How to Make a Toy Lightsaber Look Real in a Video

Rotoscoping draws the lightsaber effect into your film, frame by frame.

The lightsaber is an iconic staple of sci-fi films, made popular by the Star Wars franchise. With today's video-editing software, amateur and low-budget film makers can create realistic lightsaber effects with little more than a toy lightsaber, colored masking tape and digital video software. Most advanced editors and special-effects software can create a realistic lightsaber effect through the use of rotoscoping. Rotoscoping is the act of drawing over real film with an animation. Programs such as Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects, Silhouette FX and Imagineer's Mocha can all edit video and rotoscope.

Things You'll Need

• Toy Lightsaber
• Digital Camera
• Colored Masking Tape
• Video Editing Software

Instructions

1. Place masking tape around the blade of your lightsaber in 3-4 inch increments to assist with tracking later. Choose a color that contrasts with the blade of your lightsaber and choose different colors for each light saber.

2. Film your actors with the toy lightsabers. Do not worry about framing the entire lightsaber in each shot of the frame, since this effect will feature the lightsaber being swung rapidly.

3. Launch your video editor and load the sequences that will need to be rotoscoped. Edit together all of your footage first, to find your working cut of the video. Once you have finalized the cuts, select each scene that will need to include a lightsaber effect.

4. Use the selection tool on your editor to draw an outline around the lightsaber. Increase the zoom on your editing timeline to view each individual frame of film. Select the point on the timeline that you want to start the lightsaber effect and turn on the "Keyframe" feature. Draw a rectangle around the lightsaber by selecting the two lowest and two highest points of the lightsaber toy. Cut the area inside of the rectangle out of the frame and replace it with a pure white background. Occasionally the footage of your lightsaber will be blurred. Select about two-thirds of the blurred lightsaber to rotoscope. Repeat this process frame-by-frame until you have rotoscoped the entire sequence.

5. Preview the rotoscoped footage before adding color to the lightsaber effects. Create a new layer over the video that you rotoscoped for each lightsaber in your scene with a different color. Color in your lightsaber's color over the rotoscoped effect and select the "Gaussian Blur " option to round the lightsaber-effect out. Select a layer-transparency of 50% to give the illusion that the lightsaber is glowing. Repeat this process for each frame that includes a lightsaber effect.

6. Export your film to preview the effect.

Tips & Warnings

• Save your work often. Video editing and rotoscoping are time-intensive activities. A computer failure can cause your unsaved work to be lost.

References

• TheForce.net: Lightsaber Effect Rotoscoping In A Premiere Filmstrip
• Graphics and Imaging Laboratory: Keyframe-Based Tracking for Rotoscoping and Animation
• Alien Ryder Flex: Lightsaber Effect Rotoscoping In A Premiere Filmstrip
• Lazy Movie: top 5 Rotoscoping Software