Jerec Costume Project

Introduction

In 2003, I worked on a short Star Wars fan film called Spirits of the Force. For that film, I threw together a really horrible costume of the Dark Lord Jerec. It only had to be good enough to appear for 3 seconds, and partially transparent as I was only appearing as a spirit.

In 2005, the creator of Spirits of the Force Joel Cranson thought it would be cool to create a "Special Edition" of the film. The new scenes in the special edition called for a full-out appearance of Jerec, and hence a complete costume. So, who did I call for help? Non other than Joel's dad, Alan Cranson of Cranson Upholstery. Alan made the armor, shoulder pieces, boots, belt and gauntlets. I took on the tabbards, glasses and lightsaber. Overall, I must say that it came out amazingly well.

The Armor

The armor is made out of cardboard covered in black vinyl. We used the original armor that I used for my first costume as a starting point. After making a few tweaks we cut out two identical pieces, one for the front, one for the back. The vinyl was cut slightly larger than the cardboard so that it could fold over and be sewn around the edges. The seam around the edge really gives it a nice look.

The shoulder straps are vinyl as well, with extra stitching every 1/2" to simulate ribs. I wanted the shoulder straps to look similar to the straps on a Stormtrooper costume.

The torso straps are made from seatbelt strapping and were sewn in place to the front armor piece, and snaps were added to the back to make it easier to take on and off.

Jerec's Shoulder Pads The shoulder pads took a few design tweaks before we got them to look the way we wanted. The references pics available from Jedi Knight and books are not that detailed so we had to take some artistic liberties. We attached each shoulder pad to the armor plates with two metal snaps, one on the front, one on the back. These snaps also help the shoulder pads rotate slightly as my arms move and gives the costume a little bit more "life" and realism.

The Boots

The boots I wear are actually not boots at all. They are full sized vinyl spats" that are worn over a normal pair of black shoes that make it look like I'm wearing full-sized boots. The design was actually developed and perfected by Joel and Alan Cranson. They work great and look like real boots unless you look *reaaaaly* closely. If you watch Spirits of the Force, you can see what they look like on film in scene where Kyle walks into the Jedi Academy.

These Faux Boots are made from, you guessed it, black vinyl. Straps are added around the top of the boot just to give it a bit more interesting texture and to help hide the seams up the back and front of the boot. The bottom of the boot has a strap which velcros across the bottom of your shoe and holds it in place.

The Glasses

The character of Jerec is blind and he wears special glasses. The glasses used by the actor Christopher Neame in the video game were definitely a specialty made item. The glasses were contoured to fit around his nose, bridge over his eyes, then wrap all the way around his head with some sort of elastic band. The area where you could see out looked like either a fine mesh of fabric, or something similar to how they made Jordi LeForge's glasses on Star Trek. Either way, this wasn't going to happen in the 2 weeks I need to make this costume for the film.

I ended up going to a dollar store and buying a pair of shades that had a really slick look to them. I put masking tape on the shades themselves to protect them as I used a Dremel tool to cut them down to just a sliver of their former self. I also drasticly cut down the inside bridge where the nose sits so that the glasses would sit much lower on my nose than they used to. A coat of flat black spray paint on the frames cleaned them up, but the lenses themselves still didn't look right. The lenses still had a nifty reflective surface on them... which looked cool when used as shades, but would not look cool for Jerec. So, a single fast spray of black spray paint on the lens itself was enough to dull down the reflection, but still be enough to look through and safely do the lightsaber choreography.

The Lightsaber

What Star Wars costume would be complete without a lightsaber! :) Actually, the lightsaber I made had to function as a stunt saber for the film. In other words, we had to be able to mount a wooden dowel inside so that we could "bang sticks" for the lightsaber choreography, and then be able to take out the wooden dowels when the saber was off. This was going to be the 7th stunt lightsaber I've built, so I knew what was going to work and what wasn't. The shiny part of the saber is a standard chrome 1 1/4" sink pipe replacement part cut down to the desired length. I then Dremeled a piece of PVC piping that had in *inner* dimension of 1 1/4", painted it black and slipped it over top of the chrome pipe. A few rivets hold everything into place. I use another PVC pipe inside the chrome pipe that has an inner diameter of 3/4", and will hold the wooden dowel. An activator button was glued into place which is actually a PC-case thumbscrew (hard to see in this pic). Pretty simple design overall.