Star Wars Special Willem Wever

Halfway 2017 we got a interesting mail request from a director who used to work at Lukkien. There’s this show called Willem Wever. It’s a educational show made for children in which they can ask all sorts of questions. This time they got a really cool one: “How do you make a science fiction movie?” In about 9 of the 10 people who visit us all say the same thing about our interior design: “Whoa, this looks the bridge in Star Trek!” Yeah, yeah, I know, Star TREK, Star WARS. But the case in point was they thought of us when they recieved that letter. Because what better place to explain all about science fiction where they also have studio’s and make cool content every day? But then we upped the ante by offering to actually MAKE a movie.

You see, this kid wrote a script which was pretty much Star Wars Episode IV but shorter. And since we are all Star Wars geeks and always wanted to work on a Star Wars movie (A not THE hahaha) we just said “Let’s go all out on this one!”. I asked Martijn Smits with whom I did a lot of projects (like Popoz) for the direction since he’s the biggest Star Wars geek I know. So long story short: we contacted the 501 Dutch Garrisons for all the Storm Troopers, got the only licensed actual working R2D2 in the Benelux, a real Darth Vader, Chewbacca and Boba Fett! And we got our own Princess Tess in the form of Tess Milne, one of the presenters of Willem Wever. We filmed everything on a gruelling but insanely cool Saterday.

I was responsible for the on set vfx supervision as well as the entire post. The film was edited by the director (Martijn Smits)and we worked with a small team of 3 on the six scenes. I did the major scenes like the shoot-out, the light sabre fight and all the CGI scenes. Martijn van den Broek did the “Bridge” scene and Jeroen Diks aided with the lasers in the shoot-out. The whole post (editing, comping, grading and sound) took about 3 months but it was all done in spare time. We had a great premiere in the Cinemec with everybody who contributed from the fan clubs in costume which was awesome. Check the making of below and the end result below! There’s also a side by side comparison.