matril

The original trilogy was much lighter on costumes, but there were still plenty of fun challenges.


For our hero, I just needed to pin up a white shirt and shorten my hair.




Leia's costume was easy as well, just a button-up white shirt worn backwards, with another shirt for the hood (though I really wish I'd tucked those buttons out of sight). Her hair was another matter. I teased my hair quite a bit to get enough volume, then tucked it up and pinned it and filmed as fast as I could before it all fell out.


Beru's collar is actually my daughter's old dress, tucked inside the other shirt.



I'd already created the Wookiee look for Episode III, but there were a lot more scenes in the original trilogy. I figured if my hair is long enough to cover my face, I might as well have fun with it. Then I pulled a pair of brown pant legs over my arms and used a belt for the bandolier. And lots and lots of howling.



I bought a black button-up at the thrift store, cut off the sleeves, sewed them back on for Episode V, and cut them off again for Episode VI. I figured the wig (we have a lot of wigs) was a nice extra touch to distinguish Han from all the other short-haired characters.



My husband just happens to own a gray dress coat that looks rather militaryish. Put it on backwards with an insignia, and there's instant Imperial wear.



There's that orange t-shirt again, with the sleeves of the long-sleeve white tee tucked over the shoulders. The bowl is a pretty ridiculous helmet, but I enjoyed customizing different insignias for each pilot.


I used a tie to stand in for the medal ribbon in the closing scene.


Two white shirts, strategically pinned into shape, and a necklace of silver duct tape.


This white vest was a really lucky find at the thrift store. I used it for over half the costumes on Hoth. Add a scarf, a white brimmed hat and gilded goggles, and you've got the Rebel snow suit.


Did you know that Han's coat on Hoth is actually brown, not blue? It's like that argument about the blue and black/white and gold dress a few years back. Well, I found the perfect coat at the thrift store again, and it was worth a little extra because I've been using it as my winter coat ever since.


Braids around the head finish off Leia's look. She actually has fewer costumes than Luke most of the time.



Luke's gray jumpsuit and tank top -- yet another lukcy find at the thrift shop. They didn't come together, but their colors match up almost perfectly.


And I used a stuffed Kermit the Frog's hands to simulate Yoda's here, along with the Yoda hat. :D


Lots of black duct tape transformed a bunch of ordinary shirts into Lando's snazzy clothes, cape included. Just add a mustache and swagger.



I struggled to figure out Leia's fancy robe and collar and finally just taped it onto the vest with cardboard and silver duct tape. The hair was really the key component, which remains even after she changes back into her white shirt.


I worked hard on Leia's hair for the final scene, so I'm going to show it, darn it!


Twins!


A simple matter of painting my face gray and reusing my husband's halloween costume.


...And mine as well.


But there was no way you were getting me into that nasty bikini, so I just used my flesh-colored shirt, some string around the neck, and gold tape for the collar and headpiece.


Lando's clever disguise. Cardboard and a brown shirt wrapped around a bowl for the helmet.


I crocheted the chains for Mon Mothma to wear over a backwards button-up shirt.


You can see the orange makeup smeared on the white shirt, but whatever. The mask is ridiculously glorious.


More capes for Lando!


I love my Ewok look. I arranged my hair into little ears atop my head, used various t-shirts for headdresses (with the sleeves serving as convenient ear-holes) various pairs of pants for my arms, and a whole lot of yipping and flailing.


Nien Nunb. I think this is just adorable. Isn't it adorable? I threw it together in minutes with cardboard pinned to a cap. It's adorable.


My hero, all in black but never giving in to the dark side.


Tucked a shirt into the neckline for the bit where his collar comes undone. You know, when his dad saves him and then dies.


Funny story - I did the makeup in the mirror and then realized it needed to be flipped. So I flipped the video rather than redoing the makeup. I am lazy.


A pair of pants slung over my shoulders, and a braid amid lots and lots of flowing hair. All my own hair. I grow it long pretty much so I can look like Princess Leia.

Whew! Clearly this isn't of much interest to anyone but me, but I enjoy having the pictures all laid out like this so I can peruse them and remember the many hours of labor I put into silly fanworks. Speaking of which, a new Star Words is coming tomorrow. :)

Episode II was definitely the most challenging for sheer volume of costumes. And without the giant headdresses that Amidala wears, I had to work harder make each of Padmé's outfits recognizable. It was so much fun.



I couldn't hope to get the leathery look of the pilot uniform, but at least the colors of the layered shirts match up pretty well.



I was able to reuse one of Amidala's headdresses for Cordé's disguise. Then I got to smear red makeup around my mouth for her death scene. I filmed a lot of death scenes in this movie...



So many components to this one. I used a square of sparkly blue felt for the bodice, with the purple dress from my Amidala Halloween costume as the outer robe. I fashioned a belt into the choker necklace, and used cardboard and gold duct tape for the headpieces. Whew!



Lots of different colors to layer for Bail's look, plus a tiny little chain. And don't I look smashing with a goatee?



Representative Binks! Now he gets a maroon under-robe, a brown tshirt for the tunic, and beaded necklaces for a little extra dazzle.



I simply had to include Dormé in this scene even though she has no lines, because her expressive reactions to Anakin's awkwardness are great. A purple pillowcase worked well for her costume.





And that pillowcase continued to be very useful in Zam's costume, as well as a purple button-up shirt and cap and a metal colander. Teehee.



The dress didn't turn out great here, but I sure worked hard on those weird headpieces!



Dormé again, with a gray t-shirt and black button-up. I had a lot of fun messing around with the hair.



More of that gold duct tape for the headdress, a brown shirt for the hood, and a flower-patterned dress that's not too different in shading from the actual thing. I lucked out with that.



Not so lucky finding the right look for the gauzy veil, so I had to make do with so crinkly yellow stuff. Oh well.



I was much more pleased with Anakin's look in that scene, as I had a pillowcase that almost perfectly matched his tunic. It was a rare chance to do something with his character other than leather and Jedi robes.



I could have arranged the yellow dress to look more like Padmé's "sneeze and the whole thing falls off" look, but when the shot is mostly from the torso up, it makes me look a little too close to nude. Yikes. Instead, I focused on making the neckpiece from cardboard and doing up my hair with blue bands made of pipe cleaners.



Lots of yellow crinkly stuff, and paper for the headband. This is one of the most popular outfits for cosplay, but it's beyond my skill. Mine is excessively simple.



Again, I opted out of the bare shoulders look. I used a old dress of my daughter's, wearing the skirt upside-down and using its belt for the choker. From the waist down it was pretty bizarre, but everything in sight of the camera was great. Silver duct tape for the headpiece!



I had another dress that matched the nightgown pretty well, so I just added a blue cardigan and used my hair to cover the fact that it doesn't have the fancy stripe of the real thing. ;)



A sheet for the Tatooine robe....



...and another sheet for the dress underneath, plus duct tape for the headpieces.



I'm very pleased with this one. T-shirt pinned up in place for the underdress, a button-up shirt for the outer part, with braided yarn safety-pinned for the edging.





I did this costume some years ago for Halloween, but I had to find new components all these years later. Luckily, I had a long-sleeve white t-shirt and a white blanket, and silver duct tape for the arm bands. The real trick was getting her hair right. I never did, but oh well.



I made a chain of duct tape for Dooku's cape and decided to slather on white makeup for the beard instead of using my own hair as I did for Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan.

There was a bit more variation for the Jedi costumes in this episode, and boy did I have fun with it.



For Jocasta Nu, that's a t-shirt, and button-up and a pair of pants slung on top of it! Plus sticks in the hair, and an affronted expression.



I put a brown tshirt over a coat hanger on my head. I love this one.



Brown tshirt, blue shirt rolled up and pinned to a cap on my head, and lots and lots of blue makeup.



More makeup, a white shirt for the headtails, and never showing the top of the head because I couldn't figure out how the make the pointed horns.



The veil was another old dress of my daughter's, and the dress was a tablecloth. Also, I got to cover my hand in gold duct tape for Anakin's prosthetic hand.

Episode III on Monday!

Since I’m about to post the final episode of my One-Woman Star Wars (it should be finished by Monday or Tuesday at the latest) I figured I might offer a little retrospective on this project that has consumed over a year of my life. I’ve learned a lot from creating this massive fan work — about myself, about filmmaking, and about the original movies that were the subject of my silly tribute.

First off, I learned that my obsession knows no bounds. I already knew that I tend to throw myself into projects whole-heartedly (like the time I put the entire Star Wars saga to the music of Les Miserables) and can’t seem to rest until the thing is finished. But this was new levels of obsession. Each movie required several months of work, and even though I did most of the filming and editing while my kids were at school, there were days when I just couldn’t bring myself to stop until I was done with that particular bunch of footage. I have no sense of moderation. I took the summer off after making the first episode because my kids were at home more, but other than that I could barely stand to wait more than a month or so before diving into the next one. It would have been perfectly reasonable to take my time. There was no deadline. No avid fans waiting eagerly for the next installment. There was no external pressure. Just me and my crazed drive to finish.

I also discovered that when I am putting so much of my creative energies into one thing, there isn’t much left for anything else. Since I started writing novels, I’ve written at least one every year. Until now. I haven’t written a new novel since the beginning of 2017. And I’ve tried. I’ve started drafts of several different books, but I haven’t been able to finish a single one. I can only hope that this unusually long dry spell will end once I’ve stopped pouring myself into these movies. I’ve at least tried to keep my writing skills sharpened with my regular blog posts every week.

Well, writing has always been my primary creative outlet, but this project has given me the chance to try out a lot of different areas of creativity. Acting, costuming, hair and make-up; drawing scenery and aliens and droids and spaceships; performing and syncing up music; creating sound effects; editing footage. I’m not amazing at any of those things, but I sure had fun playing around with them.

The costumes in particular were an interesting undertaking, because I only had to find something that worked from the waist up. Most of my footage was shot while I was sitting down (partly because the backdrop was too short for me to stand in front of it, and partly because long shots would make it much more obvious that there was only one person in the scene, showing me talking to empty space instead of another character!) Even so, there were some costumes (ahem, Padmé) that really challenged me. Obviously I knew they would never be perfect; I just needed a decent color match and the general evocation of each costume. And yet, being a perfectionist, I ended up putting tons of work into costumes that had mere minutes of screen-time. Here are just a few of my favorites. I’m quite proud of myself for getting my actual hair to resemble Leia’s famous buns. It took a lot of teasing to get enough volume for those enormous things, let me tell you!


Of course it wasn’t always fun. I had some truly tremendous tantrums. Whenever I discovered, after ten minutes of acting my little heart out, that the footage was blurry and unusable. Or when I ran out of storage memory on my computer (resolved by getting an external hard drive). Or when iMovie crashed for the tenth time, because it’s not really intended for editing something over an hour long consisting of hundreds of one- or two-second clips. And there was considerable discomfort in having to work with my goofy acting face over and over and over again. I am very self-conscious about my appearance. I took on this endeavor, in part, to force myself to confront that. I deliberately didn’t wait until I’m finished with my braces, because I knew I’d always find some excuse not to put my face out there. If hundreds of people (okay, maybe dozens…maybe ten?) see my face in all its ridiculous contortions and the world doesn’t end, then maybe I can just get over my self-consciousness.

On to the next point. Guess what? Making movies is hard work! Well, sure. I never doubted that. But it was interesting to get a glimpse of the nitty gritty details, even in a silly amateur project like this one. Films really are made in the editing process. Of course that’s especially true for movies with one person playing every single part, requiring each character’s scenes to be shot separately and then spliced together. But even with normal footage, there is a special kind of storytelling that comes alive in the editing. Choices like long shots versus close-ups; focusing on different characters’ faces; longer or shorter pauses between lines of dialogue; lingering on wordless moments; transitions between scenes…all of these tiny things make the difference between a sloppy mess of footage and a coherent, meaningful movie. And even though I was just following the choices that were already made by real filmmakers, even though I was creating something deeply silly and cheap, I had some truly proud moments when I was able to make something work through the magic of editing. I don’t know what kind of filmmaking projects I’ll embark on in the future, if any, but my interest has definitely been piqued.

Finally, my respect for George Lucas as a filmmaker has multiplied considerably. And that’s saying something, considering how fanatically I have always loved the Star Wars movies. I embarked on this project for a number of reasons — as already mentioned, I wanted to do something ridiculously daring and put myself out there unselfconsciously. I wanted to try something a little more challenging in terms of fanworks and moviemaking. But most of all, it was about my love for Star Wars.

I’ve struggled recently with how I approach my fandom because I dislike very much what Disney has done with the franchise. And I really, really, don’t want to succumb to negativity and hate. If I dwell too much on what the Disney canon has made of my beloved characters, I get angry and resentful and depressed. I’ve seen the basher side of things. It’s ugly, to put it mildly. So I determined to focus all the more strongly on what I love about the six movies of the saga. And boy, I really got focused. The intensity of my fandom tends to come in waves. It was quite high during the years when the prequels were coming out, tons of fan fic and online discussion. Then it waned. I still adored the movies, but my fangirling was semi-dormant. Then Disney bought the company, fandom wars intensified, and I planted my feet in the ground and said, “Oh, I’m a Star Wars fan. I’m the greatest, craziest one you’ve ever seen.”

This was partly deliberate and partly a knee-jerk reaction. I certainly didn’t expect to put quite this many hours into fan-works over these last few years (in addition to One-Woman Star Wars and Les Starwarbles, I’ve also made fan vids and written piles of fan fiction and countless essays analyzing various aspects of the films). But here I am, with no sign of this current wave waning any time soon. And creating this absurd tribute has only heightened my appreciation for Lucas’s artistry. As I re-watched scene after scene in order to imitate them, I noted details I never had before, little touches and nuances that really impressed me. The visual and thematic parallels from one film to the next are fascinating. As just one example, consider how both Jar Jar and Chewbacca are tempted by dangling animal meat, which leads their group into trouble…but ultimately brings them into a crucial alliance without which victory would have been impossible.

I’ve particularly enjoyed recreating the structure of Return of the Jedi. It was released in 1983, two years after I was born, so I have no memory of seeing it for the first time. I always knew that the Emperor had planned a trap for the Rebels. But making my one-woman version has given me the chance to see it with fresh eyes, to recognize how cleverly each plot point is established and developed. The Alliance lays out their plans. It’s a long shot, but with the Emperor himself on the Death Star, they have a real chance at bringing down the Empire for good. Then the strike team infiltrates the installation on Endor, but Vader knows? And the Emperor isn’t bothered at all? Things are becoming increasingly unsettling, until at last, just as the strike team breaks into the bunker and seems on the verge of victory, the Emperor reveals the whole truth to Luke.

This was his plan all along. He didn’t make any mistakes. He allowed the spies to find out just enough information to tempt the Rebellion into coming. The scene with the fleet coming out of hyperspace is an incredible, incredible example of heightening action and emotion. As Lando realizes the Empire knew they were coming; as they pull away from the Death Star, as they sight the enemy ships and Ackbar utters his famous line — the music reaches a wild crescendo (John Williams is, as always, an unparalleled genius) and we’re all on the edges of our seats and wow, I’ve probably watched it a hundred times and it’s still exciting to me.

There are plenty more examples like this, far beyond the scope of this particular post, but it’s enough to acknowledge that I’m truly in awe of how well-made these movies are. It was fun to pretend to be a filmmaker for a little while so I can better appreciate what the real filmmakers do. I spent a year and a lot of effort, energy and creative power on something that will yield very little external reward, but what I said at the end of the first episode is still true. I regret nothing. May the Force be with you all!

Playlist for One-Woman Star Wars, soon to have all six movies!

I wonder how long I can make myself wait before starting Episode IV...

Well, here it is. The results of over two months work and a whole lot of insane fannishness. It's meant to be silly, of course, but I hope viewers will be laughing with me and not at me? We'll see...