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Art of the Saber is one of legions of "lightsaber effect" videos made by fans.

TFN Fanfilms has a huge library of Star Wars home movies. Many of them have excellent stories, and do much more than display the rotoscoping skills of the creators.

Duality is one of the most visually impressive, but because of conflicts between the two guys who made it it's not available on TFN anymore.

There's a low budget, professional looking, star wars video here

If you visit the site you will find out what they did, what software to use, and general tips to make a movie.

Anyway, the important thing is not the technology, but the history you are trying to tell.

(I'm glad you didn't ask how to get profit, though)

As a producer, composer, and general content creator, I think that looking for quality entertainment is the critical concern. There's plenty of stuff out there, the trick is finding the good stuff. And with a few notable exceptions (Ani DiFranco, etc.) you aren't going to find it at your local Best Buy, and maybe not even at your local record store (if any of those still exist). For now, the web is where it's at.

While certainly not a litmus test for quality, you can at least trust that artists that use alternate distribution like CDBaby to provide distribution for self-produced/funded titles at least cared enough about their music to scrounge up the money to press a CD and arrange for distribution.

If you're willing to trudge through some crap (albeit interesting crap in many cases), the big music sites like IUMA, MP3.com, and Garageband provide more tracks than you'll be able to listen to.

One hint for the more commercial sites like MP3.com - skip the charts occasionally. The way the MP3.com charts work, you'll typically get a song at number 1 that stays at number 1 for a long time because everyone's listening to it because it's number 1. A self-perpetuating hit, if you will. Also, ever since Vivendi bought MP3.com out, there have been an awful lot of mainstream artists in the top charts. Still, if you're looking for mainstream, you can at least get a "legal" mp3 of a bunch of stuff there.

An additional hint, you'll find some real gems in the less-traveled genres like film music, darkwave, folk, comedy, etc.

Finally, there are lots of small independent labels/artist collectives like RTFM Records that have quality artists that either got tired of working in the mainstream entertainment business, or were smart enough to try and slog it out themselves. Supporting labels like these is a good way to encourage more of the same.

I don't have much advice for you on the movie side of things - I think with the advent of cheap digital camcorders and products like iMovie and Final Cut Pro, you'll see more of this kind of content hitting the web in the next year or two, though. Especially as more people get broadband, which is more or less required for visual stuff.

One site I can recommend if you're into fan-produced Star Wars stuff is theforce.net which has quite a few short films and trailers of varying quality. There's also an absolutely stunning short film set in the Star Wars universe called Duality that you just have to see to believe.

Finally, I'd like to put a plug in for a new benefit album created by a bunch of musicians from around the world in response to the WTC/Pentagon attacks. The album, September Rising, is now available. It was put together by a bunch of pros, most of whom have never met each other face to face. Complete information is available at septemberrising.org. It's some really great stuff, and unlike most of the benefit albums coming from the major entertainment conglomerates who only donated a percentage of sales, I believe that all proceeds from sales of this album go to the New York Firefighters 9-11 Disaster Relief Fund.

That movie was made mostly by two guys. Total crew for everything was around 8. They used good consumer level equipment. Editing and special effects were done on Macs using about $2000 worth of software. It's only their second attempt at a movie, too.

And guess what? Duality looks as good as anything in the original Star Wars.

I think we are entering a phase where the resources required to make a top notch movie with full special effects are going to go way down. So maybe it is true that it won't be possible to get a $200 million budget for a major movie...but I don't think anyone will need a $200 million budget anymore.

Agreed. The characters sucked in Episode I. In fact, and I hate to say this, the most interesting character was probably Jar Jar. If you want the other stuff, just go to CrewOfTwo to see some cool Star Wars effects in action.

I was just about to submit this as a news article, but since my submissions never get accepted anyway...

Fanfilms.com has several very good amateur short films set in the starwars universe. The one that really caught my eye though is the six and a half minute long film Duality about the final test of a new apprentice Lord of the Sith. The film makers put up some very good information about amateur film-making at their site, including modelling hints, costuming, storyboards, and script notes.

I'm really impressed with the quality of this amateur film; and if there are any more out there like this, I'd like to see them.

I'm not sure what multimedia means anymore. It used to be cdroms, and while there certainly was a 'bad games' component, most of them were very interesting, back before we had the world wide web.

Now apparently multimedia means 'flash' to most people. Fair enough, though I've not seen much that really exploits the medium in the original sense of 'multimedia'. Flash's heritage is of course as a tool for multimedia cdroms, but most designers seem wrapped up it its vector and animation capabilities. That's great and more power to them. OTOH, that's a new medium, not multimedia.

No doubt the lack of reasonable open standards for audio and video compression isn't helping with this. And of course the advantage of vector graphics are their miniscule bandwidth requirements.

Rants aside, I've seen some interesting work content-wise out of amateur film sites--a sort of online version of the bonus materials. crewoftwo is a good example: they made a short film, but most of their website is background and behind-the-scenes material. Everything a fan could want. Some friends of mine are working on a project (blaze xpd) to produce video, audio, and prose fiction serials all set in the same universe, and tie them together as seamlessly as possible through their website. I wish movie and tv websites were as free with their content.

Best of all for your purposes is that the web site has all of the storyboards and direction available for download, so you can see how it was put together.