#studyingstarwars at DU!
With a new film coming this week, the Star Wars Franchise is all over the news. Lucky for me, I live in a world where I can study the franchise for college credit! The course, offered at DU by Professor Andrew Mantragna, kicked off this morning, and has already got me thinking about my final project.
The Course
11 students arrived to Professor Mantragna’s class and we dove right into it. Lucky for me, it sounds like it’s gonna be a week of shamelessly nerding out. We talked about the format of the class and then about many facets of “Star Wars”-as an example of cinematography, special effects, fandom, culture, and innovation, just to name a few. We first got acquainted with some of the resources we’ll be using, like the Internet Archive, Medium, and Google Drive. We also started tweeting, which, for me, required creating a new Twitter handle.
We focused on the idea that “Star Wars” is a huge phenomenon responsible for huge shift in public interest. The first film was basically destined to fail, going against the grain of what was popular and what people thought audiences would like. George Lucas defied the odds-which became all the more clear as we watched a documentary on the franchise.
The Making of Star Wars
To really get a deeper understanding of how it all came together, we watched the documentary, “Empire of Dreams”. The film was awesome and beyond particular. It shows us how difficult it was for George Lucas to come up with a product that made sense and how much extra work he needed to do to work somewhat independently. It was very honest about how much of a disaster the film truly was at some points, and goes to show just how unique and perserverant a cast and crew it took to stick with it and eventually create something remarkable.
One of my favorite parts of the documentary was hearing the trial-and-error stories behind some of the characters, like how Lucas saw hundreds of actors audition for C3PO and couldn’t make up his mind until an auditionee told him the current actor was doing a pretty good job himself! It’s always funny to find out some of the things most iconic about the films weren’t planned!
The Week
We are officially on our way! Every day, we will have another post, like this one, to write. The week will end with our final project, and most of what I post about this week will be about that! Stay tuned! This is gonna be a fun course!