A Word from Mathew Beall
Director of "JABBA ON THE DAIS"

While sitting at work one day, Petch and I noticed that "Rock me Amadaus" exactly rhymes with "Jabba on the dais".. this was too good to be true! Immediately Petch wrote some exceptional lyrics. We headed over to our local recording studio and recorded the spoken text and singing on an ADAT multi-track recorder, digitized it into a G3 Powerbook, then dumped to a ZIP and returned to my house.

I used Sound Forge to extract all the singing and lyrics from Falco's original version. I end up using clips from 3 different versions of "Rock Me Amadaus": the original, and two radio edits. I mixed in Petch's singing and my spoken text, then started working on the video. Having a finished audio track certainly makes the video portion easy - or at least easier.

I used mostly footage from Return Of The Jedi's Special Edition - luckily, my Perception Video Recorder was immune to this tape's Macrovision encoding. I digitized all the clips I could, synced them with the audio, and we were blown away! We loved it!

Since the version I had was in letterbox (is there any other way to see a movie?), I wanted to do some kind of filler for the black areas and not crop the picture. I came up with the idea to make Jabba's front door, and have it open to reveal the video. I used 3DS MAX to create the welcome droid talking and the door scene and animation. I composited everything in Razor, then realized I wanted to have the scene noise from the clips under the audio to add to the feel, since we all know the sounds anyway. So I had to go back and sync up all the clips again in Razor, this time with audio. This is the final product of two guys with a very funny idea that they didn't just laugh off and forget. I hope you enjoy it.

Mathew Beall

Director, Jabba on the Dais