IMPERIAL UNBOXING: STAR WARS FAN FILM TRICKS REVEALED
Motion graphics pro Robert Hranitzky shares the tips behind his parody from a galaxy far, far away
For Robert Hranitzky, the Star Wars fan film E-11: Standard Issues was a labour of love. It takes on the form of a Youtube unboxing video, in which stormtrooper TK-421 reveals an exclusive first look and tests out the E-11, the upcoming standardissue blaster rifle for the Galactic Empire’s army. The short parody film was a long-running passion project for Hranitzky, who is a professional designer and also runs his own Youtube channel. “I thought, ‘What if in the Star Wars universe there were influencers who used propaganda to check the tech and gear out for their fellow stormtroopers?’ And that’s how the idea was born,” he says. The Munich-based creative developed the concept over the course of five years, using his own stormtrooper armour and building the Empire’s Secret Weapons Research & Development department on the planet Mucikanaa, all from within his personal studio. “The foreground uses physical props as much as possible,” he says. “Star Wars is based very much on real props and real sets. The desk was built by creating a design in Illustrator, splitting it up and printing it onto sheets of A4 paper. I layered them on foam board and glued them onto a wooden board, with ping pong balls for white buttons. We added all the cabling and LED lights and designed a controller board to change the blinking frequency.” Hranitzky built a blaster to go with the armour, while other dials and buttons were created from spray-painted toothpaste caps and bottle tops. Two Elgato greenscreens were used as a backdrop with three lights mounted in softboxes, while three of Blackmagic Design’s Pocket Cinema Camera 4Ks were used to film the action. He designed a lot of the background CG elements in Illustrator, before importing and extruding them in Cinema 4D. The models were textured in Substance Painter and rendered using Cinema 4D. “Once the models were created and textured, I used a combination of Cinema 4D’s Physical Render Engine and Redshift to render them,” says Hranitzky. “Adobe After Effects was used to composite every shot of the film, with the keying done using Maxon VFX Suite’s Primatte Keyer. I used Mocha for some tracking, with additional effects from Boris FX and a lot of the Red Giant plugins available from the Maxon VFX Suite. “More than anything, I wanted to create a unique and funny story that was accompanied by strong imagery, but also inspire other creatives to take on their own personal projects, which helps them grow as artists.”
01 AUREBESH UI
Two ipads embedded in the cut-outs in the desk run a user interface that features text translated into the Star Wars universe’s Aurebesh alphabet, as well as other animations running at roughly 12 fps. The animation is linear keyframes, with no easing or smoothing. I made it super crisp with clean lines and colours, and then ran it through a couple of plugins to give it a blur effect, some chromatic aberration, a bit of glow, and a pixel grid. The blacks and whites were pushed a little more towards grey. This helps to sell it as though it’s on a CRT monitor instead of an ipad.
02 ROUGH TEXTURES
It’s crucial to have a good foundation in the 3D model and the UVS. I’d chamfered every edge in Cinema 4D to have a sub-edge catch the light. Working in Substance Painter, I used Smart Materials’ predefined textures. I used a texture called Gun Metal that has edge detection. Using the angle threshold of the geometry you get scuffed edges automatically, and with a slider you can define the weight. This was a starting point to apply manual edits and smudging, and then painting over it, but it got me 60 per cent of the way.
03 GOBO LOZENGES
I was adamant about making the lighting look realistic. The corridors in the original Star Wars movies always have those lozengeshaped lights on the ceilings and walls. The reflections of those shapes on the armour help to add a layer of believability and allow your mind to actually place the stormtrooper into the scene. In order to do this, I printed out the basic shape design, traced it onto black cardboard and cut out the shapes to form mattes. I then placed them in front of my lighting softboxes as a gobo.
04 BLASTER EFFECT
The blaster shot is a streak, so it has to be blurred. It’s a tapered shape, a little thicker in the direction where it’s travelling. It’s not red, the colour comes from a specific glow, with a white and orange core. I used two plugins. Red Giant’s Optical Glow offers physical parameters, like an inverse square falloff. It creates a super strong white, which then falls off gradually into the background. I also added Optical Flares from Video Copilot for the actual highlight. Then I used lens dirt, just a little speckle that you only see when it’s brightly illuminated.
05 GLOWING TROOPER
The stormtrooper armour in the films isn’t actually pure white; it’s maybe a 50 per cent grey on average, but it’s highly reflective. I added a diffusion effect to give the armour a hint of a glow, which helps to make it a little more believable. I applied this during compositing in After Effects, using a combination of diffusion with Supercomp and S_glow from the Sapphire plugin, allowing me to dial in that super subtle glow. I also added chromatic aberration to roughen up the edges. The splashback-style illumination highlights from the blaster firing on the shooting range were created by running a real red flashlight over the armour.
06 FAKE FX
Cinema 4D’s Physical Render Engine is quite slow; for my scenes it took on average three hours to render a frame in 4K resolution. When I wanted to add an effect like blinking lights on the wall, my shortcut was to render just one master frame and create separate alpha mattes for each light in After Effects. I selected all the lights with masks and activated them separately. I spent an hour in After Effects adding animation keyframes to turn the masks on and off and ended up with a blinking animation. If you layer that on top of the wall, it looks like a blinking panel. •