Was Ewan McGregor TOO Fast For Star Wars? Physics and Video Analysis Gives the Answer.
I ran across a video on YouTube — it was about Ewan McGregor and Star Wars, so I was legally required to watch it. Check it out.
In this video, Ewan states that when he did the lightsaber fights with Ray Park (who played Darth Maul) — they were too fast. To fix this, the scene is actually played in “slow motion” to make it look better.
Wow. That’s crazy. Oh, but maybe I can use some physics to verify if this is actually true. Maybe — just maybe. Well, I’m going to try.
Video Analysis
If you aren’t familiar with video analysis, let me give a brief overview. Basically, it’s possible to position-time data from a video. The time part is usually easy. If the video plays at 30 frames per second, then the time from one frame to the next would be 1/30 seconds. The position of an object can be determined by looking at the location in terms of pixels (where a video might be 1080 pixels high and 1920 wide (for a typical video).
