Hey there, welcome
to Brain Stuff.
I'm Jonathon Strickland and I
had a question that came in.
And it seems that you guys want
to know how light sabers work.
So news flash, they aren't real.
I mean I could talk about focus
crystals or battery packs,
but reality is these are
just special effects.
Now, those special
effects are pretty cool.
It's pretty straightforward
but it's also
a very tedious process.
Now this is for the
original trilogy,
you know, the good ones.
You see what the actors would
do in shooting the movies would
be to hold aluminum rods that
were painted a specific color.
And they would actually fight
with these aluminum rods
as if they were light sabers.
But after the film
was shot, it was then
taken to an effects artist.
At that point, what the
effects artist would do
would trace around
each of these rods.
Finally, the artist would
paint the correct color
in that outline.
So that they would replace the
aluminum rod with the lighted
light saber effect.
You know something
like this, right here.
Now this is an old rapier
scabbard we're using.
And we put some
reference points here
for our artists to
use when replacing
this in post production.
These days we don't necessarily
paint over frames of film
individually.
We could actually do
all that digitally.
Now we have software
suites that allow
you to do this automatically.
You just give it a
couple reference points
and it does the rest.
Pretty cool, huh?
Sith.
Any way, there are
even some hackers
who have managed to use
the Microsoft Xbox Kinect
sensor to create this
effect in real time.
So you just hold a broomstick
or a rod in your hand
and it will turn it
into a light saber
on your television screen.
Voom.
Bsh, bsh.
Normally, I'd have someone to
do the sound effects for me,
but our budget was cut.
Voom.
So if you enjoyed
this video, make
sure you like it, and
subscribe to the video channel.
We've got a lot more
interesting questions
to answer in the near future.
