Ifilmed myself in my living room with one of those crappy toy lightsabers. Then I imported the footage off my DV camcorder into Commotion Pro 4.1. Rotoscoped over the blade to produce a white matte with black background. Layered that over the original footage in After Effects with a screen transfer to remove the black leaving the white animated blade over the top. Applied a blur & the colour to the blade, then saved that. Opened that in Premiere to add the sound & music. Exported the first 5 and last 5 frames as jpegs so I could remove the toy lightsaber blade from the shots where the blade extends. Simple. Only took me 4 hours for 10 seconds of film.
(
WD-39,
Tue 18 Nov 2003, 14:06,
archived)