In order to combat my post European vacation and 9/11 anniversary blues, I figured that I should move straight ahead and start the preparation for filming my Star Wars fan film, Dark Vengeance. The film takes place during the time before the events in Episode I (The Phantom Menace) and tells the story of a Jedi Knight by the name of Jonas Xavier. I won’t go into all the details now. Suffice it to say that the story is a basic “Jedi meets Sith and they battle to the death” type of story.
The costumes for the shoot have turned out really well. I am planning on using a standard oversized martial arts gi (30 bucks), a thick leather belt (50 bucks) and cheap pleather equestrian boots (30 bucks) for my Jedi outfit. The most expensive part of the costume was a Jedi robe that I bought on eBay for about 70 bucks. The Lightsaber is a cheap toy model that you can buy at any Toys-R-Us for about 10 bucks. I was tempted to spend the money for a high quality stunt saber from Randomsabers.com but decided against it at this time.
The sabers from randomsabers are machine polished metal hilts that can hold wooden or acrylic sticks for dueling. These are very similar to the ones that they use on the real Star Wars films. They also look extremely cool and would make an excellent present for any Star Wars geek. The price on the sabers run from about 10 bucks for the plain metal sabers to as much as 250 bucks for the highly decorated hilts. I figure that I don’t need to spend the extra cash right now because the cheap Toys-R-Us sabers will be fine for most shots and I can easily replace them if they get damaged.
My only concern about them is that they are very lightweight and may look awkward during the fight scenes. The benefit to using the cheap sabers are that they are plastic and don’t hurt at all when you accidentally hit another actor. The machine polished metal sabers with the wooden sticks can hurt like hell if you slip up and duck when you should have dodged. This can be especially important if I have a student actor playing the Sith that isn’t experienced with swordplay. Once I cast the “sith” part and we begin the fight chorography I will get a better idea of how the cheap sabers will look during the final battle. So for right now I will put the money that I would have spent on the randomsabers into other areas of the production.
Check out some of the previous lightsaber effects test shots that I worked on earlier in the year. The script still needs some work though.