The Force is Strong with TechStuff

And we thought it might be fun to talk about the lightsaber and so I want to go back and listen to this episode that Chris and I recorded way back in April. This is going pretty far back there, but we talked all about lightsabers. So check it out. And then when the episodes over, I've got a little bit of an update and some information to tell you. So we're gonna start off this podcast with a little tweet. This listener tweet comes from Jacqueline Hyde, who says, got

a listener request for you how lightsabers work. The force is strong with this one, so we are going to talk about lightsabers. This is kind of an interesting subject in the sense that really it belongs and stuff you missed in history class because it did happen a long time ago. Any galaxy far far away, Yeah, um or technically it could be fan stuff, but they don't have a podcast. So we're gonna tackle it before anyone can

grab it from our cold dead paddawan hands. As the Jedi would say, niner niner, Yes, the Jedi would say that. So of course we're talking about the civilized weapon from a or the elegant weapon from a more civilized age. The light Saber, as introduced to us through George Lucas's brilliant work Star Wars A New Hope um or just Star Wars. When it first came out in it was

not American Graffiti as many people think. No, no, there was no cameo of the lightsaber in American graffiti, although that would have made that movie that much more awesome. So Lightsabers, of course, this is the weapon the Jedi use, the the magic sword of the Star Wars series, and in fact, when uh, most of the interviews I've seen with Lucas, he just refers to it as a magic sword. You know, it just it's that's what the purpose of it is. It's just it happens to be called a lightsaber,

but it's a magic sword. So the problem with magic is that there's not a whole lot to how it works other than magic. You know, Yeah, you're just totally getting into that early. I thought we were going to go ahead and talk about how it works. All right, Well, this has not stopped people from telling us how it works, despite the fact that it's magic. So let's talk that. There are people who will argue exactly how this works. It's as a matter of fact, we have an article

on how it works. It's not cannon, and cannon is important to me. But then again, and you know what is canon jar jar binks. So let's just move on into how lightsabers work. So a lightsaber is made up of several different parts. You've got the handle, which is pretty much where everything is, right, yeah, So the handle has at the base of the handle, you've got the power cell and it's a it was it diecium, yes, the dietum crystal. All right, so you've got the diaction

power cell that's in the That's fine. You know what if they correct us, if they take that time more power to them uh diaction power cell is in the middle of a power of vortex ring and a power field conductor. Now where does all this power go? You've you're generated. That's essentially like the battery of the lightsaber. That's the very base. So and it's got a lot of energy stored in it, lots and lots of energy. Now where does this energy go once it starts to

emit from the power cell? It goes into the crystal energy chamber right where you have your primary crystal. Now, depending on whom you ask, this crystal may or may not determine the color of the lightsabers blade. Now, some would argue that the real determiner for the lightsaber color is lies with the Jedi him or herself and the force that that Jedi abuse the crystal. So in that case, you could have any crystal and essentially have a lightsaber of any color. It would all be up to the

individual Jedi. Others would argue, nay, tis not. So, the lightsaber color is dependent entirely upon the color of the crystal you select to focus this power. Um, I'm gonna go with that one. So you know, of course, we we also need to talk about how Jedi lightsabers are different from Sith lightsabers because they are so the crystals

that Jedi use tend to be natural crystals. They're crystal those found in caves throughout the galaxy um, and so these crystals are they can take the power and create the the the force of the I guess, the actual lightsaber blade. It's the best way of putting it. Um. And the Sith what they do is they'll they'll make a they'll make their own crystals, they'll create a forge,

and they'll build a synthetic crystal. And there's tend to be red, yes, which is why you see Sith while like like Darth Maul or Darth Vader or Darth Tyrannus walking around with a big old red lightsaber, whereas Jedi they tend to stick with blue and green, although other colors are also available. Yes, so there are more that, but there are there are more than one crystal though the primary crystal is uh is just one part of that.

There are sex there are secondary and smaller crystals, and it sort of depends on the Jedi who builds the lightsaber, because the lightsaber is creating a lightsaber is part of becoming a Jedi. Yes, it's actually the final step of

Jedi training according to a Darth Vader. Yes so. But but what the additional crystals do is they actually help focus the energy into a blade form, right right, So, the energy coming from the power cell, once it passes through the crystal, that's what gives it the the destructive force that we see from lightsabers. The other crystals focus

that into the blade. Um and depending also on upon whom you ask, they may also give the the lightsaber other certain powers, like it may enhance certain certain aspects of the lightsaber. For example, we know that lightsabers can deflect blaster fire. Some of these crystals are apparently more effective at deflecting blaster fire than others, and others may be better at cutting through certain kinds of material. So uh Now, other other scholars will argue that's not the case.

The just focuses the blade, doesn't imbue it with any other powers. Um. Personally, I haven't had my hands on the lightsaber in a really long time, so it's kind of hard for me to tell you exactly what what which ones are, right, and also I have only ever really used one, So with that small sample size, it's

impossible to say yes. And and it's probably a good time to point out that if you do have the opportunity to use the lights I remember it's it's not the kind of thing that you just want to play around with because it can be a very very dangerous weapon. It turns out serious damage when you can cut through, you know, a foot of steel that it's not the

best thing to you know, swatterfly with no um. After it goes through the christ the focusing crystal, it passes through the blade energy channel again further refines the blade and directs it into a straight line that would emerge from the hilt um. And then at the very top of your blade, you've got your your cycling field energizer's your energy modulation circuits uh, and then you've got your your controls. Your control adjust the power of the blade,

and it also adjust the length of the blade. So even though we normally see lightsabers used at a at a pretty standard length, most people have it at a whenever they turn on their lightsaber, it's pretty much the same length each time. Technically you can adjust that so you can make it longer or shorter using the blade length adjustment UM. And then there's a magnetic magnetic stabilizing ring and a blade shroud emitter um at the very top which helped control the blade so it doesn't just

zap out when you turn it on. UM. That's your basic anatomy of your lightsaber hilt, all right. And then Coston there's the activation matrix, which is the star Wars term for the switch. I just I love that part there. The handle is about thirty centimeters in length, so they're not ridiculously long, right, UM, which is good to know. It generates an arc wave energy field, and this is why the blades actually have a stopping point. Yes, and

it has it. It produces sort of a gyroscopic effect to which is why you have to be very careful with it because you know it has it has a pull to it if you will, right. But that also makes it easier to use, because otherwise it would be like swinging a flashlight around. There'll be no feedback from swinging the handle, and it would make it much more difficult to master a lightsaber if you didn't have that

gyroscopic effect when you started swinging it around. UM. So the blade arc tip, that's the very end of the lightsaber um and it's it's the arc emmitter is what's keeping it from becoming like a blaster. Actually, lightsabers predate blasters um before it was a more civilized age after all, as it was, and you know, I guess civilized means that you locked each other's limbs off, as opposed to shooting each other from very far away. Uh. Never never

bring a lightsaber to a blaster fight. Oh wait, no you could do that. No, yeah, you can't do that because yeah, alright, so let's let's talk about about that's that's the basics of building your lightsaber um. Now, each Jedi builds his or her own lightsaber as part of their training. Uh, and they're gonna build it according to their own particular fighting style. Now do you have you heard about the different Jedi fighting styles? No? I haven't.

There are seven major forms of lightsaber styles. Yes, okay, well why don't you? Why don't you tell this? All right, I'm gonna go into a little detail, but I'm just gonna do this as a pretty high level thing. We don't need to get into depth. This isn't Jedi fighting style stuff. That's right. Yeah, that's another podcast that we're starting next month. You start requesting now, um, next month being April. I can't imagine when the first episode will

come out. So, so the the fighting styles, and you can think of it kind of like martial arts styles. Um, you know, not all martial arts styles are alike. Cut on Day is very different from jiu jitsu, which is very different from a keto, which in turn is different from hap keto. Um, they're they're drunk Jedi style. No, there's no drunken master Jedi style, although I hear Yoda can get up to some way shenanigans on a Saturday unit. Uh. The seven forms of lightsaber combat are actually listed as

you know, Form one, Form two, Form three. They each have their own names, but I'm not even going to try and pronounce them because they're all alien and I don't have the capability. I don't actually know what the pronunciation is for most of them. But if you hadn't spilled your mini chlorine, you'd be fine, I know. In general, Form one is the foundation. It is the basic form

of lightsaber combat. It's your basic strikes, your basic defenses. Um. It teaches you how to view the body as a series of targets like you think of you divide up the body, like the head is a certain certain target, the arms, the torso, and you know, attacks are very specific to each target. You know, different slashing techniques and hacking techniques. So for one is kind of lightsaber combat one oh one, everyone pretty much goes through that. Form

two is dueling. Now, this lightsaber combat really concentrates on finesse blade control footwork. This is the kind of of style that Colt Dooku slash Darth Tarrannis used. Now. That is why his lightsaber handle actually has a curve at the end of it. It's so that he can hold it kind of like a pistol grip. Gives him a lot of control over the tip of the blade. And that's just his style of dueling. Now, this was much more popular before blasters came out because it was just

really meant for lightsaber to lightsaber combat. Once blasters came out, people Jedi began to realize that the in order to deflect these these blaster bolts, they would need to adapt their fighting style. This is not the best style to use if you're being shot at by stormtroopers, for example.

So uh, but that was Tarrannis is favorite form. Then there's Form three, which is defensive, where you are trying to reveal the least amount of target space on your body, so it's really good for defending against blasters, that kind of thing. Form four is an acrobatic style, lots of flips and spins. You're using the force to boost your your physical abilities, so you're you're depending more on uh these acrobatics than on your blade at that point. So

Yoda uses that a lot. Um if you've seen him fight Count Dooku, He's like a little queens and art. And then uh Fom five that uses the deflective nature of the lightsaber to reflect blaster fire. Um you you use use strengthen your attacks, so it's a more brute force kind of of approach. This is the style favored by a certain Skywalker family. Both Anakin and Luke used Form five. Form six combines elements of forms one through five. Um, but it also teaches that you should be detached from emotion.

You should be using very calculating ways of moving. You shouldn't let your emotions dictate what you're doing. Four and seven is kind of the opposite, that's leveraging your emotion into power and using that to fight your opponents. This was what Darth maul Uh used with some reliance on on on Form four as well the acrobatic style. Now, of course he had a double bladed lightsaber, and those don't work all that differently than a regular lightsaber. They're

just basically two lightsabers attached together at the hilt. So there's there's four crystals instead of two, or a minimum of four, because you have to have for you know, two of the generator type and two of the focusing type at minimum in order to create the two blades. By the way, those focusing crystals are usually add again crystals usually, but you can also find them on Dantweine as well as many many other UH planets within these Star Wars galaxy. Yes, until Senti Star comes after you

and you know calls you a coward. Right, I'm sorry, I switched genres. Okay, you lost me. You lost me, seriously, you never played Senti Star. I rarely played way way way way back in the past, back when the Jedi were um much more numerous. The color of your blade also would indicate what what kind of Jedi you were. For example, if you had a blue blade. That signified that you were a Jedi Guardian, and so you're much

more you know, kind of a physical. You would get into the fights, you would you know, defend people with your your prowess. Uh. Green would suggest that you were a Jedi consular, and this would be someone who was much more thoughtful and kind of contemplative. And then um, Yellow would indicate that you're a Jedi Sentinel, and that's someone who kind of was in between the other two. So so not as physical as the Guardians, but not as brainy as the others either. So Yellow and Blue

dommate Green. This is true. I learned that somewhere should we go into the other aspect of lightsabers. So you mean we're actually gonna step outside of the realm of Star Wars just look at the time and thinking that maybe we should do that. That's pretty good idea, all right, So that's within the Star Wars universe, of course, that's how they supposedly work. And I should also add none

of that is cannon. And when I say cannon, I'm talking about the stuff that Lucas himself has signed off on as saying, yes, this is officially part of the Star Wars history. Um, most of that is just the movies. Um. To some extent, you could argue the books as well. Some of those. Lucas has more or less said, yeah, even though that didn't appear in the movie, that is cannon as well, But he never goes into explaining the

blades in the movies. And so this is really other people trying to um rhet coon really to explain why this stuff works. Um, yeah, basically, and if you're unfamiliar with the tournament cannon is uh like basically, they're written instructions for how a a magical or you know, fantasy or science fiction universe operates. It kind of helps you write the stories. And the Star Wars cannon sort of came about after some of the stories had already been

in practice. So it's a little of the other universe. So if you were to read some of the comic books or some of the other books that have been written in the Star Wars universe, you might notice that they sometimes contradict what happened in later movies, and that's because they're not canon, all right, So moving on to how they actually created this effect, which is really which

is really fascinating too. I think right now now. First of all, in a New Hope, the first film, they hadn't originally considered animating or adding any light to these

at all. The original idea was that the lightsabers were going to have There were these these uh I think it was three sided, three sided pole that came out kind of a triangular pole, and each side was was coated with a very reflective material, and they used a lamp that was on the same side as the camera and focus the light so that it would reflect off of it be really shiny, and there was a motor inside the handle that would direct the side to be

aligned properly for the camera. But the effect was not as a zippy as Lucas wanted. So they started to cast about and see if they could find some other way of making this magic sword seem really magical, and they contacted an animator by the name of Nelson Shin. Nelson Shin took a week and looked at this footage that had been shot and used an effect called rhodoscoping. The the technique and animation technique is actually a very old technique. A lot of people and myself, including associated

with AHAs, take on video. I associate it with Ralph Box She's um Lord of the Rings movie. Also, Wizards was another movie he used it in. But it's it's where you take live action footage and then you overlay animation on top of it, sometimes replacing the live action footage entirely, sometimes enhancing it, and in this case, it

was enhancing it. So what he did was he used animation cells to create this this glowing blade effect on top of the the actual physical rods that were in the shots, and then uh using you know, synchronizing the cells that he had created with the actual film, overlaying the animated effect on it, creating a new print that combined these two individual prints. And that's how you you know. He sent that back to Lucas and said, well, here you can try this and see if this works. Lucas

liked it. Um, they decided to go with that approach. They refined it a little bit. They added some color so you had different color blades because originally they were both white and uh, and that was the beginning of the lightsaber effect. Now, in the first three films, which four or five and six, UM, they use the rotoscoping

technique where they would essentially hand draw these things on cells. Um. Basically, what they do is they put that cell over the original film and color it in and then but that's not but that's not all of it, because that does add some color to it. But from from there they have to shoot more film with the cell and the original and when they do that, they shoot it over a black background and use a light diffuser over the lens.

They double exposed the shots and that that makes them really pop. That makes that makes them look sort of you know, gives them that sort of otherworldly effect. You know, how bright they are in their shots. So kind of sophisticated when you think about it, but very very time consuming. Right, Yes,

it took took a really long time. It took slightly less time by the time they got around to the prequels episodes one, two, and three, because they could do it all digitally, but somebody still has to go into the computer and you're doing it, you're doing it all

in computer as opposed to doing it on hand handmade cells. Um. So, I mean it still takes time, it's just not quite as time consuming, except for the fact that Lucas decided to throw in about I don't know ten times as many lightsaber battles in those first three movies as the original trilogy combined. Um, the the actual hilts of the lightsabers were made up of old camera flash battery packs and other odds and ends, like stuff from hardware stores

like plumbing, um gaskets and things like that. Now, they shot these movies in England, so they were raiding various British hardware shops. So a lot of the materials that they used to build the lightsaber handles are very hard to find or sometimes impossible to find in the United States, which is why it's kind of challenging to create a model of those those first. Again, this is for the first trilogy four or five and six. Um, it's hard to make those faithfully just because it's hard to get

those parts in the United States. Um. Now, for episodes one, two, and three, those were all machined, so there's all like routed. They designed them in the computer and then and then made use a router to cut custom parts and then assembled them. So it wasn't like they were just grabbing whatever they could find and and sticking it together. Um. They came up with the concept, and artists came up with the concept and then they built it from scratch.

That was actually one of my questions, like, where'd the Jedi going to machine these parts? And you know, do they as electrical engineering part of their training. It's Dreadria. It's in the CAD system, very very nice. A lot of a lot of rascals in the CAD system. As it turns out, I think Han Solo actually spent a lot of time in the CAD system. It's funny because when I started doing the two of these, the two pieces of this, the fantasy part and the you know,

special effect, how do they make it happen? I started thinking about that way, So who's actually making these? You know because each one is different? Well that's one of the things too that uh um and I think is at least somewhat cannon, is that it's all sort of individualized, you know to the Jedi. So I'm wondering if you know, they have to go down to the shop, you know, on the thirty fourth floor and go, yeah, I need can you make the sort of the the arc tip

sort of in this shape? No? No, no, not exactly like that? Yeah, yeah, uh you know it It's kind of sad because when I look at the props from the first trilogy, those look like things that have really lived in that universe for a really long time. I mean, the ships are all beat up, and even the Jedi, uh, the Jedi are beat up. The jedire beat up pretty bad.

But no, even the lightsabers look like they've been well used, whereas the if you look at the prequels, every looks like brand new and sparkly, and it's just a little it doesn't feel to me. It almost feels like it's two different universes. Well, you know they are like years

apart and on and thirty years. Come on, do you really want to go down this road because we've been recording for like twenty four minutes, I'm not gonna go for another fifty probably conservative that would be only because I'd have to stop and get a break to drink something.

So let's we So we talked about the fact that you know, rotoscoping, either digitally or by hand, that replacing frame by frame, these these rods, the physical things that were in the shot, and you needed the physical rods because you needed to be able to make contact when you're doing lightsaber battles. Right now, that's a that's a

good point. The handles that they use in the movies right now, are you know, plastic handles with aluminum rods, and they're they're basically cylindrical and colored red, blue or green. They actually had to wrap the aluminum rods in construction paper because they were giving off too much dust when they were colliding during the lightsaber battles. The original trilogy used I think wooden owls. I don't think they used aluminum,

at least not in the first film. Yeah, I would imagine that would be a little hard on your wrists too, because they're actually, you know, having a sword fight with aluminum rods. And yeah, now therons are are thinner than what you see on the screen. Um, they're not as they're not as thick as as the lightsaber blade appears to be. But yeah, they need that so that they can do these moves and and make it look convincing. Otherwise you would have lightsabers passing through one another and

that would just not look right. So, um, so there is a physical object there that you are are concealing with the the overlay. And before we get into how you can do this yourself, I wanted to talk a little bit about the sound effects. They were designed by Ben Burt, who was he's a brilliant sound designer. Um. Sound designers are I think of them kind of like

a very specific type of engineer. Sound designers are the kind of people who can walk into a room and just take a second and think of a billion different ways to use the sounds that are naturally occurring in that room. Most of us we walk into a room, we'll hear a noise and then within a second we are already ignoring it. It's just been incorporated into what we think of as the background. But if you ever take a moment and really listen to your environment, you

start to pick things out as as they happen. Well, he's one of those guys who can hear a noise and immediately say, hey, uh, this would be great for blah blah blah. And when he was tasked with finding a noise for the lightsaber, he actually says this was the first sound he designed for Star Wars was the noise of the lightsaber, and he did it with a combination of two noises. One was from an old projector.

There was an old projector that would made this humming noise as it ran, and if you ran two of those projectors, you've got a good little harmonizing effect with the hum and that's so that formed the basis of the wow when you fire up your lightsaber. Um. The second was noise is that you would get if you ran a microphone near a television. It would be this buzzing noise feedback. Yes, that that gives it the kind

of little crackle sound that you also hear. That's just sort of uh, kind of a light sound underneath the thrumb. And then whenever someone would wave a lightsaber, well, you have to create the wow noise. The way he did that was he would move a microphone past a speaker that was playing that UM. The the the humming noise, and the Doppler effect would take care of the rest. So you're just moving a microphone around a speaker and then it's translates into the womb womb when you're waving

your lightsaber around. UM. Absolutely brilliant. One of the uh you know, there's there was no going into a synthesizer or going into a studio and trying to create this sound from scratch. He just found a practical way of creating it. And uh, and it's one of those things that is forever married with the Star Wars universe. You hear that sound, you know immediately what you're listening to. Now,

let's say you want to do this yourself, it's quite possible. Well, you have to spend all that fuel getting to the other star system. You know, I don't mean building a real one, I mean like creating the effect in a video. So you can do this yourself with the right kind of software. And uh, there are a lot of different video editing suites out there that have the effects that

you would need in order to create a lightsaber effect. Um, most of them are like things like Adobe has several There's even a tool that's called l S Maker, which allows you to create a lightsaber effect pretty easily. In fact, all you have to do is do two clicks and you create the basis of a lightsaber effect for a single frame of video, and then you can go in and tweak the effects so that it looks exactly the

way you want it to. But again, you have to do this frame by frame, so it's not like you do two clicks and it magically turns something into a lightsaber. You actually have to go through each frame and replace the physical object with the lightsaber representation in order for it to work properly. Yes, but YouTube is filled with people who have done this successfully. Yes, yes, and some not so successful, and some of them are pretty awful.

But uh, the same effect. You can use the same sort of technology to create other effects besides the lightsaber effect. It's just that's one of those that's pretty easy to to apply because really you're talking about a straight line. It's not that complicated. Um, it is time consuming though. It can take hours and hours and hours to render a video that would only last maybe thirty seconds, especially

if you have multiple blades on there. That can because each blade is going to require a different layer in your video, you know, So you're gonna if you have like six Jedi out there and they all have lightsabers at six layers of video right there in order for you to have all the effects come together properly. Then if you know, they clashed and you have to add the sparks and there's and you have to and it's

it can be challenging. I mean it's it's not it's not something that you're gonna be able to whip out in an hour. It's gonna take a while, but it's it's doable, all right. I hope you enjoyed that episode. I had a great time with Chris recording that one. So the update I promise. Well, first of all, it's not about your broadsword lightsaber that was seen in the trailer.

Although my favorite theory so far is that the lightsaber is so overpowered and jankie and it was made by someone who was not actually trained as a Jedi, that the the cross hilt is not truly a cross hilt. Instead, it's vents that are venting off extra energy so that the lightsaber doesn't explode. It's awesome fan made theory that probably has no basis in reality, but it's also pretty cool.

I wanted to talk about a an actual experiment that was done back in two thousand thirteen that showed how light can somehow behave kind of like it does with lightsaber. So if you know your you know your your light physics, you know that photons don't normally interact with one another. That's why you can turn on two flashlights and pass the beams against and through each other and there's no interaction. There's no interference. They just passed right on through. Photons

normally don't mess with other photons. However, the some scientists at the Harvard m I T Center for Ultra called Atoms, which is the best name ever, discovered that if they super cooled rubidium atoms a gas cloud of rubidium atoms too too as cold as they could possibly get it, and then they passed a couple of photons through that gas cloud, they would start to push and pull on each other as if they were like lightsabers. They could

actually physically have this push pull relationship. Now, it all has to do with a pretty weird concept called the Rideberg blockade, which it states that if you excite an atom, then you cannot excite nearby atoms to that same degree. Is impossible to do that. So when a photon enters this super cool cloud of rubidium, it excites one of those atoms, and the other atoms around it can't be

excited more. And that's where you start getting this kind of shoving behavior between the photons that the various press releases talked about it being kind of like the way atoms are arranged in a molecule. The photons actually clumped together, so that's pretty awesome. Doesn't mean you can have a lightsaber. No, it's not gonna be helpful for a lightsaber, but it may end up one day helping us create quantum computers

that use the interactions between photons to help do these computations. Normally, again, we can't do that, or it might even lead us to being able to create three dimensional objects physical three dimensional objects with light sometime in the future. How that works? You got me this point. The physics are way over my head, but I thought it would be pretty cool to talk about anyway. Let me know if you enjoyed

this look back. Maybe one day we'll do another episode about lightsabers where we look into it again, especially given the new movies coming out. If you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, let me know. Send me an email. The addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on Facebook, Twitter or Tumbler. The handle it all three is tech Stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and basons of other topics.

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