the universities media focused societies shared an office space in the student union. The video society, the radio society, and the university newspaper were all located in the union across from two student bars. These mostly operated during 9 to 5 office hours, but were open until the union bars closed, usually at midnight, maybe 2 am at the weekends. At this time the whole building would close. This proved to be the greatest downfall for the whole project. Project work by its nature is not a 9 - 5 endeavour, and the obvious case of course lectures, classes and coursework taking priority over a society project, meant disruptions at odd times, where work would have to be packed up for an hour or two, and then returned to, breaking the creative process. Although this was the start of the year there were classes, lectures and workshops to be taken.

Time, or the lack of it, was the project's greatest limiter. At its worst, the project was faced with exporting a rough cut to ensure there was a final result, but looking at 5 hours to export when the union would close in 3. This meant all rooms, bars, offices empty, and everything switched off. Not ideal at all. There was insufficient time to capture, edit, export, create effects, import, and then export the final cut. While the amount of hours spent working on the project was significant, it was always in short bursts with no real continuity. The final cut itself had to be exported back onto a Super VHS video cassette, so this meant rendering the project, and then exporting back onto a cassette.

In an effort to deliver something, the video was exported in the final cut viewable above. The final cut itself had to be exported back onto a Super-VHS video cassette, so this meant rendering the project, and then exporting back onto a cassette. The lack of hard drive space meant no projects could be kept on the suite longer than a week. The intention had been to return to it and integrate the "broken broom" sequence as it was described above with a brief lightsaber effect. This would have meant re-capturing the partially completed project. However in the run up to the videos premiere the new digital editing suite was widely used by several teams, and broke down. There was to be no more projects completed on the digital editing suite for a very long time. And for some of us, never again.

Release - or the lights don't work.

The video society had an opening project at the start of the year every year for the first year students. In an effort to achieve bonding and to quickly emerse newcomers in the practices of making a video they were challenged to submit a short (under 5 minute) film to an in society competition. The premieres were always held in a lecture theatre on a Wednesday evening before the mid-term October break, giving roughly one month to script, film and edit.

The video society meetings were fortnightly on a Monday, so a decision was taken early on to show it on the Monday meeting before the premieres on the Wednesday. The Premiere evening was always an exhausting affair. Most of the films were either too experimental, too rushed, to amatuer, or just outright awful, and most over-ran the 5 minute length. 1999 was also made worse by the fact that the society had received some sponsorship for new cameras and the editing suite, so every couple of films a trailer for the Blair Witch Project had to be played.

In some ways our decision to show the film "out of competition" as it were, was the sensible one, it would be the only film shown on the Monday, would not get lost in amongst the other films, and given that the competition itself was (as we thought) focussed on the first years, not right to undermine their evening.

However, on the Monday, it was impossible to dim the lecture hall lights to view the video on the big screen. As we discovered security had to be informed prior to lectures and events that required the lights to be dimmed to enable it, as lighting had to be adequate in the event of a fire. It was virtually impossible to view the final cut of the film on the big screen. A thoroughly disappointing evening and premiere.

Retrospective

18 years down the line this is not a video, or rather subject, I'd return to. The disappointment with the prequels, and the model of media saturation typical of today's movie franchises, plus a proliferation of Star Wars parody material, (makes) this is an exhausted sub-genre. But never the less it remains this was the opening of pandora's box moment. Once you embrace digital, you just can't go back.

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Street Sweeper Crew Member

The biggest issue with looking back at Street Sweeper, and it's biggest fault is the subject of the lampoonery itself - Star Wars. Parodying Star Wars is almost a sport now. Family Guy and Robot Chicken have run a trilogy of specials each. The prequels critical disappointment has even led to a total mockery of the franchise, with Mr Plinket's reviews of the films not only being exceptionally brutal, but raising valid points and enought points to be often longer than the films themselves.

Now with the franchise firmly in the hands of Disney and adhering to the current movie franchise model of planning releases long (decades) into the future, a Star Wars parody feels cheap, easy and unconvincing.

In terms of what we were trying to learn and achieve also, the topic and technology was moved on also. The original attempt to rotoscope lightsabers has been widely covered now, and more successfully than anything we could have accomplished then. Freddieview's Jedi A-holesand The Jedi A-holes Strike Back is probably the best example of what can be accomplished (outwith the franchise itself) - and frankly funnier than anything we came up with.

In addition shooting the planned ghost sequence was hurried and didn't work. The idea was to film the actor from a fixed point of view position, then once he had completed his scene, for him to exit the shot while the camera continued filming. The two sequences of footage would be layered, with the top layer with the actor having an oppacity of approximately 50%, and a blue filter, no need for chroma keying with this idea. Unfortunately the background from the point of view shot was the sky. This was the very issue that caused the makers of Return of the Jedi to change Luke Skywalkers lightsaber from blue to green, so that it could be seen against the blue sky background in the sarlac pit sequence. The actor in the ghost shot repeated the joke in another film a couple of years later, but this time with more success. Filming this time against a wall with a darkened window and a wooden vine plant frame, and wearing blue clothing to give himself a natural blue hue.

He also came up with a far better joke of using a puppet in a yoda esque role. In that sequence the apprentice character asks it for advice, before telling him to take his request seriously, at which point the camera pans out to reveal the puppets human operator, who casually throws it away, stops doing the yoda voice, and carries on giving advice. Even against other amatuer productions the jokes in Street Sweeper come over as a little tired and rushed in their delivery these days.

It's not what you know - it's who

The release was also a disaster. At the video society competition evening, several lecturers turned up, much to the surprise of the crew involved in the project, and as we had already shown our video we were conspicuously absent from all the entries. In some ways it was easy for us to drop off the radar following that. The evening also signaled the end of the video society. A lot of the older students had submitted entries to the competition, and the society committee largely awarded all the prizes for the evening to themselves, in flagrant disregard for the spirit in which the competition had been held in the preceeding years. This discouraged most of the younger students and membership collapsed following that.

In addition the new editing suit remained broken. In retrospect, the number of videos being edited on it over that month long period, meant that it was virtually on all the time, and probably chocked full of render files and resource files in need of deletion. The video suite was also because it was a society computer, rather than a university computer, not covered by any IT support or warranty. With no real membership, and no equipment, other than two S-VHS cameras, and priority access to a university 8mm camera (but no facilities for editing 8mm film) the video society pretty much folded after that.

For myself and the rest of the crew involved in the production since we were now in third year, the linear video to video editing suite was now a distant memory, and as we had access to the mac suite and ths to Final Cut Pro software used by the university courses we no longer really needed the video production society, anything we created after that was university course work and spare time was anything away from digital editing. We did however experiment with assembling a computer ourselves out of largely spare parts and installing Premiere 5 on it, but realisitcally this set up never worked, the spare parts used were just not fit for purpose. The loss of the video society's equipment was no real loss to us, particularly as we had access to two reasonable quality VHS-C cameras, and the university equipment. However it remained that this was our first digital experience and going forward would prove invaluable.

What also proved helpful was the agile methodology by which the project was delivered. There was no linear, have an idea, write script, revise script, story board, plan, film, edit, design effecrs, include effects, publish, and deliver approach. Anyone familiar with the story of the production of Mad Max: Fury Road will know that filming was started with an uncompleted script. Storyboards were used to start filming and the theory that you should be able to watch a film with the sound off, and still have a strong semblance of what the plot is and what is happening should be achieved. In many ways film development is similar to software and web development. The desired out come is known, but the means of achieving it is flexible and often feeds back into itself.