My first “film” actually taught me a lot of what NOT to do when making a film.

It was a Star Wars Fanfilm called “The Invisible Enemy,” and was released on the interwebs in 2001

I put up most of the money, wrote the script, and Elliot, one of my best friends, put up the elbow grease to get it in the can and directed it. Amazingly, I learned a lot of lessons making this fanfilm believe it or not.

First, you can’t do it all. I was originally going to write and direct and do everything else, but learned quickly that doing it all alone is impossible. The problem with making a fanfilm is that no matter how awesome you make it, it’s not real. Sure, a lot of great fanfilms both Star Wars and otherwise have been made over the years and most likely will always be made. The problem come in that you don’t own the fanfilm and can never make any money off of it. George Lucas ain’t going to say, “Gee Bobby, you made an awesome fanfilm, let me buy it from you and put it on dvd and we can split the profits!” At best you can hope not to be sued, or in today’s world, get your videos removed off of youtube or your own hosting site for copyright infringement.

Most Star Wars fanfilms suck because they are usually just two dudes in robes fighting with lightsabers and that’s it. I wanted to do a story about the first scouttrooper/stormtrooper party that found Endor for the first time and have said party die at the hands of the malicious Ewoks. Since I lived in BF Mississippi there were two problems: The first being that there were no groups/people within a 100 mile radius with stormtrooper costumes. Second, there is no varied terrain in southern Mississippi; it’s about as flat as you can get and un-Endorish as you can get.

So, we had to buy the trooper costumes and put them together, which was a huge pain in the ass, as they were uncut/untrimmed plastic from the resin molds. Then we had to find people willing to ride two hours out of the way and don the trooper costumes and walk around the woods. The site we found was in Tunica Hills, MS, right on the LA/MS border. We originally had a lot more funny scenes, one even at a really awesome waterfall that had to be cut simply because it was too difficult to film at the various locations we wanted due to the “hills” part of Tunica Hills Park. It should have been named “Tunica Mountains,” because I don’t think I have ever encountered hills that steep in my life, and I was a boy scout and walked many a trail. We had no crew, so it was just me, Elliot, Josh Sisk our cinematographer (who was just in an episode of “The Wire” as a photographer), and the guys who would be in the costumes. Carrying the costumes to the various locations was quickly ruled out and thankfully so, as we all found out that maneuvering in the costumes was almost impossible and quite painful as the costumes pinched in the worst places. In the end we had to film at the entrance to the park, complete with gawking hikers.

The movie was shot in one day, as that’s all the time we had to get it in the can. Elliot and our friend Teddy went back and did some pickup shots, but that was it.

One of the biggest problems was that Elliot was in Baton Rouge, over a hundred miles away from me, so I was stretched way to thin and with my work schedule (50 hours a week) it left little time for me to be creative. So the project which I started,slowly drifted away from me, and Elliot had to take over.

The end result is below:

The Invisible Enemy

Bad voice acting, bad shot setup, bad lighting, pretty much it hits all of the hallmarks of most Star Wars Fanfilms. I like to tell people we made it that way, as a parody of Star Wars fanfilms, but it’s the result of poor planning and the lack of wisdom that sometimes can be only achieved by fucking something up.

The script that I wrote was actually really funny, not to toot my own horn. Unfortunately, due to the aforementioned problems, those funny scenes were cut. The voice acting is horrible. Johnson was supposed to be played by our friend Steve, who would have made an infinitely funnier effeminate Stormtrooper than Elliot ended up performing, and the rest of the voice actors sounded like they were reading from a script for a car commerical.

Moral of the story, you gotta make a film, even a short one, in order to learn from your mistakes so you don’t make them on the set of a real movie.

Here is one of the latest SW fanfilms. Once again, two doods with sabers, but it’s actually really good.

One of the guys who made this video actually got a job at Lucasfilm for his SFX work for the previous iteration of this movie.

A really funny send up of “fanfilm” directors is the sketch “Fool’s Gold” featuring “Glen Tennis” the director of the science fiction movie “Crystal Shyps.”