Andrew (7) and Michael (4) have really gotten into Star Wars lately. It's actually kind of neat that we're able to share this since I was about Andrew's age when the first Star Wars movie came out. We even managed to find some of my old Star Wars toys at my parents' house for them to play with.

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to make some photos and maybe videos of the guys holding light sabers. I found some pretty simple techniques on the web and earned high marks for "cool dad" this week as a result. (Let me tell you that the image of Michael with a light saber is terrifying.)

Along the way, I found some amazing Star Wars fan films. These are amateur movies with a Star Wars theme. Some are meant to fill in gaps between the movies, others are just spoofs or (mostly) light saber battles. In any case, they're amazing. It's incredible what people can do with modern technology. The reason I got into software development and am still doing it after all these years is that I'm super excited about how software can help enable more people to exercise their creativity by lowering the barriers to entry and production. I think word processing did this for writing, digital imaging did this for photography, and now digital videomaking is doing it for filmmaking.

Super neat stuff.

Check out TheForce.Net for a good list. I especially like Revelations, Broken Allegiance, Duality, and the whole Pink Five series. (Not all are links to TheForce.net)