The Solo Adventures was a 5 minute short film that celebrated what we loved about the first STAR WARS trilogy. The dynamic between Han Solo and Chewbacca. Two characters that fans love and a back story that needed to be told about why Han had a price on his head. As part of the final block at the DAVE school. It took 12 weeks to produce this fully animated stereoscopic film.It has been seen by over a million people.
This film started as a pitch session were Jeff Scheetz the producer, Jason Pichon the art director, and myself hatched out the ideas of the story. Jeff then wrote the first parts of the story and then I took the rough story template and fleshed out a completed screenplay. After the boards and rough animatic were completed, the class began and the students started to model all the assets.
We hired voice actor John Armstrong who provided voices for Indiana Jones and Han Solo for several Lucas Arts video games. He made the perfect voice for Han. I directed the vocal performance and recorded the audio during week 2 of production.
The class then created a 3D animatic using low res proxies of the film and we setup all the stereoscopic 3D. As each shot was refined the edit was updated and final textures and models were completed.
Motion Performance was captured for all the characters and integrated into each shot. Facial animation was applied and all the final lighting and rendering was implemented by week 10 All the 3D renders were sent though Nuke and adjusted for proper depth.
The final film was submitted to Atom.com and Star Wars Celebration V for inclusion into the Fan Film Movie awards were we won for “Best Animation”
