So, was I included in the 4 sent this week?

Yup.

I really like the lightsaber ignitions and retractions. I like how they weren't toyed with except to smooth them out and make them visibly extend and retract.

Thanks

Luke playing with the lightsabre in Ben's hut was a morph, with either 3 or 5 (can't remember) frames inserted. Ben was also morphed a bit, because his hands and head jumped positions. The extra frames gave me room to make the blade visibly extend. Threepio also jumps in this scene - I fixed that by working out the rotation/translation of his body and head from the first half to match the second half, then applying that transformation automagically to all the frames in the first half.

Second bit was Luke turning off the lightsabre after Alderaan gets destroyed - that was easy enough.

Third was Luke turning off the lightsabre to say, "You don't believe in the force, do you?" For this I took a few frames after the lighsabre goes off and slowed them down and reversed them (but retaining the original training ball thingy). Then I painted in the lightsabre to match the original scene.

Fourth was Luke turning on the lightsabre with the helmet on. This was the jumpiest cut of them all. The best alignment was actually between the first frame with the lightsabre and the frame that came about 5 frames before, so I used three or four separate morphs - one of Luke's head, one of his left side, one of his right side, and possibly one of his lower half. These were blended in Photoshop and a matching lightsabre painted in. In slow motion you can see that his hands go from holding the lightsabre one over the other, to one above the other, so his hands seem to pass through each other, but at normal speed I think it works pretty well.

Last was Ben igniting his lightsabre in his duel with Vader. For the DVD it looks like they tried to morph him from position A to position B - but they only used a single frame! I did another automagic shifting thing so his hand stays in the same position. Because there's not much movement in his cloak I did a mix, rather than a morph, to smooth things out.

DE