[Brickfilm] Star Wars - Escape from the Vader

This project took me around 1 month to finish. One month for 50'ish seconds movie. That includes 5 days of actual shooting. Thinking, planning, writing, editing, montage and of course building took the rest of that time. Warning! I suggest to watch movie before continue reading because text contains spoilers. Ah, and it might be worth to watch 2 times, because action is pretty fast and can be hard to notice all the flavors.

You watched it already? Good. So let's back to the story. I start from the very beginning. I have this strong need of building stuff from Star Wars. It never stops ;) But I also love to design and build my own projects from the scratch. I didn't want to build another X-Wing or Tie Fighter. I figured out the most fun will be MOCing by own ship which will fit into Star Wars old trilogy design. And there it is - K4L Shuttle Transporter.

It is pretty small transporter. Equiped in Deflector Shield Generator (100 SBD), Hyperdrive and engines rated at 500 KTU.

After building transporter I was ready to make photos and put them on the blog. But I thought - hmm, something is missing. I got to add some scenery. And what's best scenery for the space ship? Of course some landing platform. Let it be landing spot in hangar of bigger ship. And so I started building big hangar with corridor. It was hard task, because it needed a lot of bricks and I didn't want to buy anything more at this moment.

The mission was complete. I was satisfied with the final effect. Hangar with loose parts on the ground and a bit chaos greebling on the walls was looking like a interior of smuggler's ship. And then... I had another idea. Maybe instead of making photos I could make a movie? YES!

So I sketched the story and few shots showing my MOC. There were Stormies, there was Vader, there was cool smuggler (the guy who dies in the beginning). I also designed cute B3-T1 droid. Ah, and the Jedi Knight. I like stick to official canon and I don't like overpowered heroes so I had to limit my imagination of super powerful Jedi who kills thousands of Imperials ;) Darth Vader is one of the most powerful guy in the universe. Coming with Stormtroopers squad. No, noone can defeat him. Jedi had to run. He knows that direct attack won't have happy ending.

So the next steps was polish screenplay and LEGO models itself. And final step- shooting the movie. I wanted to get as much as possible thru lens. What you see is almost raw material. No blue boxes and not much image post processing. I limited digital effects to required minimum.

Five days was totally taken out of my life. I've rot in the darkness surrounded by studio and LED lights. I mixed my everyday work with working in the studio in many lasting hours sessions of creativity. Only few hours of sleep per day. I even lost almost 2kg of my weight! I was so into making this movie that I forgot about regular eating. Heh... But it was totally worth it! I was so happy that I finished it. I didn't want this project turn into never ending project. It required a lot of determination and discipline. But I made it! And I learn so much. I will use this knowledge in the near future :) Stay tuned :)

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