Flying the Millennium Falcon with Stop-Motion

Our pal Joey Shanks goes old-school again with the VFX, and does his best to replicate the Millennium Falcon scene from the Star Trek: The Force Awakens teaser using nothing more than model spaceships, stop-motion and his own creativity.

Of course, he had to tweak his model of the Falcon to match the new one from the trailer, and then he set off to capture the scene, positioning the ship on an articulating stand, then painstakingly repositioning and capturing it one frame at a time. I especially like the little long-exposure trick he used with the laser pointer to achieve the afterburner effect. One YouTube commenter suggested that Joey could paint the stand green so he could chromakey them out, and I suppose that would work as long as you don’t care about the bottom of the spaceship.

I always love watching Joey’s videos. They really inspire me to want to create some of my own practical VFX shots.