In an earlier post, I described the creative writing “Space Camp” that I taught with fellow writers Stacey Matson and Marcie Nestman through the Creative Writing for Children Society (CWC).
In preparation for that week-long endeavour, we got together with our creative friends and filmed a short Star Wars-inspired film.
The project was developed by my friend Luke Spence Byrd. His day job is working for Industrial Light and Magic, but he recently had some time off and wanted to work on something that allowed him to have some creative license. He’s done previous films in preparation for our creative writing camps, so when he found out our theme was “space”, he went all in.
Luke rented a space for a day of filming and we set up multiple green screens so that we could shoot against them. I’m no actor to begin with, but filming with limited physical props and virtually no practical sets was very challenging!
The only real set piece we had at all was a console for our spaceship, which my friend Rob and I built in the days leading up to our shoot day.
The console began with a pile of household junk and some plywood reclaimed from Rob’s scrap pile!
This is how it ended up looking:
It turned out pretty well for a quick-and-dirty job. It even had functioning LED lights that sparked to life with the flick of a few switches.
The only other thing I really did to prep was to put together my costume. Thankfully, I had many bits and pieces left over from previous events:
It also helped that our friend Jeff Porter, our cosplay and costume guru, had many costume bits to help us out with the filming. And it also helped that Luke has a full-size Jabba the Hutt costume that we could use!
The cast consisted of myself, actor and playwright Marcie Nestman, authors Stacey Matson and Kallie George, the aforementioned Jeff Porter and Rob Stocks (who actually didn’t intend to be in the film, but got roped into it once he was on set). Oh, and, of course, R2D2, whom you will see in the photos below . . .
Well, the film turned out to be way more ambitious than originally intended. As it turned out, we could only finish a trailer in time for our space camp, plus a couple of scenes that really helped us when it came to a few specific writing activities. The rest of the film will be finished later this year.
But, for now, here is the trailer for CWC and the Galactic Glitch:
Between the Cracks of Here and There 