A Star Wars Fan Animates An Unused Concept For The Opening Of The Force Awakens

A fan animator has taken a crack at animating the storyboards for a rejected introduction idea for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. (Don’t worry, it’s not the terrible idea with Luke’s disembodied, decayed hand holding a lightsaber in space.)

 

 

Animator Tim Gray saw some storyboards for the 2015 mega-hit, and took a crack at animating what it might have looked like. In this sequence, we see Jakku live up to its reputation as being a junkyard planet by means of seeing some light vessels use tractor beams to drag a Star Destroyer into its orbit, before said ship inevitably gets drawn into the atmosphere and crashes into the desert, directly segueing into the sequence where we first meet Rey as she plunders the vessel. All of this is set to the score of The Last Jedi, which comes together for a cool animatic sequence.

 

 

 

While I like this idea a lot, I find the more active introduction to the movie to be a much better way to draw audiences back into the Galaxy Far, Far Away on film for the first time in a decade. In addition, for a movie plagued by fan comparisons to A New Hope (many of which I believe are unfair), deliberately modeling the introduction after the franchise’s original opening sequence seems like a way that would have put blood in the water. Not to mention that the idea of Jakku’s supply of crashed ships from the age of the Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire coming from some massive, cataclysmic battle that we never saw is more intriguing an idea than “a destroyed ship is dropped into the place where destroyed ships go to die”.

 

 

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Grant has been a fan of Star Wars for as long as he can remember, having seen every movie on the big screen. When he’s not hard at work with his college studies, he keeps himself busy by reporting on all kinds of Star Wars news for SWNN and general movie news on the sister site, Movie News Net. He served as a frequent commentator on SWNN’s The Resistance Broadcast.

Grant Davis (Pomojema)

Grant has been a fan of Star Wars for as long as he can remember, having seen every movie on the big screen. When he’s not hard at work with his college studies, he keeps himself busy by reporting on all kinds of Star Wars news for SWNN and general movie news on the sister site, Movie News Net. He served as a frequent commentator on SWNN’s The Resistance Broadcast.

27 thoughts on “A Star Wars Fan Animates An Unused Concept For The Opening Of The Force Awakens

  • February 5, 2018 at 12:21 am
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    This was really beautiful and stunning. TFA has a solid opening, but this is just jaw-dropping.

  • February 5, 2018 at 12:28 am
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    That’s so fucking cool.

  • February 5, 2018 at 12:41 am
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    Nice job. You can tell the CGI isn’t Lucas Film quality but I can let that side since its one guy.

    • February 5, 2018 at 3:10 am
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      You can let that slide? How noble of you. I’m sure there is a compliment in there somewhere, but it is buried under snark.

      • February 5, 2018 at 3:43 am
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        Wow someone has a chip on their shoulder. The scene impressed me! You cannot expect one guy to design a Star Destroyer as well as Lucasfilm can. That’s all I was getting at.

  • February 5, 2018 at 12:50 am
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    WOW. I must hand it to the animator – and fans in general – often it seems they can be more creative than the actual custodians of the property.

    This is truly excellent work!

    • February 5, 2018 at 12:55 am
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      Well, the custodians of the intellectual property were the ones that came up with this idea. It’s just that they decided against it, and I think that was the right decision from a narrative standpoint.

      – Pomojema

      • February 5, 2018 at 12:59 am
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        I wasn’t clear – I was knocking the custodians in other instances, not this one. I’m a big fan of fan creativity.

      • February 5, 2018 at 12:59 am
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        I wasn’t clear – I was knocking the custodians in other instances, not this one. I’m a big fan of fan creativity.

        • February 6, 2018 at 3:06 am
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          But where is the fan creativity?

    • February 5, 2018 at 9:42 pm
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      It was really good, especially for a fan animator. It would be nice to see more of this, like if Disney does a series on their up and coming streaming service, they could bring in relatively unknown people to make the episodes, kind of like how Stephen King lets anyone who wants it have rights to make a movie out of his books. They would not only get a good intro to filmaking, but it would also prove who can do Star Wars movies, and possibly even select canidates for directors of movies.

  • February 5, 2018 at 1:03 am
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    Nice job. Too bad Rey was scavenging inside a super star destroyer, not a regular one like in this opening

    • February 5, 2018 at 8:57 pm
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      Does it matter? The animator is recreating a discarded concept and showing its intended transition to the Rey reveal. What she’s actually doing in the final film is irrelevant. No points for being a detail-obsessed fanboy in this instance.

      • February 6, 2018 at 12:21 am
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        Lol all I’m saying is the animator maybe could have used a super star destroyer model to make it fit better but whatever. Chill out dude

  • February 5, 2018 at 1:50 am
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    Question ( just out of curiousity ):

    If a Star Destroyer fell to ground from upper orbit, wouldn’t its impact have the same effect as several megaton nuclear bombs? The imapct crater itself would be kilometres in diameter.

    • February 5, 2018 at 2:37 am
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      Yep. I don’t think anyone would care though as it’s largely uninhabited. Plus I would wager they took out anything dangerous/valuable like a reactor core. So no major follow up explosion. Just the pure kinetic force.

      • February 5, 2018 at 8:55 pm
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        A star destroyer hitting the planet from orbit at terminal velocity would likely be an extinction level event due to the amount of dust thrown into the atmosphere. That is, if Star Wars physics worked anything like ours. 🙂

        • February 5, 2018 at 9:39 pm
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          Exactly. It’s a different galaxy with different planets and enviroments. We dont need to overexplain everything.

        • February 5, 2018 at 10:14 pm
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          I actually don’t think it’s large enough to have that impact. It would be a considerable explosion though. We also don’t know the size of Jakku. It could be larger than earth. Silly to debate though… as we can never know the exact details.

  • February 5, 2018 at 2:38 am
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    A more interesting idea IMO. A nod to the past while clearly showing it’s the future. Of course a massive graveyard filled with the past worked too. 😛

  • February 5, 2018 at 3:11 am
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    Those Rebel Transport/Blockade Runner mashups were awful. Really glad JJ scrapped those. Bloody terible idea.

    • February 5, 2018 at 3:48 am
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      Snarkey!

  • February 5, 2018 at 5:43 am
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    Boring, and does nothing to set up the story or characters. Glad they did not use this concept in the movie.

    • February 5, 2018 at 9:43 pm
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      But you have to give credit to the guy who did this, it looks really pretty nice.

  • February 5, 2018 at 6:36 pm
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    More fan films please.

  • February 6, 2018 at 7:18 pm
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    Not wishing to start an argument, but if TFA story had been a bit more original in the last act (no super Death Star), then I would of been happy to see that opening. Would of been a nice nod to the original with that great twist. Though what we got was pretty cool as well.

  • February 6, 2018 at 8:22 pm
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    It doesn’t do much for character development. It lend’s to Jakku being a star destroyer junk yard. From reading Empire’s End – Jakku bacame a junkyard because of the final stand of the Empirial Fleet, not from rebels dropping off dead Imperial ships on Jakku.

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