"The possibility of successfully filming a scene with these resources is approximately 3,720 to one!"

On Sunday, I whipped up a batch of ice-cold bantha milk, and my cast and crew got down to the business of making movie magic. We had a hoot and a half — maybe three quarters!

A communications snafu waylaid my Boba Fett (Trish), so we shot the cockpit scene first. I'd had a lot of fun assembling found objects to make something that would read on-screen like a cockpit — a soldering iron, some Christmas lights, a big military decade box, a couple of plastic pen carriers, and (as a nod to the Satellite of Love) a couple of spray paint caps. We wrapped my C-3PO (Herbert) in aluminum foil, dressed my Leia (Kat) and Han (Kendra) in their color-coded jackets, and convinced Rosie to lie on the floor and shake the Wookiee. ("I always knew my film debut would be on my back," she said.) They all crammed themselves into the cockpit and did their best Star Trek lean as the Falcon "was hit by lasers" and "avoided asteroids."

(Those two hot spots of light on the green screen will come back to bedevil me during editing. Live and learn.)

Boba had arrived by the time I got my shot, so we all trooped downstairs to the "Super Star Destroyer bridge" I'd turned my living room into, and my long-suffering actors suited up. Vader (Rosie) wore a black zentai hood and sunglasses that made her nearly blind; Dengar (Yossi) strapped a baking pan to his chest and stood on a rickety stool; the Imperial Trooper (Will) wore a bowl on his head. Boba Fett (Trish) and Admiral Piett (Kat) had less onerous costumes — though Boba did get cardboard pieces duct taped to her chest — and Herbert played puppeteer for IG-88.

Everyone did a bang-up job. Vader hit her mark every time, despite being unable to see. IG-88's head turned just like it was supposed to. Boba Fett slouched to make Vader look taller. Dengar really stepped up — literally, since he had to stand on a stool to make it look like he and IG-88 were looking down from a raised walkway. (It's a shame that only his midriff appears in the scene, since his costume was surprisingly successful.) Imperial Trooper Will, apart from having the perfect slightly confused military-stern expression of an Imperial Trooper, offered deep insights into Star Wars character motivations. Admiral Piett held Vader's train as IG-88 presided over her marriage to Boba Fett:

(Robotic voice: "MAWWIAGE...MAWWIAGE IS WHAT BWINGS US TOGETHER TODAY.")

I spent most of the shoot standing on my coffee table, directing people and framing up shots in the viewscreen of Kat's little camera. (My camera doesn't shoot HD video.) I learned I'm better at building things to go in front of the camera than I am at standing behind it — I don't worry about foam core and duralar getting impatient with me. But I got all four of my shots, and even though nobody drank the bantha milk the peanut gallery seemed duly impressed:

The IG stands for Instagram

IG-88 is pretty much finished. I laid him out in the back yard yesterday and gave him a couple of coats of Rust-oleum's Dark Steel, followed by a couple of coats of Aged Iron. I wasn't happy with the eyes in the previous post, so I swapped in hotel shampoo bottles for the corks. In the photo above, he's wearing his bandolier (my kilt belt) and has a black sock stuffed in his mouth to soak up light. Here's the head just after painting, showing the neck of the 2-liter bottle that serves as his neck joint:

The dome is still a little transparent, which means the bike tail light I'm using to illuminate his sensors shows through where it shouldn't. I might need to touch up his paint in a few spots, depending on how I'm shooting him. But he's mostly done!

Next I move on to the EXT: SPACE shots, which means constructing a miniature Millennium Falcon and Star Destroyer, a few asteroids, and a clean black stage. Also possibly Silly String, fingers crossed.

IG-88 fluid ounces

I'm just about finished assembling IG-88, which should be the hardest build for my Empire Uncut scene, particularly since I'm viewing it as "an opportunity to make an IG-88! Plus some other stuff." Those are two 2-liter bottles forming his head. Not sure about the eyes — I'll have to see how much he looks like Beaker after a coat of metallic paint. Tomorrow will be spray-painting-in-the-back-yard day.

 

The pink circles on his forehead aren't acne — they're paint shields. After I'm done spraying, I'll peel them off, and hopefully the plastic beneath will still be clear. Then I can stick an LED inside his head and make them glow, just like the real IG-88 (seen here waving from big IG-88's shoulder).

If you look closely, you'll see a white rod running up through his head. That's a puppeteer's control rod:

Well, okay, actually it's a curtain rod. But it'll allow the puppeteer to reach inside IG-88's back and rotate his head 45°, which is all IG-88 needs to do.

I've taken a lot of liberties with IG-88's appearance, but I'm not too concerned about details. Like, at all. I'm not going to run out and find exactly the right Derwent flame tube for the head. I've got 25 days left, and IG-88 appears in only two of my six shots — I have Vader and Boba Fett and a Star Destroyer and asteroids and lasers and the Millennium Falcon and the Falcon's cockpit to worry about. Slapdash construction is all in the spirit of Empire Uncut, anyway. It's all fun and shoestrings and chewing gum. That's a feature, not a bug — part of what makes this exhilarating is being forced to turn off my inner perfectionist. There's simply no time. In the spirit of Roger Corman and Ed Wood Jr., it doesn't have to be good, it has to be done. That's good for me.

I also picked up some green posterboard for use as a green screen (!). I spent some time last night playing around with iMovie's green screen function, and found it blessedly easy to use. I know I'll use it for the starfield outside the Falcon's cockpit; I'm not yet sure about the two EXT: SPACE shots.

This continues to be wildly euphoric.

Oh gee, hey gee, you should see my IG

Work on Houses of the Muses continues apace. I hit the hundred-page block for a couple of weeks, but put my head down and bulled through instead of going back and starting the second draft.

But this isn't about that. This is about Empire Uncut, and the scene I have thirty days to film.

Star Wars: Uncut chopped Star Wars into about 800 fifteen-second chunks, then handed them out to amateur filmmakers to recreate. Which they did, using action figures, Lego minifigs, computer animation, traditional animation, pencil sketches, cats, dogs, ferrets, terrible costumes, excellent costumes, excellent terrible costumes, puppets, adorable children, greenscreening, machinima, rotoscoping, repurposed footage, shop vacs, stop motion, fast motion, slow motion, no motion, instant messaging, an Oscar statuette, a hamburger, and My Little Ponies. Then they stuck them all back together and added John Williams's soundtrack back in. I saw the final result at the Brattle Theater in June, and it was joyous and jubliant and ridiculous. (If you want to watch it, it's on the internets.)

I couldn't resist signing up for the sequel, which is why I have thirty twenty-seven days to film fifteen seconds of Empire Strikes Back. That sounds like a lot of time, but the chunk I selected has six shots, two locations, two F/X shots, four speaking parts, and a life-size IG-88. I'll be posting updates here — it's not exactly writing, but it is a creative endeavor slathered with fandom sauce, so here it is.

I've never filmed anything before, so I expect this to go extremely well. If you feel like signing up for a scene of your own, or watching the chunks as they're uploaded, go here: http://www.starwarsuncut.com/empire.

My first storyboards. Adorable!

Plans for IG-88.

IG-88's torso, the early stages