Behind the Scenes: Replacing a Star Destroyer

Recently a follower asked how we recreate the sets in our Empire Strikes Back project so I figured I'd have some fun doing a 'behind the scenes' post.

You may have already noticed, we have to use more than just action figures as the Hasbro line doesn't/couldn't cover everything, one great example, the Star Destroyer. This is a model I picked up recently knowing it would soon be needed for the project, so now I'm going to show you how we put this model in the movie scene.

We start with a screen grab from the Empire Strikes Back and using photoshop we select the element(s) we want to replace, then we use a tool called 'content aware fill', which this project could not possibly be done without as it does this:

Now that we have the background, we need to photograph our own Star Destroyer.

Hard to tell from this iPhone photo but we put a green image on the TV screen resulting in our own home made green screen:

This makes it very easy to select the star Destroyer and remove the background in photoshop:

We then add this image to the image we created from the movie still:

Now all that's left to do is to apply a bit of photoshop magic and we have our finished image:

Check out our Empire Strikes Back project, were we recreate one scene every week at www.facebook.com/kmswc and give us a like!