A long time ago when Construction Wars was being made...

Kevin Rosmer
May 5, 2016
19 min read

... And indeed it was a long time ago--ten years to be exact-- when we set out to make this Star Wars parody. I've always loved Star Wars. As kids, my brothers and I would obsess over it. The biggest draw for me was the idea of the Jedi Knights. I used to play with my Dad's tape measure and pretend it was a lightsaber, extending it a little ways and then letting it slide back into the handle, just like the way a lightsaber blade retracts when you turn it off.

Development & Pre-Production

One day in April of 2006 I was reflecting on that early memory and thought, "Wouldn't that be a humorous theme for a spoof; the characters and story of Star Wars set in the construction industry?" I began thinking of the many possible parallels and immediately came up with the idea for Darth Welder, and how he could wear a welding mask in place of Vader's iconic breathing apparatus. It would be perfect! I thought about the whole concept of young people going out to get their trades and needing to apply for an apprenticeship, and that spurred the idea of Luke Drywaller. I was also thinking about what the main conflicts would be akin to the warring Empire and the Rebellion in Star Wars. Of course, constituents of the Galactic Empire are referred to as Imperials (Imperial stormtroopers, Imperial shuttles, etc.) and that lead me to think of the imperial measurement system versus the metric measurement system, and how I had once heard a carpenter groaning about how much he hated the metric system. All of these ideas were lining up so perfectly that I felt it was simply meant to be.

The next day at school I shared the idea with my friends and after a short session of brainstorming we came up with Han Solder and the Millennium Fulcrum, Ben Kilowatt, Princess Brick Laya, the Wrecking Ball in place of the Death Star, and the power of The Work in place of The Force. Ideas were rapidly coming together but as an actual project it only gained traction when Rob Wallace and Corey Donovan made a serious point of saying, "we should do this".

I recall feeling intimidated at the prospect of actually making this movie. It had also always been my goal to make a movie that could be taken seriously, and a growing philosophy of mine was that if you were going to produce a film you should try and make something that you knew you could do well within your limitations. I didn't think I could do justice to Construction Wars, and I wasn't entirely turned on by the fact that it would be another silly comedy, which we had done many times before. I HAD, however, just begun learning about very basic greenscreening effects and had a fair bit of interest in trying to do something with flying spaceships. I think ultimately though, the driving factor was Rob and Corey's enthusiasm for the project. I felt like it would be a fun experience, even if it did turn out really cheesy (which was a likely probability).

So the three of us began writing a script together during our lunch breaks at school. The more we developed the script the more invested we all became. We started thinking about what the costumes would be like and how we could piece them together, and we began constructing props and miniature set pieces or models. I had to purchase two large greenscreens (10' x 15') and started experimenting with the effects I had in mind and learning how to use the software. Every time we got together we would try and come up with jokes and talk about where we might take the story. We decided we wanted to incorporate references to all of the Star Wars movies (mostly the original trilogy) rather than just one specific film. If we weren't discussing the script, we would be exploring our hometown trying to scout the right locations to shoot all of the scenes that wouldn't be shot on greenscreen. Everything about the process was exciting to me. It was unlike any film we'd tried to make before; much more involving. I think when it was all said and done I had spent close to a thousand dollars on props, costume pieces, and the supplies and equipment we needed, which doesn't sound like much but was quite a lot for a teenager without a job. By around early to mid summer we had everything in place. Our screenplay was done, we'd figured out the costumes, the props, and the locations. However, there was an issue that had remained problematic which was the need for an interior location that would be spacious enough for us to assemble our massive greenscreens. We got the bright idea one day of asking our school for use of the gymnasium over the summer as a make-shift studio in a controlled environment where we would be uninterrupted. The staff were extremely generous in accommodating our needs, and so with that taken care of, we were all set to begin filming.

Production

I think the first thing we shot (minus the test footage) was where Luke Drywaller is hammering a piece of wood and his boss comes to send him on an errand to the hardware store. I find when getting started on shooting a new project, it's a smart idea to begin with something simple at which you feel confident in your ability to succeed. Because making a movie can be daunting, that early success provides much needed confidence to tackle the challenges ahead. It kind of gets you warmed up and kickstarts your momentum. The scene in question was exactly that; very simple to shoot. Most of what we filmed on location seemed relatively easy because it was familiar territory; what you see on camera is what you're going to get. Things were a little different when shooting on greenscreen.

Logistically, the "studio" filming we did in the gymnasium was a breeze. It was comfortable, we weren't exposed to the elements, we had plenty of space to spread out our supplies without having to worry about losing track of it or transporting it into some difficult to reach location, and it was quiet and undisturbed. The difficulty in it came from a sense of insecurity I had about whether or not anything we were doing was going to work. In theory, all I had to do was keep the camera locked off (no tilts, pans or movement of any kind), and make sure all the action was contained within the green space. But even still, I had no idea what I was going to replace all that green with. This was in the days before there were resources that could be easily accessed all over the internet. I had a hard enough time finding decent free sound effects, let alone backdrops and stock footage. I had been entertaining different ideas, one being that I could create backdrop images in Microsoft Word using the draw tools which could be used as digital "sets"... but take a look at this. This image (Left) is a sample of one of the sets I drew in Microsoft Word, and as you can see, it's garbage.

I was exploring some other possibilities as well, but basically I didn't have a clue what it was going to look like. I didn't know how careful I had to be with my selection of angles. We had

several scenes planned that were going to be a lot more complex than just basic over the shoulder shots or cockpit frontals... Haha, cockpit frontals. What the hell is that? Not what it sounds like, but basically this (Right). And so, shooting on the greenscreen was like a giant leap of faith; I'd film it how I THOUGHT it needed to be filmed, then hope and pray I'd be able to put it together effectively in post-production without looking too horrible or being impossibly difficult. My concerns didn't end there though. I was also unsure about how other effects were going to be accomplished, like creating explosions and laser blasts. Again I had theories and ideas, but all of those ideas came accompanied by uncertainties. I should have done more testing beforehand, but there were complications around that too, which I won't get into. Basically, there were things I knew how to pull off but many things I didn't know how to pull off, and just counted on figuring them out along the way.

Despite these uncertainties, shooting the film was an unforgettable experience. It was exciting trying to figure out the challenges of doing things we had not tried before. It was interesting to see the difference between how you imagined things looking and sounding in your head and how they actually turned out. I remember being disappointed by a few things specifically. One was the scene in which Luke talks to the salesman about buying a power adapter and then meets Ben Kilowatt (Adrian Matwie) for the first time. Playing back the footage I realized that my garage was not as good of a location for that scene as I'd initially had in mind. It was sort of random and just not suitable or appealing to look at on screen. I also didn't like my delivery of the lines. I should have rehearsed more in my spare time. On the contrary I got a real kick out of Adrian when he entered the scene making outrageous sounds to scare off the salesman. It caught me off guard, but in a way that made me laugh. Seeing everybody jump into their respective roles was an exciting process. Things didn't always turn out the way I had imagined, the way lines were delivered and such, but sometimes that's okay. I've learned over the years that giving actors freedom to bring their own interpretation to the table can often deliver great results, and that trying to control everything with an iron grip isn't always to the benefit of the production. There's something about working with people (some of whom are your best friends) towards a common creative goal that you are all invested in and passionate about. Ideally some kind of bonding happens in the process, and it's always been like that for me making movies with people, you know, teamwork and all that. Certainly a good way to spend a chunk of the summer anyway.

We had aimed to shoot the entire film over July and August but that didn't end up happening. A lot of potential shooting days were lost due to scheduling conflicts, and I was not as proactive as I should have been in bringing everyone together, I think largely due to my inner doubts. A part of me thought it was pointless to put in the effort on production if it wasn't going to turn out any good in post.

Eventually the summer came to a close and we had accomplished very little, which left me feeling somewhat deflated about the whole thing. I knew it was going to be harder once we were back in school again. We managed to shoot after classes on a few occasions, but mostly I watched the days go by while nothing got done. I'd also been feeling deeply unhappy in general about the summer coming to an end, and there was a massive dump of snow that came out of nowhere at the beginning of September, which was jarring and didn't do much to help my motivation. It was a series of triggers that seemed to crush my spirits.

I believe one of the later things we shot was the very end of the movie, where all the principle characters are standing together looking up into the sky, having celebrated their victory over the Imperials, which then transitions into the end credits. This was a part that I had a real clear vision about for awhile and so I wanted to get it in the bag. We had scouted out a good location for this scene months earlier. You had to trek a little ways through some pretty thick brush, but eventually you'd come to this nice, isolated clearing where the sun sets over the trees. It was a great spot... or at least it was, back in June. In late August/early September however, it wasn't quite the same. First off, I'd underestimated how annoying it would be carrying all of our gear through the forest. It wasn't fun. The second problem became apparent when we made it to the clearing, only to discover it was now a hidden wetland. You'd step onto what looked like a solid patch of grass and your foot would quickly sink into the marsh. And of course in the summer, marshes tend to be a great habitat for mosquitoes to live and breed, so we were contending with the constant nuisance of swarms of mosquitoes. And to top it all off, I didn't really understand the concept of backlighting (or lighting in really any capacity) at the time and was enraged to discover that I couldn't point the camera toward the sunset and still have the characters appear properly exposed in the lower half of the frame. It was made worse by the fact that my camcorder had no manual exposure functionality (at least none that I was aware of) and so my shot was at the mercy of the camera's auto-exposure. It was a nightmare; perhaps the only truly miserable experience making the film. None of us were happy. I was so frustrated and I couldn't figure out how or why professional films managed to capture these beautiful images of characters in front of sunsets. I just didn't get it. I realize now that if I'd had manual exposure controls and a graduated ND filter I could have pulled it off quite nicely... but alas, I had neither the tools nor the knowledge. Well anyway, we got what we needed, sort of. But the incident left me feeling like, "this movie is going to suck," and it was possibly the first time I considered abandoning the project.

We shot a little bit more throughout September but I really just lost the motivation. We would talk on and off about when we were going to shoot more footage but the more time that passed the easier it became for me to just let it go. By the time December rolled around, I just accepted that it wasn't going to get finished and left it at that. It was sad. I felt like Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back, after he fails to raise his X-Wing up out of the swamp on Dagobah.

Spencer, swatting away mosquitoes in the middle of the shot.

Project Purgatory & Regrets

Over the years I had been told by various people in my life how disappointed they were that we never completed the movie. My Mom would occasionally remind me about it. "I always wished you had finished your Construction Wars movie," she would say, "I thought that was such a cute idea. It was so clever." My brothers also mentioned it from time to time, asking me why I never finished it. I remember one evening in 2010 maybe, Corey and I pulled out the videotapes and tried to play back the footage, just for kicks. The picture was fine but the sound wasn't coming through at all for some reason. I was pissed! I boxed them all up and put them out of my mind, thinking they were ruined forever, for no reason I could understand. We still loved to reminisce though. He had kept his original copy of the script and when we met up sometimes he would pull it out and we'd read it together. Every time we talked about it he would urge me to cut together the footage and make a copy for him, even if there was no audio. His parents had always wanted to see what we had shot as well. I told Corey maybe I would one day, but I really didn't want to put in the time. I'd put it behind me and had no intentions of revisiting it.

Whenever I would hear someone being asked that question, "What do you regret in your life?" the response I almost always heard is that you shouldn't regret anything. People pride themselves on living without regret. It would always get me thinking if there was anything in my own life I regretted. Only a few things jumped out at me, but over time as people brought it up time and time again, I came to realize that I really regretted not finishing Construction Wars. Any time I'd catch a glance of my box of videotapes, it sort of called out to me and I'd hear a little voice whispering, "It's still there". Of course, because cassettes are now obsolete, I no longer have any devices capable of playing back my old tapes. But it was kind of a captivating thought that all that footage, all those memories, and all those moments in time were captured right there in that little box, and they could be enjoyed if only I could access them.

I'd accumulated a lot of tapes between 2002 and 2008, and I had been meaning to convert them to a digital format for many years, in order to preserve them. In December 2015--nine years after ditching the Construction Wars project--I finally decided it was about time to do so. My Dad still owned all of his old video cameras, which were still in working condition. He also happens to be a DVD copying enthusiast (what would I ever do without my Dad?) so when I went home for the Christmas holiday, I took full advantage.

It was a great experience watching over everything I'd filmed from the previous decade. I found old projects that I had completely forgotten about. It was a total nostalgia trip. When I came to the tapes which contained Construction Wars I wasn't expecting them to work properly, but when I played them back the audio came through loud and clear! I was thrilled!

When I saw the footage I didn't know how or what to feel about it. It was not amazing, but it was amusing. Overwhelmingly though I was really impressed that we had come up with this neat idea and actually tried to make something of it. It was clever and ambitious and I felt even a little bit re-inspired. It reminded me of what I loved so much about making films and kind of ignited the old filmmaking spirit in me that I once had all those years ago... the enchantment of it, I suppose, and the imagination, after having become so bogged down by the technical aspects of filmmaking over all that time. It was something that I feel I was desperately in need of.

Post-Production

I was excited to share the footage with Corey since he had been bugging me for years to make a copy for him. I still wasn't planning on doing much with it and figured I'd just throw all the raw footage together into a file and upload it online for him to see. That would be simple enough and would satisfy his longing. So I set out to do just that, but as I started assembling it all I thought it might be more interesting to actually arrange the shots in order so that it flowed like the actual scenes were supposed to.

The first scene I cut together was the first scene that we shot, with Luke Drywaller's boss sending him on an errand. It was quick and easy to edit and kind of neat to just see something that we'd done come together... But in fact, it was SO quick and SO easy that I decided to go ahead and do the same with another scene, and another after that, and I decided to throw in a little music for good measure, just to bring it to life and make it a little more complete. It was very cool seeing what we had shot take on some feeling for the first time. It was a moment of realization where I sort of felt like, "Oh, so this is what the movie would have been like".

I ended up coming to the scene with Darth Welder and his henchman, which I believe must have been one of the first bits of greenscreen material that we shot for the movie. I was really curious how well the greenscreen would key out, given that we'd shot it in standard definition on a consumer camcorder with low color depth. So I decided I'd take a crack at it, just as a fun experiment. Low and behold it keyed surprisingly well, and with a little tweaking of the settings I was able to get a pretty clean, isolated alpha channel. Of course I had to throw in some kind of a background to see how it would look, so I snatched an image off of Google, threw it in place and oh dear lord... it was a slippery slope after that. The next thing I knew I was scraping together every piece of spaceship test footage I had shot, adding sound effects and explosions, and digging up the script so I could start recreating the opening text crawl. That was it. I was going to finish what we'd started.

Of course, I only had what we'd filmed available to work with, but there was enough there (more than I even realized) to put something together that would resemble what the finished product would have been like, and that was enough for me. That was all I needed to gain closure.

The more I worked on it the more obsessed I became over nailing down the little details. This was especially true for the opening logo and text crawl. Everything from the four periods following "in a galaxy far far away. . . ." being square as opposed to circular, to the letter 'g' having a curl rather than a hook, or the letters of the logo being black filled (not hollow, as I'd previously thought), to the thickness of the font, I really tried to hit the details.

There are a few things that I didn't get right (if you aren't a nerd, skip over the rest of this paragraph). For instance, the letters in "IMPERIALS VERSUS THE METRICS" look a little different from the letters in "THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK" particularly the letters M, R and S. Also the way the paragraphs are justified is different. In my version, justifying a paragraph just increases the kerning of the spaces. In Star Wars, the paragraphs are justified in a way so that it affects the kerning of the words as well as the spaces. I'm only saying all this to make it clear that I did think about these things, but just decided not to do anything about it. Aside from those and a few other minor details, it's pretty dead on. I even applied a 1-2% blur to the logo and font to subtly soften it up. Otherwise it just looked too sharp. But I should add just how fucking tricky it was to figure out how to make that text scroll back in the way that it does at a slant. You watch Star Wars and think, "Well that should be easy. All you've got to do is type it up, make it scroll, and then put it on a tilt." Yeah, you would think. But the problem is that you have to make sure you adjust and keyframe the right parameters. For starters, you have to make sure you adjust the orientation so as to keep the text in line with its proper axis, and then secondly, rather than making the text scroll by adjusting its position, you have to adjust its anchor point. I didn't know about the nuances of those parameters and struggled for hours trying to make it work because I wanted to figure it out on my own. In the end, I resorted to a tutorial. But I got it working. It was just way harder than it should have been.

For the most part, putting the project together was an easy and enjoyable process. Most of the greenscreen material only required two layers. The most complex scene to composite was the spaceship battle scene. It had five different layers to it. I'd start with the footage and remove the greenscreen. Then beneath that was a still image of a cockpit. The very back layer was a space time lapse to create the illusion that the ship was moving through space, and then between the space and the cockpit I sometimes incorporated various other ships flying all around, just to sort of populate the scene, and then there were a couple of explosions, which were just stock footage elements. The only other layer was a flash of color whenever the pilots fired their blasters. That's as complex as it got, and it was all very basic compositing.

There were two composites in the Millennium Fulcrum that required a little bit of masking work. This was in order to make it appear as though Spencer was coming out from around a corner. It's not complicated but does require a little more precision work. It is three layers. The technique just involves cutting out the shape of that left portion of the still image and placing it ON TOP of the footage we shot, while the other part remains underneath. So you have part of the still image in the foreground, Spencer is in the middle ground, and the rest of the still image is in the background.

Aside from the picture aspect though, I also got to have some fun with the sound production, which was especially important on Construction Wars to really sell the action. Sound production brings me a lot of satisfaction for that reason. Afterall, what would the picture be without sound? While I was editing, the sound production started sort of experimentally again. I was cutting together the spaceship battle and thought it would be cool if I had the characters voices coming in over the com-link, so I decided to try it out. It was a small detail that seemed to just make the scene a little more versatile and authentic. After that I decided to try putting in some laser blaster sounds and from there the whole scene just became more and more active as I started putting other ships flying in the background with wooshes and hums as they flew by, as well as an explosion. The voices of Darth Welder and Jobba the Unemployment Agent needed to be re-recorded, so I recorded myself saying the lines and then edited them pretty heavily. In the case of Jobba, I just read his lines in plain English and then played them in reverse so it would sound like he was speaking an alien language, then drastically lowered the pitch. Of course, AC Adapter also had to be re-recorded, as well as one line for Han Solder in the scene when he shoots at Luke and Laya who are flying the shuttle. After all the sounds were in place I did a basic mix of the whole thing to balance the levels and make it all stereo.

I'd like to talk about technology now for a moment. Film production tools have come a long way in nine years and there's no way I could have finished Construction Wars in 2006 the way that I finished it in 2016, although that probably has more to do with resource availability than technology. In 2006 you didn't download stock footage off of websites, you had to order it on DVDs, and virtually nothing was high definition. Google Image search was significantly less effective. Quality sound effects libraries were hard to come by, or costly. My editing tools consisted of Pinnacle Studio Version 9 and the Ultra 2 Chroma Key software. Nowadays, Adobe Premiere (which is a giant leap up from Pinnacle) has the Ultra Key plugin built right into it, I have a subscription to services that supply an abundance of stock footage, music and sound effects, and Google Image search can find pictures of almost anything. The main point I want to make is that whatever you need as far as resources go, you can acquire it almost instantly in the modern age. That was not the case when I was seventeen (I also didn't have a credit card or any money to make online purchases, so that was another inhibiting factor). But now, when I wanted to put an animation of a planet in the background for my ship to go flying by, I could just look it up online and download it within a couple minutes. When I needed the Millennium Falcon cockpit as a backdrop, it was one quick Google search away. When I decided I wanted to show a spaceship blow up, I could easily find an element designed specifically for compositing and a high quality sound effect to go with it. My point is just to observe how much easier things are now. The software has improved massively and with the ability to acquire resources with such ease, I was able to take our amateur footage from so many years ago and make it into the film that I had always imagined. Yeah, it still looks cheesy--you can only do so much in post--but it's the way I'd hoped it would turn out when we conceived the idea. When it was all said and done, compiling the entire film took a total of about two weeks.

Reflection

I think the most notable thing about the finished product was just how great it felt to see it come to life. I didn't think I'd ever get to see it. For nine years I'd given up that hope, believing It would always just exist in my memory and my imagination. It's a wonderful thing when you get to surprise yourself. Although there's still so much of the script that we never got to film, I feel satisfied enough now that I can lay my regret to rest. A lot had changed between 2006 and 2016. This time I felt like Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi after the Battle of Endor, when he burns the body of Darth Vader... and then looking back at the ghosts of all his mentors.

Well, that's all I have to say about that. Now I'm going to listen to the Ewok Celebration Music.

May the 4th Be With You.