July 2026 Update

So the donation drive went really well… or so i thought. I managed to order the Archive X paints ( some out of stock so will re-order them soon). I can’t thank Guy at Archive X enough. Very helpful and , as they are based only half an hour away from me, he hand delivered the paints to my address the same day as ordering.

On the printing side of things, i’ve almost finished printing the top section of the 5-foot Falcon. This thing eats filament but it’s looking good. Used the last of the first order of filament and i’m having to pause until i can order the final batch. (well i am having to have a short pause even if i had the extra filament at the moment, but i’ll come to that later).

Now bout getting that final batch… We hit the target ( we got £12 more than the target in the end) a few days after i became ill with a nightmare of a chest infection. And the first heatwave hit just as i was starting to feel a little better, so it was too hot upstairs to have the PC on (36 Degrees C in my workroom and no air conditioning). Then, when it started cooing down i went to order the second lot of filament only to find out that paypal had frozen the funds. I’d had donations from multiple email addresses totalling up to £267 that turned out to be from the same credit card and there had been a charge-back and my account was frozen while paypal investigated. Took over a week for them to unfreeze my account but now i’m £255 away from the total i needed to raise. I wasn’t given any explanation other than the credit card company had received a charge back request from the card owner. So i thought that someone had used a card to make donations that they wasn’t theirs. All the donations that used this card came from different email addresses and were within a week of each other, the last one being on the day before i made the last post stating that there was only £100 left to raise.

But a day or so after paypal unfroze my account and refunded the money i got an email from the person who had made the donations and made the charge back request. It was done deliberately. This person was very pleased with himself and very abusive towards me and what i am doing with this project. He knew that it would completely screw me up because i wouldn’t be able to cover the amount of funds he withdrew as i had spend them on the materials. Luckily , thanks to being ill and the heatwave, i hadn’t had the chance to place my order. So he failed in that respect.

But i do still have to keep the donation drive open longer and just hope that i can raise enough to cover this hole in the funds. So, if you can still help out , then i would be greatly appreciative. You can find the link to donate in one of the earlier posts on this page.

The last thing i want to cover is something i touched on earlier in this post. That i’m having to have at least a week or two off from printing even if i had been able to get the filament. Most people who have an Elegoo Centauri Carbon 1 will have come across the “Error code 103” problem which stems from their shitty USB cable going to the hot-end. Well i got it half way through a print and the thing stopped and the error code came up. Rebooted and then just got stuck in the “anomaly in printhead heating- reboot” screen cycle. Reboot, screen comes up again every time and i’m stuck . can’t do anything. Luckily it is in warranty and i’m in contact with Elegoo who seem pretty good at shipping you the parts needed to fix the printer. Done all the tests they requested and it looks like the USB cable, the hotend board and the main board need replacing. I’m just waiting back to hear from them to fins out what’s happening next. It’s a very common issue and they have produced a replacement USB cable that is supposed to fix this problem arising in the future. But sadly the parts look like they have to be shipped from china so it is going to be a few weeks to get this up and running again.

In the mean time, now things are cooling down a little at night here in the UK by the looks of things ( well it is tonight at least anyway) , I’m working on Vaders voice in ANH to hopefully bring it closer sounding to how it appears in the other two films. But i will cover than in my next post.
See you in a few days…

April 2026 Model Update

So, in my last post, i mentioned that there was a BIG change in respect to the model side of things. Well, yes, from a certain point of view.. 😉

the pictures i have posted have corresponding numbers to make it easier for me to explain things.

For the Home One Hangar scene , as i have mentioned, i will be replacing all the matte painting shots with physical miniatures. But when i begun working on the ships for the wide hangar shot ( #8) which are approx 1/48 scale, it became apparent that this small scale wouldn’t really hold up for the closer shots (#7) and that i would need to go bigger to achieve this. But to do this would mean making a much larger Millennium Falcon, separate to the smaller one , the 32inch (pic # 6) being used for the wide hangar shot. I couldn’t just make one falcon larger and then just scale up the other ships & the hangar i need to build this this whole scene because it would be way too big without having a dedicated studio to work on it and film it. I’d need a bloody large space.

Originally i was going to scale up the CG model we have been using for the FX work and get it modified for 3D printing. But a few months ago i came across a Facebook group on my newsfeed and it contained the solution to my dilemma. Darrin Hurd had created 3D printing files to create the 5 foot version of the Falcon and released it to the public for free. This is the “BIG” thing i was talking about. 😉 It’s huge.

I started printing out parts to see how they would turn out on my Elegoo Centauri Carbon FDM printer and the quality is amazing. I will have to print off some of the more detailed/ smaller things on the resin printer, but even without all the post processing needed it looks great. He’s even done a version with the landing ramp and landing gears. So far i have printed out the frame and some of the upper panels and cockpit (pics # 2, 3, 4 & 5) and you can see it next to the 32inch version in pic # 1. Now some of the parts I have printed already will need to be redone due to a few alterations I need to make to the model and the fact that these were basically just test prints so not all were printed at the highest quality. It was more to see how things fitted together, which is why I haven’t glued any of the parts together as yet and just taped them.

Originally I was going to use the Hasbro Hero falcon playset as the basis for the smaller falcon, with most of the details replaced with 3d printed and scratch built parts, but being able to print out the same model for both will mean they will both be the same, with much better quality. And it scales down perfectly to 50%. Details will match perfectly between the 32 inch and the 5 foot ones .

The only problem is that this wasn’t budgeted for. Now I already have the 3D printer resin needed , but the 5ft alone takes a huge amount of filament. They estimate that it takes 25kg to print it, without adding extra for failed prints or trial/ error. So you can probably add another 5kg at least to that. And with the 32” being printed the same way for the mostly part, that’s around another 15kg. And then there’s the painting. I was going to use the Archive X acrylic paint set for the falcon so I would need a lot more of the base colour to paint this thing, which is also an added expense.

As you may remember, I split the donation drive up into sections. The first two being completed and then it was paused and was going to be reopened for the final drive for the x-wing pilot shoot. Well I have decided that I will use the third and final part of the donation drive to fund these models/ sets as these are more important that the pilot shoot at the moment. And as I will be selling all of the models, including the 5 foot falcon, I can use the funds raised from the sale of those to fund the rest of the project, including the pilot shoot.

So the third part of the donation drive is now open. I’m hoping to raise around £800 which would cover the filament and paints needed for this beast. Once the funds for this section have been raised, the drive will be closed and the draw will take place to pick the winners of the x-wing / y-wing models.

So if you can help out at all towards achieving the total goal , then it would be greatly appreciated.

Donate

April 2026 BTS Update

Thanks for the well wishes everyone.

I had scheduled a post for the day after the last one but it obviously didn’t post and it’s now disappeared. Bloody Facebook. I’ve only just realised it never posted. Sorry

So, onto the leaked theatrical restorations of the OT. Officially they have only announced the restoration and release of Episode 4 for it’s 50th anniversary next year. There have been no official announcements of the other two films or even if these films will be released on physical media . But we have seen the many clips of these restorations, so we know they are happening. It’s just the waiting game to see whether or not we get copies of them in our hands or they will be a cinema release only. Personally i can’t see them spending all this money and effort solely for a limited cinema release. But we will have to wait until next year and see what will happen.

Having seen them , I am blown away at how good thee restorations look. Even in their highly compressed leaked form they are head and shoulders better than the official versions we have at the moment. The colours are amazing. The detail is far superior even to the 2020 Blu-Ray set.

So, how are these going to impact the Revisited edits? Well the straight answer is that they probably won’t apart from ROTJ. If we do get a release of Jedi next year then I will use that as the basis for ROTJ:R. If not then I will just carry on as planned with the 2020 release. What I am going to do until we know either way about these releases is work on shots that are either going to be fully replaced or ones that FX work could easily be transferred to another source if needed. Now, could I go back and do an updated version of ANH & ESB using these new restorations? Possibly, but it would only be for shots that I wouldn’t have done any FX work on, especially when it comes to ESB, which I will get to in a moment. My focus now is on getting ANHR:HD finished ( i’m going to need help on finishing the last few shots so I will be making a post asking for FX help in the next few days), and concentrate fully on ROTJ:R

Now work has begun on ROTJ:R, as I have said, but while I couldn’t sit at the computer for any length of time I began working on the model side of things. The 1/48 scale ( or there abouts) Millennium Falcon is under construction and I will be showing some photos in the next day or so. But there has been a BIG change in one aspect of the models I was planning to make. And twhen I say big, I mean BIG. 😉 You’ll see what I mean in my next post…..

Now some bad news. It’s highly unlikely that there will be a behind the scenes doc about the saga. The external hard drive that I had all the FX work and project files including all the shot footage for the troopers and other behind the scenes stuff for ESB:R on, died. Now this was a brand new Western Digital Elements drive that the first time it was plugged in was to transfer all the files used for ESB for back up purposes so I could free up drive space in my PC. It was then carefully put away in a protective box and wasn’t disturbed again until recently when I plugged it in the retrieve some files it threw up some errors immediately, there was a loud pop and the thing died. I had another Western digital drive that I could swap over the power pack from but nothing. It didn’t spin up or anything. As these were identical external drive I knew I could swap over the controller board too just in case it had fried that, but again it wouldn’t even spin up. It’s not worth spending hundreds of pounds on getting the drive looked at and trying to recover any files. Now luckily I stored all of the master files for ESB:R on a separate drive, so the higher bitrate version will still be coming and the updated version could still happen as the master files are lossless. But sadly most of the foreign language tracks that were given to me along with most of the subtitle files were lost along with the dead drive.

So there you have it in regards to these new restorations. Tomorrow will be about the models/ miniature side of things , so keep an eye out for that. I won’t rely on facebook’s scheduling option this time.