Animator brings Star Wars to Singapore in viral video

A galaxy far, far away has just been brought to our doorstep – thanks to a local animator.

Ever since it was uploaded on Sunday (Dec 13), a video titled Star Wars: Singapore Edition has gone viral on social media.

The brainchild of Mr Ivan Goh, 25, the video has nearly 25,000 views after four days.

The 57-second clip depicts several scenes from the Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer seamlessly superimposed on several prominent locations in Singapore.

It also features a lightsaber duel that was filmed on the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) campus.

Mr Goh, who goes by name Livan Goh, began work on the project in October, following the release of The Force Awakens' official trailer, which served as his inspiration.

He told The New Paper: "The trailer was really quite epic.

"At first, we only wanted to do the lightsaber scene, but I felt we we needed to pad up the story a bit.

"So I envisioned something like an alien invasion of Singapore, or in this case, the Empire."

Mr Ivan Goh (right) with his friend and co-star Mr Van Teo on location while shooting the lightsaber duel for Star Wars: Singapore Edition. PHOTO COURTESY OF MR IVAN GOH

In order to bring the Star Wars universe to Singapore, Mr Goh had to painstakingly crop out and re-map footage frame by frame from the trailer with videos of Singapore's landscape.

The process was a slow one, with Mr Goh needing hours of work to splice together just one second of footage.

As for the lightsaber duel, Mr Goh got together a team of three friends before spending a few weeks rehearsing the choreography.

They even did a second shoot to get the right footage when the results of the first shoot failed to impress.

While he was initially a bit disappointed that his personal Facebook post did not gather more traction online, he is happy that the video has gone viral.

Mr Goh said: "I never expected it to get as much attention as it did.

"I'm happy to have entertained so many people as well as giving them a taste of how Singapore might look in a big blockbuster film."

As to whether he is worried if Disney might ask for the video being taken down because of copyright, Mr Goh said he will comply if asked to do so.

"We mainly did this for fun and didn't intend for it to go this viral," he said.

"I hope it doesn't come to that, but I will take the video down if Disney asks me to."