At this year’s Star Wars Fan Movie Awards presented by Lucasfilm and Atom at Celebration V in Orlando, Florida, The Solo Adventures won Best Animated Feature.

Starwars.com chats with Florida-based filmmaker Jeff Scheetz about his award-winning film, The Solo Adventures.

What is your background in film? Did you study it in college? Did you make films as a youngster/teen?

I grew up making Super 8 movies in my backyard with Star Wars action figures. I vowed to one day become a visual effects artist. I was an early adopter of CGI on the Video Toaster and my first job was on Babylon 5, then Star Trek Voyager. In 2000, my wife Anne and I opened an animation school at Universal Studios Orlando called The Digital Animation & Visual Effects School. We have been training visual effects artists and animators for 10 years. Our grads have worked on Avatar, Battlestar, Kung Fu Panda, and at Disney, DreamWorks, Sony and ILM!

What prompted you to make a Star Wars fan film? How has George Lucas and his films influenced your work?

We produce four films a year as part of our curriculum. The instructors write and direct and the students work on the films as they would if this were a production studio. We have made 33 films in 10 years. It was inevitable that we would eventually make a fan film, the questions was when. The answer came with the news that Celebration V was coming to home town Orlando.

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At this year’s Star Wars Fan Movie Awards presented by Lucasfilm and Atom at Celebration V in Orlando, Florida, Chronicles of a Young Skywalker won Best Action Heroes Award.

Starwars.com chats with Hawaii-based filmmaker Blake Cousins about his award-winning film.

What is your background in film? Did you study it in college? Did you make films as a youngster/teen?

Brent and I are known as the Cousins Brothers Productions. We have been making films for over two years. We broke into theaters with our blockbuster hit The Night Marchers series breaking box office records in the state of Hawaii! We also won the John Carpenter Award for our movie Slaughter Day in the Video Review Magazine Shoot off! Our most recent film is an apocalyptic horror called The Rising Dead — it’s a zombie movie that takes place at the end of the world, currently being distributed by York Entertainment.

What prompted you to make a Star Wars fan film? How has George Lucas and his films influenced your work?

With Brent’s 3-year-old boy Cameron Cousins, we decided that he loved Star Wars so much that we would test his skills with a lightsaber. Turned out he was fantastic, so we went ahead and did three feature shorts of Chronicles of Young Skywalker! Growing up in the 1970’s and watching Star Wars for the first time it changed our life in a way that would lead us down the road to making film!

What is the backstory regarding your film? Where did you get your idea for your film?

We came up with the concept of what would young Luke Skywalker and a teenage Han Solo do if confronted by a dark Sith? It turned out to be a real adventure! Having a 100-year-old sugar plantation in our backyard on the Hamakua Coast of the Big Island of Hawaii would be a perfect back drop for our film!

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At this year’s Star Wars Fan Movie Awards presented by Lucasfilm and Atom at Celebration V in Orlando, Florida, Renaissance (Redux) won Audience Choice Award.

Renaissance (Redux) is produced entirely by Chilean people, shot in Chilean locations and inspired by George Lucas’ Star Wars. Using only a video camera and domestic computers, the Estudio 19 and Droi-D crew intended to demonstrate that science fiction is possible in countries like Chile, without exorbitant budgets. Starwars.com chats with Chile-based filmmaker Inti Carrizo-Ortiz about his award-winning film.

What is your background in film? Did you study it in college? Did you make films as a youngster/teen?

I went to film school here in Chile, at the ARCOS Institute of Art and Communications; but I made my first serious short film at age 17, using two old VCRs and a Mono cassette radio for editing. So I guess I took an early major in “Making Movies with Nothing at All;” a philosophy I stubbornly maintained during film school and beyond, and of course, with Renaissance (Redux). When the story is right, imagination is always the biggest budget asset.

What prompted you to make a Star Wars fan film? How has George Lucas and his films influenced your work?

Star Wars is what got me into movies; and movies is what keeps me going. It has been such a huge inspiration, I just needed to do something about it — to give something back, no matter how little, to that wonderful universe of crazy old wizards and men twisted and evil. And soon I discovered I wasn’t alone.

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At this year’s Star Wars Fan Movie Awards presented by Lucasfilm and Atom at Celebration V in Orlando, Florida, Makazie One won Best Cinematography.

The impressive fan film is set in the Star Wars universe during the time period between Episodes III and IV. An elite soldier has been sent to track down and destroy a known threat to the Empire through intense ground battles and haunting imagery of death that surround the environment. The unsuspecting enemy to the new Imperial order has no idea what he is up against when the two finally meet for an action packed surprise ending.

Starwars.com chats with Florida-based filmmaker Clutch about his award-winning film.

What is your background in film? Did you study it in college? Did you make films as a youngster/teen?

My only formal education that relates to film was attending Full Sail University that specialized in Digital Media, Film and Audio at the time. They’ve really expanded a great deal since then to include 3-D animation which I taught there for a number of years. I went through the digital media course which had classes covering a broad range of subjects like 3-D animation, composting, audio, cameras and 2-D graphics but no, I’ve never attended any kind of formal film school and Makazie One was my first film altogether. As a young boy I was inspired by Star Wars as many were and would make home movies with some of the toys while desperately trying not to burn down the garage in the process.

What prompted you to make a Star Wars fan film? How has George Lucas and his films influenced your work?

I’ve been a member of the 501st since 2001 as well as a former Marine so I always wanted to try to bridge the two worlds and make a Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers-type movie but with stormtroopers. I also wanted to twist our perspectives around and make a film from the Empire’s point of view where the Jedi were the bad guys. That’s just me though, I’ve always been partial to the villains. George Lucas created this great universe to explore and expand so as far as him influencing the project, it wouldn’t have been possible had he not created the environment to work with.

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As the winner for the Best Sequel presented by Lucasfilm and Atom at this year’s Star Wars Fan Movie Awards at Celebration V in Orlando, Florida, The Notebook Strikes Back captured the imagination of what The Empire Strikes Back would look like recreated with paper cut-outs in a notebook, much like last year’s winner Star Wars in a Notebook by the same filmmaker.

Starwars.com chats with Columbia-based filmmaker Oscar Fabián Triana Méndez.

What prompted you to make a Star Wars fan film sequel? How has George Lucas and his films influenced your work?

The first part had a really nice reception — lots of positive comments and reviews! I watch the film featured in blogs and sites from everywhere: obviously the USA but also France, Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, Perú, Australia, Russia, Spain even Thailand. People seem to love it! So I thought a sequel should be a nice gift for all of them (and for me).

Also I have a fun time doing it so. Plus everything has a sequel now doesn’t it? I don’t know if I should credit Mr. Lucas for that, but I hope mine it’s one of the good ones like Empire!

What is the back story regarding your film?

To sum things up, it’s the film that plays in the head of a little kid that is shocked discovering the Star Wars movies. You know, your memory isn’t perfect so you skip scenes, swap characters, and distort some other parts, but you really capture the essence of that story. I visualize that naive feeling with the tools you have at the moment in your house or school: paper, cloth, scissors, glue.

Back then you give life to your drawings or cutouts in your head, now thanks to a computer. I love the handmade look, I’m a big fan of the sweded/indie/low budget filmmaking that is flooding Internet.

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