After years of working on an idea and a script, a story came to life. Created by senior Richard Jackson, a film based on the Star Wars storyline was released in November.
“There are a lot of fan films online that people do their own thing,” Jackson said. “They don’t take into account other movies already established in the series. I wanted to make one you could watch in the series with all of the other movies and it would still make sense.”
With the goal of the film in mind, Jackson wanted to create a feature that fit into the Star Wars universe.
“This is a survivor story of someone who’s on the run from the Empire because they want to kill him,” Jackson said. “He just learned how to survive on his own while trying to keep things he cares about safe.”
To create the story, he had to build up the idea, scenes and lines.
“The script took me like a year and a half to write,” Jackson said. “It went through three different versions, and I split up [the script] into five different projects.”
During the process of filming, Jackson went through hard trials but also learned more about the smaller details involved in the industry.
“I would definitely upgrade my camera — we were shooting on a Canon Rebel T4i which is a really old camera,” Jackson said. “The newer cameras have a much better film if we were [to] shoot on those. Also, [having] better stunt coordination and taking into account the effects when shooting because a lot of times we integrated the effects into scenes where it’s really difficult. [Sometimes] the spot where the camera was would have someone’s body in front of it, which made it really hard to add it in.”
Jackson has completed only the first part of this series, with more to come in the future. In the meantime, he shared advice from his time spent on this process for those new to film making.
“You have to get the ball rolling and start writing — start getting your ideas flowing,” Jackson said. “Talk to people in your friend group and see if they would want to help. That’s really encouraging because without my friends, I wouldn’t [have been able] to do] it. If you’re worried about it, just go dive in — it could turn out a lot better than you would think.”
