Thanks to the Slashdot crowd, who came up with lots of ideas for special effects shots. Not that I think we’ll use them all, but nice to have a big pile of ideas to look through.
Also amusing to see a debate over if my lightsaber should cast a shadow or not, and a telling off for getting Goa’uld wrong! 
As I was asked today exactly how I achieved the various effects (Hello Sean!), I thought I’d post links to my cheat sheets. These are the tutorials I’ve followed to render lightsabers and laser blasts:
Once I’ve written it up, I’ll talk about how I vapourised Chris.
Still missing one saber in the middle, but now wit hphaser blast, and screaming Teech!
Here’s a very quick look at the compositing process for the video I’m editing at the moment…
Starting with a frame of Chris after he’s been shot: Untreated
This shows the original frame as we recorded it. Nothing has been processed yet.
First, I apply a diffuse glow effect to show that the ray gun I shot him with is taking effect: Ray Gun Effect
Then I needed to create the lightsaber blade. I’ve just done one here to show you:
On a new layer, draw a white line over the top of the blade. In this case the blade is fanning slightly, so I use the polygon tool to draw an area of white: Untreated Blade Then turn down the colour on the background layer to get white on black.
Then, applying the nifty glow effect (this includes multiple layers and blurs) it ends up looking like this: Treated Blade
Then, composite the treated blade into the second image (the one where Chris is starting to dissolve): Composited Image
This gets done for every frame in the video! In the 10 second clip I’m working on, there are 250 frames. I’m using about 1.36Gb of storage for it already! Obviously, when I get round to finishing this sequence I’ll render Chris’ saber and a pulse from the gun to show it shooting too.
Still missing sabers in the middle, still no visible phaser blast, but super-cool sound effects!
I’m surprisingly awake given the time of my last post, and the fact that I was in the office before 9am today!
I’ll complete the video tonight, hopefully.
No sound effects, missing sabers in some bits, and no visible phaser blast, but it’s getting there.
For your amusement, Chris losing his battle with the forces of darkness. (Who, it would appear, cheat!)
Anyway, that’s enough SFX for tonight. Time to sleep!
Well, an email to DivX tech support has unlocked my activation key, turns out the delay in their response was due to Thanksgiving. D’oh.
Anyway, I’ve been able to encode one of the light-saber battles to DivX, click the image to play the DivX YouTube video:
Notice, if you will, that I am acting, look at the concentration on this Jedi’s face as he fights for his life. Then look at Darth Surawy. Big grin on his face.
A short and sweet video - 8 seconds of footage - about an hours worth of processing time!
Next stop, the longer battle between a Jedi Surawy, and Darth Durdle. 
Well, Chris and I spent Friday afternoon messing around with video cameras in order to do some special effects editing. We even bothered to choreograph the stuff before we shot it.
Anyway, here’s a still from a brief battle Chris undertakes with the forces of evil:
You’ll have to wait until the rest of the video is processed to see if he wins his fight or not!
And here’s me, defending against an attack from Darth Surawy…
I’d have a video clip of this up here, but Dr Divx has decided it won’t let me install it again. Grrr. It’s times like this that I really hate software activation! I paid for it! Let me reinstall it!
I promised Teech that I’d help him with a school project to show some of the kids at his school how to create simple special effects. Of course that means I’ve had to remind myself how to achieve a lot of these things again! To that end, I’ve dug out the footage I took a year or so back of me and my then housemate Martin with our lightsabers. No, that’s not a euphemism, don’t be so dirty.
I also wanted to try out Goauld-style glowing eyes (like the bad guys in Stargate SG1):
Also check out these clips for me with different Lightsabers, and Martin - who actually knows how to swing a sword!
More special effects as we film them!
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