When I was a kid there couldn’t have been many things that would have been cooler to own than a real life lightsaber. Sadly the still didn’t get around to inventing them yet, (probably a good thing really), but back when Star Wars was released in 1977, home computers were only just beginning to appear in homes and were barely powerful enough play tic tac toe, let alone generate movie style special effects. Fast forward to 2009 and computers have got powerful enough that we can have a half decent go at making those special effects, à la Star Wars style, ourselves. Now that I have kids of my own, two of whom are big Star Wars fans, I thought it would be cool to get them in the garden acting out a short Star Wars demonstration and then add the special effects to it. Where would I start?

First, I shot some scenes with my digital cammcorder and imported the raw footage into my PC, editing it together using Adobe’s video editing suite, Premiere CS4. Once I was happy with the basic composition, I imported the finished clip into another excellent Adobe application, After Effects, also from the CS4 suite to add the special effects.

The first thing to tackle was the light saber glow effect itself. I’ve played around with doing this before entirely manually in Photoshop, but this time I found an excellent After Effects plugin on the Video Copilot website including a full tutorial that helps you get the look and feel right, but basically the method is the same and involves a process called rotoscoping, an animation technique where you trace over live-action video footage frame by frame. It’s very time consuming since you literally have to forward one frame, draw on the saber, forward another frame, draw on the saber, etc. The excellent Video Copilot plug in does make it as easy to do as possible but given that the clip below has around 18 seconds of actual lit lightsaber footage in it this still equates to around 450 individual video frames where the lightsaber blade needs to be drawn on.

Next was the blaster fire, for which I actually used the same plug in just setting the colour to red. This had to be drawn on also, although this was made easier using “tweening”, a computer aided animation technique where you set a start keyframe and an end keyframe, and the computer fills in all the frames in between.

After that was done, I needed some sound effects. I trawed the web looking for a suitable lightsaber hum sound, together with some that changed volume and pitch appropriate to waving the lightsaber around, and finally the blaster firing sound and lightsaber clash sounds. Once I found sounds I was happy with it was fairly easy to import them onto the timeline  and line them up with the footage so they were in sync.

For a finishing touch, some Star Wars music – the piece is from the beginning of the Darth Maul vs. Qui-Gon Jinn and Obiwan Kenobi dual from Star Wars Episode 1 – and finally I added a basic muzzle flash, and also one on the lightsaber itself in sync with the blaster fire hitting it just for a bit of added realism.

The resulting video is below. Forty seven seconds long of which only about eighteen or so seconds has actual special effects and in total took around 4-5 hours to complete, although much of that was learning the ropes on the After Effects suite. The kids really enjoyed it though. Ok, who am I trying to kid? I had a great time making it too. It’s not perfect but I’m happy with it for a first attempt. I hope to improve on it some time soon with a Darth Maul style dual ended lightsaber video, but that may be some way off yet