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There are many inhabitants in the Star Wars universe eagerly anticipating the final installment of the Star Wars saga, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. At the recent Celebration III Star Wars convention in Boston, George Lucas, who hadn't been to a Star Wars Convention in 18 years, made an appearance, and also detailed plans to bring Star Wars to the small screen by way of a 30 minute animated show as well as a live action show. Some consider Star Wars fans to be rabid enthusiasts about everything Star Wars and Star Wars related, but the ultimate fans have gone on to do some pretty incredible things in their own right.
One of them is Shane Felux, a digital designer based in the Washington, D.C. area who, in his spare time, (he is principal and sole employee at Panic Struck Productions in the D.C. area) spent the last three years working on a Star Wars fan film that eclipses most of the fan films that have been dedicated to Star Wars.
His film, Star Wars Revelations, and available for download from various websites on the Internet, is 40 minutes in length and features some of the coolest animation and effects seen in a fan film. What is really mind blowing is that since Felux released Revelations on the Internet two weeks ago, it has been downloaded nearly one million times, including more than 300,000 downloads for the DVD version of the film, which sits at around 3.5GB.
Production
Making a 40 minute film in one's spare time is no easy task. Making a film that has the look and feel of the art coming out of ILM is a huge undertaking that Felux (who served as executive producer and director of Revelations and played Cade in the movie) and his cast of actors and Internet artists, appeared to have pulled off. Shooting off and on over the course of two years with a Canon XL1s DV camera that he bought on eBay, Felux was able to shoot a total time of two and a half weeks. The film was assembled in Felux's basement with Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 running on a white box 3.2GHz Pentium 4 with 2GB RAM, a dual head Matrox graphics card and an NVIDIA Geforce card. He also had 2TB of data storage.
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| On the set. |
All the actors who appeared in Revelations worked for free, as did the animators and compositing artists who worked on the film. Some actors drove four hours each weekend to participate in a shooting. To produce a film about the Star Wars universe, and to get it done with very high quality, with little resources, Felux turned to the Internet I(and his own pockets) , posting help wanted ads in Star Wars, animation, and special effects forums. Initially, Felux got responses from quite a few folks, and initially started working with about 40 artists from around the world. However working for free didn't always work out for some. There wasn't the true passion in it for many.
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| Everyone who worked on the film donated their time |
"Some were very difficult to work with and come on hot and bothered and once you start giving them stuff, they find out it is hard work," Felux said. "I probably went through 30 to 40 artists who kind of petered out, dropped off the face of the earth and bailed." He then would have to find someone new.
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