One thing that seems to go unappreciated by a large number of people is that this is a continuation of geek-soaked fantasy. None of this is real, which should be accentuated by the regular return to reality in those long shots where all we see are a couple of nerds hacking away at each other with sticks.

Thus the question, or rather the statement “I thought he was dead!” becomes a moot point. Although it’s funny that I’ve heard people refer to Brian as “the demon” in this video. That makes some sense at least since he’s wearing the devil’s cloak from Satan’s Seat. I guess I should leave this to speculation; here I go ruining the whole idea of interpretation. So go ahead, interpret.

In fact, I may have just made all that up to throw you off the trail of the truth.

To answer another commonly asked question: no, that girl had no idea what was going on. I hurried us up so that we wouldn’t miss the opportunity to run past her. Partly because I was hoping for a good reaction from her (which we really didn’t get) but also because having random bystanders adds a good element to the atmosphere of the video.

I spent about 22 hours on the lightsabers in this one, which at the time I thought was an obscene amount of my precious life. This was the largest contributing factor to the length of time between this video and iSaber 4. Believe me, an hour of rotoscoping light sabers will discourage anyone from choosing to do so again for a while. (Also, you may have noticed I struggle with spelling light sabers, not sure if it’s one word or not still).

The Batman-esque titles covering the punches were a simple necessity because we never bothered to mask them properly. Our fight instructor at Eastern’s Theater Department, Mac, wouldn’t be too proud of that. I also had to deal with a couple of errant sticks here and there which you can pick up if you’re paying attention. All in all I could have spent more time perfecting this video, but at the time I wasn’t ready to sit in front of my computer any longer.

We had intended to finish the fight then and there, but I had to teach a class at 3PM and we started filming at something like 2:30PM so we didn’t have time.Thus the “To Be Continued…” Not bad for really cranking this one out though eh?

Interesting fact: Frank (Caleb) screams “My Mommy bought me an iPhone!” when he joins the fray with his new iSaber.

Slightly less interesting fact: I made the “sneaky” music deaf. In other words I couldn’t hear it when I was making it because I was pumping it into my computer to be recorded, and it works for how poorly it should have turned out.

VASTLY less interesting fact: Jonathan and Caleb are brothers in real life… I warned you when I said it was vastly less interesting.

Well, not no one. I think Seth Gossler and Daniel Fockler thought it was funny… maybe Jenny, but they were probably laughing at me more than with me. Basically we were all sitting around talking about our iPhones, or at least my iPhone and Seth’s touch. I’d downloaded the Force Unleashed‘s light saber app and we were playing with it while we should have been working.

I thought (out loud) about how funny it would be if you saw two nerds walking across campus that stopped when they saw each other, squared up, and then unsheathed their iPhone light sabers (hereafter shortened to “iSabers”). They laughed, and I thought about it and figured… why not? So we did it.

Brian Ross, who’s been with us since the beginning, has such a bad ass face with well pronounced features that he made the perfect sith nerd. I had the shaggy, been-out-with-the-sand-people-too-long Obiwan look going so I donned brown (which is why I didn’t wear the traditional good guy white for the last time!).

Caleb shook things up with his mad camera skills and his girlfriend Jenna provided our reality check mid-way through. Obviously filmed on Eastern’s campus we managed to get the whole thing finished in a few hours. This would not be true for iSaber battle 2, iSaber battle 3, or least of all iSaber Battle 4…

And for those of you nerdy enough to understand (or catch), in the opening dialogue I am talking about how to create two columns in an html document using floats. The trick is to put a div underneath them with a clear:both value.

Interesting fact: When in France that beard was long enough that I could grab it with my fist against my chin and have hair protrude out the bottom.

Slightly less interesting fact: The interesting fact above just ensured I would remain single for the remainder of my days.

VASTLY less interesting fact: The music and sound effects we used were all recorded off the light saber app itself.