Thirty years ago, The Empire Strikes Back opened in theatres. I saw the original Star Wars but I was a bit young then. But, for Empire I was a bit older and it was just an incredible movie for me. Like most kids my age, I had my share of action figures from the movies and space ships. I also watched all of the special “making of” TV shows which gave you some idea of the amount of work which went into each film. So, I took our Super 8 camera and some of my toys and made my own version of the movie or at least part of it.

In honour of a movie which was very important to me when I grew up and its 30th anniversary, I thought I would put my movie online today. There is no sound because our camera didn’t record sound. Also, it has gone through a number of conversions which explains its sorry state and is not a reflection of the film maker himself. It was converted from film to a VCR tape years ago by my parents along with a number of other home movies. A while ago, I used our DVD recorder to burn the VCR tape to a DVD. More recently, I ripped that DVD to a MP4 file on our computer. So, it has been converted a number of times and maybe needs the wizards at ILM to return it to its former glory (or whatever it was originally).

Happy Birthday to The Empire Strikes Back.