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I began working on this trailer in Summer of 2007 as an entry for the LEGO Star Wars moviemaking contest. When I had completed about 2/3 of Bane of the Sith I decided that it was perhaps a little dark for a LEGO contest and decided to making something light and fun instead; the result was Clone Trooper Down. In this "making-of" I will try to explain the process of creating the trailer, all of which involved complicated visual effects of some kind. I learned a lot while making the trailer and developed techniques I had never used before, so creating the trailer was a very valuable experience for me. The Opening
The opening logo is, of course, a parody of the LucasFilm logo. I created a version of it intially for Duel at Kamino, but had since revised it for my Star Wars trilogy. The text was created in Photoshop elements, and the metal effects and sparkles were animated and composited using Axogon Composer.
The trailer begins on Apatros, a mining colony where Darth Bane lived as a child. I built a pretty enormous set for this scene, I think it ended up being about 1.5 feet tall or so. Of course I don't have enough black or gray for such a set, so I built it using blue bricks and desaturated the blue in post-production- this was accomplished in Axogon Composer by created a desaturated version of the shot, then keying out the blue in the original shot to reveal the desaturated layer. I used the technique similarly in "Clone Trooper Down," where I filmed the desert scenes with yellow bricks and washed them out to a sand color in post. In the case of the mine, I didn't completely remove the blue hue because I wanted it to have a bit of a blue-black, obisidian-like sheen. The long opening dolly shot was accomplished with a tripod; however, it came out really bumpy so I had to stabilize it manually. Also the camera was very visible in the reflection of the wall, so I had to paint that out in Photoshop Elements frame by frame. I decided that it didn't look enough like a distant planet, so I added a CGI space shuttle, which was actually a slight reworking of the worker bee from Attack of the Drones.
Korriban
The shot of the Valcyn approaching the Sith homeworld of Korriban is the first of several 100% computer generated shots in the trailer. The ship is approximately minifigure scale, and was built in MLCad. After the amount of time I spent on the model, I made sure that it got a significant amount of screen time in the trailer. The planet and stars background for this shot was created from scratch in Photoshop Elements. The texture for the planet was derived from a picture of some cracked asphalt.
Another CG shot, this time of the Valcyn landing in the Valley of the Dark Lords. The design of the valley was based loosely on its appearance in the Knights of the Old Republic games, though this trailer is a few thousand years later so I tried to make the ruins a little more dilapidated. The mountain background was created in Carrara Studio and Photoshop Elements, with a drastically recolored stock photograph for the sky.
This shot is more of the same, though this time we see the more of the Sith tomb. The symbol above the door is the emblem of the Sith Empire.
This shot was largely experimental; the entire corridor is computer generated, with Darth Bane himself shot infront of greenscreen. I thought I would be able to achieve greater atmosphere, scale, and dramatic lighting using CG than I could get with a physical set.
The Tomb
The idea to this scene is that Bane is coming to the tomb to seek a Sith holocron inside the tomb. There, he meets the ghost of Darth Malak. (This scene was my own invention, but the Malak's words are based on dialog from Knights of the Old Republic.) The ghost appears at the same time the holocron is activated, which has caused some confusion and a few people have mentioned to me that Malak was never said to have a holocron. The holocron here is not intended to be Malak's, as he is a ghost. The glow effects were the product of a flashlight, Axogon Composer, and Photoshop Elements. There needed to be a physical light shining on the holocron in order to create the illusion that it was emanating light and sell the effect of the glow.
A close-up of Darth Malak. I shot this with and without the minifigure so that I could make him partially transparent, and added a pulsing, glowing outline around him to emphasize that he is a ghost, similar to Obi-Wan's appearance in The Empire Strikes Back. The face was created digitally and mapped in Carrara, like all the faces, to be 3D dimensional. It isn't very obvious, but his eyes and eyebrows move slightly during the shot.
The camera movement in this shot is digital, and there was no stop-motion animation; the head itself was not actually moving, and Bane's face was added in post. Bane was shot in front of greenscreen, and the background was shot separately at the same angle. The foreground and the background zoom in at slightly different speeds, resulting in an illusion of 3-dimensional camera movement. The Duel
This shot and the duel shots (set in the caves on Ruusan) following it were some of the most complicated for the trailer; the crystals in the foreground and background were computer-generated, so compositing them in properly proved to be a challenge. Also, the green-screen I filmed this shot with was not very well-lit, so I ended up doing quite a bit of manual masking. There were supports which had to be erased as well. If you're interested in the lightsabers, you might want to check out a tutorial I wrote on the subject.
The crystals were based on the LEGO cave crystal piece, from the LDraw database, but they were lit internally to give them an energetic quality similar to the lightsaber crystal caves of Knights of the Old Republic.
Because the Mandalorians that Jango and Boba Fett are descended from were around during Bane's time, I thought it would be fun to include a few to strengthen the connection to the original movies. I didn't want them to look just like Boba Fett and Jango, though, so I changed the color digitally. The soft lighting in the shots with the Mandalorians was an experiment in using indirect lighting to try to create natural, evening-like lighting. Ruusan
I knew when I started the trailer that I wanted to have some shots of Ruusan, a mountainous, forest planet central to the Darth Bane story. This shot is almost entirely computer generated, with the only physical element being Darth bane and the handlebar. The other elements were created using MLCad and rendered in Carrara.
The foreground speeder bike model was matched to the still image of Darth Bane, and the resulting composite was layered on top of the computer generated background. I made the bike bump up and down a little bit to lend it some life and realism, though of course it isn't touching the ground.
This was a fun shot. The terrain is not actually built out of individual brick pieces; I developed a method in Carrara to make a normal terrain blocky like bricks and textured studs onto it. The green flying things are "bouncers," a kind of obscure, Star Wars, sentient wildlife that lives on Ruusan.
As you can see, the bouncer model was fairly detailed; I had originally planned on giving them a little more screen time but ended up pairing down the length of this trailer quite a bit before I completed any other shots. One did make it into this shot though:
This is the Thought Bomb, a powerful Sith weapon which Bane ultimately uses to destroy the rest of the Sith Order. Basically a big shiny sphere built out of bricks, modeled using the lathe tool in MLCad. The Sith Academy
Several shots are set at the Sith Academy on Korriban. There was a great deal of compositing in these shots, because I used only one Sith Trooper, and the trooper had no decals, so those had to be added digitally. It's probably a little strange for the trooper armor to look exactly as it did in Knights of the Old Republic, thousands of years earlier, but I thought it looked pretty cool so I wanted to include it. I made the "decals" in Photoshop Elements and composited them on manually in PhotoShop Elements as well.
For example, here's a background plate I used in the shot of Bane talking to Lord Kaan. The bricks for the wall were gray, so they were tinted tan, and the troopers were shot separately, then composited together, and after that, four images were composited manually onto each of them. The whole process took a while, but I think it looks much cleaner and more "real" than it would have had I printed out decals and taped them on. The Finale I wanted the trailer to build to a climax, and sort of 'go for broke' with the last several shots, so the series of CG shots at the end were made first and foremost to look cool.
This one is the Valcyn crash landing on the tropical planet Lehon. I had planned to include more shots set on Lehon originally when I was intending to make a 3-minute trailer, but once I abandoned entering this to the LEGO Star Wars contest I decided to make the trailer a little shorter and more concise. The trees are LEGO palm trees, but I used a utility in Carrara to distribute hundreds of them over the landscape.
The Sith army and the Army of Light go at it. This was another fun shot to make; a few people have commented that it is perhaps a little too dark, but really the darkness hides a lot of the imperfections in the animation. The sky was a heavily photoshopped stock photograph.
I lined the title up with the Revenge of the Sith title used in the real trailers to get the spacing and style correct. I did stray a little from the look of the movie titles though as I wanted a more solemn, stone look, and of course there is no episode number so I replaced the episode with the first word for dramatic effect.
A gigantic crater resulting from the detonation of the Thought Bomb on Ruusan. I wanted to test out Carrara's new volumetric cloud generator, and I was pretty happy with the results.
Finally something that isn't completely CG! This shot was filmed in front of my computer montitor, with the two minifigures (Bane and his young apprentice, Zannah) in the foreground. The background was generated in Carrara, including the sky. The Music I cut the music together as I went along; nearly all of it is from Revenge of the Sith, as the sombre style of the score fit with this trailer. It's a mix of many songs from the soundtrack, including some layering of multiple songs simultaneously near the beginning of the trailer. In many places, the shots were made to fit the music rather than the other way around. The Story Okay, I'll be honest. I have not read Darth Bane: Path of Destruction, or any of the comic books on which the events in this trailer are based. I researched the story on the official Star Wars website, as well as a variety of fansites such as the Star Wars wiki, Wookieepedia. I have played the Knights of the Old Republic games, and really liked those so I did incorporate some references to those games, as I have noted. And Now... If you'd like to see just what was filmed in camera, without any post-production effects, I've edited together the trailer without any post-production work. In shots with multiple layers, I've used a split screen in order to show all the layers. Completely CG shots are entirely absent, with sound continuing over black.
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