With Disney’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens less than a week from release, the company is stoking the flames across its entire media empire — including ESPN. The network announced Wednesday it will air a documentary-style special on December 15 detailing the history and real-world influences that inspired one of the franchise’s icons, the lightsaber.
Called Star Wars: Evolution of the Lightsaber Duel, the special will be hosted by Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill, according to The Hollywood Reporter, and will show how many of the lightsaber duels from all seven Star Wars films were shot. The show will also feature original interviews from J.J. Abrams, The Force Awakens star John Boyega, and Ian McDiarmid, who played Emperor Palpatine.
“What people don’t realize is how much goes into what appears to be just minutes on the screen,” Hamill said in a statement. “The elaborate choreography for the actual fight is done on several different sets over a period of weeks and then it is edited down to what you see on the screens, so I am happy people are able to see the amount of work that goes into it.”
Aside from the films themselves, the documentary will focus on how one sport, the sword-based martial art Kendo, inspired the physical and philosophical aspects of the Jedi.
“It’s honor,” the trailer explains. “It’s balance. It’s justice. Kendo is everything that Jedi are.”
Film critics have long connected the Jedi to Japanese samurai, whose traditions are connected to Kendo, and the films of director Akira Kurosawa.
Star Wars: Evolution of the Lightsaber Duel airs Tuesday, December 15, at 7pm Eastern on ESPN. And although you probably already know this, Star Wars: The Force Awakens opens in theaters December 18.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?