Star Tours: Welcome to the Stars

Star Tours: Welcome to the Stars

A Long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

My senior capstone was developed to showcase my skills in video, graphic design and animation. For this project, I wanted to take the idea of Star Tours, a galactic travel agency in the Star Wars universe, and expand on it, adding even more charm to it. One of the reasons why I decided to do a project based on the Disney theme park attraction was because of a question I thought of...what would it be like if Star Tours was a real company? With businesses, there’s a lot to take away from them. Branding, uniforms, products, etc. Not only that, but with some companies, there are training videos that new employees have to watch. I wanted to capture that same magical and entertaining feel that Star Tours had while incorporating some corniness into it like any other training video would. Thinking over that question, I wondered what Star Tours’ training videos would look like for new recruits of the travel agency.

For Star Tours: Welcome to the Stars, I used Adobe Creative Cloud to help achieve my goals of creating a series of conceptual training videos for the travel agency. The specific softwares I used include Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.

As for filming, I used a green screen that was lended to me by a photographer friend of mine and my iPhone 8’s camera since I couldn’t obtain a tripod and film camera. In addition to the film equipment, I had some actors assist me with the production, acting as the Star Tours employees within my videos. With my film equipment in hand and my actors ready to act their hearts out, I used my living room as a film set, using one of the walls to place my green screen at.

With the animation sequences, I had to design everything in Illustrator in order to have that minimalist, motion graphic look I wanted. Once I had all of my vector graphics, I imported them into After Effects and began animating. For my planet animations, I used a plug-in that I found for AE from Video Copilot that helped me create realistic looking planets. I also used their saber plug-in in order to create realistic lightsaber blades. For some of my footage, I incorporated video stock footage into my animations in order to attempt to make them more realistic. In a sense, I pulled off the classic film technique of rear projection.

Once I had everything completed, I began to piece together all of my footage to create the final training episodes. With the help of my talented composer friend, William Kingham, he scored my training videos to fit the initial Star Tours feel and he created the StarSpeeder 3000 3D model for me to use throughout my editing. I also hired a voice actress from Fiverr to do the voice over for the entire series.

At first, when I started editing the project together, I wasn’t too sure how it was going to end up. Even though I had a storyboard and a screenplay for the project, informing me of what I initially envisioned, I wasn’t sure if it would work out in the end. As I started wrapping up editing, my views changed drastically. Everything that I had created was coming together quite well and it made me proud when the final results were achieved.

Having finished everything, I can finally say that this project was probably one of my most elaborate and difficult projects to work on. I previously worked on a music video with many classmates of mine last semester, which was somewhat tough to do since there was a lot of scheduling for the shoots and it wasn’t just a one man project, it was done with multiple people. With my capstone project, I was practically doing everything, except for the acting and producing the music. This isn’t necessarily me complaining about it though, if anything, it shows that I can work on large scale projects that are complex and that I’m capable of problem solving throughout a project. In the end, I had a lot of fun working on this project and it’s something that will make a fantastic piece in my portfolio.