Hello everyone, for this blog post I decided to take a look at the starwarswars.com site. This had to have been one of the most bizarre and interesting watching experiences I have ever witnessed. The website name is extremely deceiving, but if you didn’t check it out, the website has a video containing the first 6 Star Wars films — played at the exact same time. It is a very dangerous sensory overload, but I must admit, it is very technically impressive, especially with the effects.
All of the audio overlaps and is balanced surprisingly well. But the most technically impressive part of it is how at any given point, you can make out at least 3 movies, and most of the time more, in the video. What I suspect is going on is at any given point, the editor used a mixture of a color picker and a chroma key to accomplish the end result. Assuming each movie has it’s own layer, I believe that the editor went through each movie, and for each one that was on top of the base layer, created a chroma key with the most prominent color on screen at any given point, which allowed the movie in the lower layer to show through. This was probably repeated for every scene change for one movie. And then from there, they repeated the entire process for 5 more movies.
Traditional cinema was definitely altered by this process. After all, it’s 6 2-hour movies played at the exact same time, all at least audibly present, if not visually present in some way, and all combating for your attention. It creates such a unique experience that becomes really hard to sit through, but it’s worth exploring at least a little bit.
-Jeremy Sauter