Star Wars: The Animated Project
The Story
An early idea that the thought of doing a 30-second animation from Star Wars conjured up was a simple one - last year I ran a Star Wars tabletop campaign, using the Savage Worlds engine, from which a rather memorable chase scene involving the party chasing the Big Bad Evil Guy through an asteroid belt, resulting in him impacting an asteroid and getting himself captured. With a pretty strong story already to work from, the main challenge of this project is instead going to be the actual animation - and of course, getting it to a standard that my perfectionism can stand. Possibly double that standard, since the girlfriend is obsessed with Star Wars and a little peeved that she can't do this in her own course. So I almost feel obligated to make this good.
A Chase in Space: The Basic Story Idea
Although sorely tempting, the classic Star Wars 'scrolling wall' is probably best avoided here. Since the sequence would take 30 seconds by itself, it would probably spoil the entire point of the animation. Still, could be fun just to make one for the sake of it?
The first scene would feature the Villain, the Red Hawk, fleeing from the destruction of his station in a fighter into a nearby asteroid belt. The party, in a YT-1000 freighter (like the Millennium Falcon, just earlier) follow, in turn being tailed by 2 other fighters. Each fighter would probably be unique, so the animation will feature 4 prominent models.
The freighter follows the first fighter into the asteroid belt, but struggles to fly as quickly due to its size. One of the fighters that follows failed a roll, and so impacted an asteroid; the other closes quickly on the freighter, glancing a few hits off the shield. The freighter's turret turns and fires at the second follower, but misses; he eventually flies into an asteroid as well.
The chase then focuses on the Freighter and the far more agile fighter, with the Freighter scraping a little close to a few asteroids. Finally, the fighter strikes a debris field and is flung out of control, impacting an asteroid. The Freighter speeds past, but quickly turns about to land. The party disembark, and take the now-stranded villain hostage.
Since the animation isn't going to feature character models, then this story could easily be finished with the freighter simply landing on the asteroid, with the wreck in the foreground and visible. Otherwise, the animation could simply end with the last of the three fighters crashing into the asteroids around.
The other problem is going to be using the asteroids; since all of the assets need to be modelled, the asteroids are included in that. A single asteroid duplicated many times would look repetitive and boring; multiple models would be needed to make the chase interesting. Still, the use of otherwise 'static' assets would be good for creating a sense of pace in an otherwise empty environment.
The Models
Of course, the most prominent (and probably the most difficult) model will be the Party's freighter, which would constitute the 'main ship' and the only 'good guy'. The party had a YT-1000 freighter at this point, featured here; though not featured in any of the movies, the YT-1000 is the predecessor of the YT-1300, which was the base model for the Millennium Falcon featured in the original trilogy. With the campaign I was running being set about 20 years before the earliest film, A Phantom Menace, the ships were instead based on those featured in the much wider Star Wars universe. Fortunately, due to the popularity of the Star Wars universe, most of these 'early' ships have images available from books, particularly the original sourcebooks for the Star Wars d20 conversion (another Tabletop ruleset).
As of the fighters, none of them were specific ship models, though the Star Wars universe features a great many fighter-sized designs that were not necessarily featured in the movies; a quick look deeper onto the vast archive available on Wookiepedia may well turn up some potentially useful ideas for the other models.
