Lucasfilm Releases ESB UNCUT, Fan Film Awards Return
The Star Wars Fan Film Awards are back! More on that in a moment…
On Friday, October 10, Lucasfilm uploaded to YouTube The Empire Strikes Back Uncut, a crazy quilt of fan-created pieces of The Empire Strikes Back that puts the fans in charge of the production. The entire film has been re-created with good costumes and sets, bad costumes and sets, cardboard characters, LEGO figures, stop-motion animation, and anything else you can think of for making a movie.
Mary Franklin, Lucasfilm’s Senior Events & Fan Relations Lead, introduces the production with, “One of the things that we love seeing here – and we see it here every day at Lucasfilm – is fan creativity. One of the best examples of fan creativity I’ve seen for a long time is The Empire Strikes Back Uncut.”
A follow-up to the Emmy Award winning Star Wars Uncut, this project launched in 2013 with fans taking 15-second segments to re-create in their own unique way. Star Wars Uncut supervisor Casey Pugh returned to manage ESB Uncut, sifting through over 1,500 submissions to assemble 480 segments.
Franklin, in this humble reporter’s opinion, buried the lede, however. Toward the end of her introduction to ESB Uncut, she also announced the return of the Star Wars Fan Film Awards, which had become something of a tradition for many years since 2002, the first time Lucasfilm had officially acknowledged fan films as a “genre”. The awards were discontinued in 2012.
Fans 13+ can submit their work between October 9, 2014 and January 16, 2015. Voting will begin in March 2015, with the winning entries will be screened at Star Wars Celebration in Anaheim, CA (April 16-19, 2015).
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