Star Wars: Broken Allegiance

BROKEN ALLEGIANCE II: The sequel that never quite made it.

After the success of Broken Allegiance in 2002 I was inundated with emails from fans from all over the world calling for a sequel, which had always been in the back of my mind, but never really seriously considered as the cost and time commitment of such a film essentially ties you down for several years while making it which makes things hard when you cannot profit from Star Wars fan films. So I'd more or less dismissed the idea.

Early in 2003 a friend spoke to me online and urged me to consider a sequel and I told him I felt it would be very hard to do again without some more financial backing. At which point he made the suggestion of putting it in the hands of the fans. He asked me if the fans raised the budget to make a sequel, would I do it, and after careful consideration I said yes... but didnt want to do it unless we could better the first film.

From then on in March 2003 a 6 month fundraiser was started calling fans of the first film to help finance a sequel, and the respose was amazing. Come August 2003, we had in place a budget suficuent enough to do justice to good sequel. Drawing together people who played a large part in getting BA made, we began story development meetings to bounce around ideas in terms of what the film was going to be.

Initially, the plan was to make a prequel. At the time of BA I had written extensive backstory information on the main characters and thought it might be nice to see the origins of Ruan and Calis and Korbain Thor. At this point Chris Hanel came on board to help work on development of the story. He and I brainstormed many ideas surrounding the prequel premise. Those ideas can be read below, along with some teaser artwork done by Sean Cooke to help promote the film back when doing a prequel seemed like the direction we were going to head.

Word doc outlining original prequel ideas	Early prequel concept for Ruan	Prequel Teaser Poster CALIS	Prequel Teaser Poster RUAN	Prequel Teaser Poster KORBAIN THOR

After much deliberation, we decidided that the prequel direction wasn't the path we wanted to take. And started formulating ideas for a sequel. Most weekends you could find the team brainstorming ideas including an online voicechat hook up with Chris Hanel in the USA.

Weeks went by of development and honing ideas to the point where we were happy with the story we had come up with. It was then I organised a lunch meeting with the principal cast of BA to discuss them coming back for the sequel. Niobe Dean, Paul Hooper and Hadrian Jonathan were all eagar to reprise their roles from the first film and agreed to participate in the sequel. It was now official. We had the cast back and the story in place, the film was a go!

Script & Story Production meeting	The cast return	Sequel greenlit!

Over the coming months I began working intensively with concept artist Sean Cooke, and other artitsts on developing the look for characters, ships and locations that were to be featured in BA2.

The first thing that was designed was the new costumes for Ruan and Calis. For Calis I wanted something a little sexier than her outfit in the first film, and for Ruan, his character steered more towards a force sensitive Han Solo-esque looking character.

Since Korbain Thor was left for dead on Bothawui in the first film, he needed a different costume for when we first see him, prior to him getting his armour back. For this Sean took the colouring and style of Thor's costume and simplified and downgraded it, as if it was a very old and early outfit he used to wear before getting his armour seen in BA. Below can be seen Sean Cooke's design for these characters costumes, along with a revamp of Thor's original armour by Matt Jackson.

Calis costume	Ruan costume	Thor costume #1	Thor costume #1 minus cloak	Thor upgraded armour	Thor upgraded armour - WIP

By the end of 2003, the script was complete and a title assigned which was to be:

Here is the final draft of the script for your enjoyment. Feel free to either read it now or to keep reading the history of BA2 below first, however plot spoilers may follow.
	Download PDF File Broken Allegiance II Script Final draft

Along with our principal returning cast, we had an array of other characters proposed for BA2. Two new antagonists for the film were a female Imperial Admiral and a scientist by the names of Admiral Kreig and Doctor Solvidar.

Additionally, one of the main sequences in BA2 took place on Nar Shaddaa where our heroes have to fight their way out of a bar filled with many low life mercenaries and bounty hunters. This was to be one of the most ambitious sequences of the film and needed a lot of prep time. The first task was to create the characters to be featured in this scene. They can be seen below along with the other new characters. (Artwork by Rasmus Tizirtis)

Calis Tynahra	Ruan Arconis	Korbain Thor	Admiral Krieg	Dr Solvidar	Vagora
Naalori Z'har	Lynathria Tokk	Grellik	Dargashkas	RT-V6	Podaru Vu

After speaking with Peter Sims, the fight choreographer on BA, and also our other fight choreographer for BA2, Joey Kurtchenko, we cast 9 performers in the roles of these bounty hunters who had prior martial arts or gymnastics backgrounds. We were also fortunate to have Morgan Evans, trained stuntman, who had helped out with some of the fight stuff in BA, and who was Orlando Bloom's stunt double as Legolas in the Lord of the Rings films, as a fight consultant. By the end of 2003 our team was assembled, and fight choreography training had begun.

Fight training images - December 2003.

The following quicktime videos are taken from several fight training sessions back in December of 2003. The first shows Peter, Joey and Morgan taking the performers through their paces and slowly developing what was to be the bar fight scene
The second quicktime video is the fight sequence edited together from various training sessions over a five week period. Bear in mind that this is a rough edit only after a little over a month of training. Had BA2 continued, the fight team still had 3 months to further hone and develop the sequence, so what you see in this video is probably a bit over 50% from how the final sequence might have looked.
Just to set the scene, the Nar Shaddaa bar fight scene was to take place in a location filled with about 50 extras, a large percentage of these in alien makeup. We had chosen a local nightclub called the Bond Lounge as a location to shoot. Ruan and Calis come to this bar looking to find information on Thor's illness, but are unaware he is still alive. After convincing him to help them, a wanted poster for Thor goes up on an electronic noticeboard within the establishment and all the bounty hunters in attendace want the bounty. As he is very sick, Ruan and Calis must protect Thor long enough for them to safely escape. Early in the scene Calis' saber is dislodged from her belt clip and rolls under the bar. For this reason a large part of this fight scene is hand-to-hand.

Nar Shaddaa Bar/Nightclub Concept Art by Sean Cooke	The Bond Lounge Nar Shaddaa bar scene location	* QUICKTIME MOVIE * Fight training with the cast. (18mb / 5 mins)	* QUICKTIME MOVIE * The bar fight sequence. (13mb / 2 mins)

With the fight scene well on the way to being choreographed, we knew this bar fight sequence would be one of the more ambitions sections of the film, so we began coordinating all departments from fight to makeup and costume in weekly production meetings to get everything organised.

Images from BA2 production meeting - February 2004.

Everything was coming together well. All departments were producing some great work and everyone was throwing themselves whole-heartedly into making the film as good as it could possibly be.
It was around this time of the pre-production process that Niobe Dean (Calis) received an amazing modelling job offer to go and work in Singapore for an indefinate period of time. This was a huge setback for the film, but a great opportunity for Niobe and we all wished her well with her career.

Although the popular decision at the time amongst the cast, crew and fans was to recast the role of Calis and press on with the film, as we were already quite advanced into the pre-production process, and 2 months away from shooting, Hadrian Jonathan (Korbain Thor) felt strongly that if Niobe wasnt going to be in the film, he didnt want to do the sequel without all of the original cast. Now with minus two out of the three primary cast members, and with Hadrian's role in the film a key due to him playing 2 major roles that were plot critical, the film was realistically undoable and it was with regret in February 2004 that Broken Allegiance II as a live action film was cancelled.

At this time "H" Gibbens (Visual Effects Supervisor) came to me with the idea of continuting BA2, but as an animated film in a comic book style. I thought the task was ambitious but "H" was keen to have a crack at it - so BA2 soldiered on to be an animated film.

Before Niobe jetted off to Singapore I set up an audio recording sesssion with her to record all of her lines of dialogue, so the original actors would provide the voices for their on screen animated characters. The same was also done with Paul Hooper (Ruan).

Niobe records her dialogue for BA2	Paul in his recording session	* QUICKTIME MOVIE * Niobe & Paul: Dialogue recording (5mb / 1½ mins)

Concept artwork continued finalising costumes, ships and locations. After the bar fight on Nar Shaddaa, there was to be a ship chase around the buildings and upper atmostphere with the trio in Thor's ship vs. about 5 bounty hunters in their ships. Additionally, the climax of the film to take place on a desolate planet where Dr Solvidar's Elite Force Trooper production facilty existed.

Bounty Hunter ship#1	Bounty Hunter ship#2	Bounty Hunter ship#3	Bounty Hunter ship#4	Ext. Nar Shaddaa	Nar Shaddaa Streets
Nar Shaddaa Landing Pads	Ext. Nar Shaddaa	Thor's Apartment	Thor's Apartment	Bartender concept	Thor's ship living space
Solvidar costume concept	Solvidar concept	Facility concept	Facility corridors concept	Elite Force Trooper reactor concept	Elite Force Trooper concept

The concept for the Elite Troopers was basically a bio-engineered stormtrooper with force sensitivity. Better reflexes, bordering on precognition, greater gymnastic ability, and armed with two tonfa-style energy weapons capable of repelling a lightsaber. We had 5 gymnasts/martial artists set to play the force troopers, but BA2 was cancelled as a live action film before we had a chance to begin choreographing their scenes.
With all of the concept art complete the next task was to storyboard the film. I had already begun this process back when BA2 was to be a live action film, and with it changing to an animation, these storyboards were still valid. Sean Cooke began to take my storyboards and create more respectable pieces of artwork from them, however only the first 8 pages of storyboard were created before the live action/animation versions of BA2 were cancelled.
In order to make things easier for the visual effects team to see the kind of thing I had in mind for the opening sequence, I took Sean's storyboards and editied together an animatic for the opening few scenes of the film. Along with the dialogue recorded with Niobe and Paul, I was able to see in animatic form - how the first few scenes of the film might have played out.

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* QUICKTIME MOVIE * Animatics - First 2 scenes of BA2 (15mb / 4½ mins)

It was around this time that "H" who had been working hard to try and make the character animation work, realised that character animation and modelling was a great deal more complex than ship modelling and animation. Things just werent working as well as we had hoped. On top of this Stephen Rees, BA2's editor, and his wife having just had a newborn baby, was no longer able to invest the time it would have taken to edit the film. With similar family situations to deal with, H agreed, and it was with sadness that making BA2 as an animated film came to a close.

One of our concept artists, Antoine Sandoval, suggested at this time that we turn the BA2 script into a comic/graphic novel, and that he would be happy to illustrate it. Rather than see BA2 die alltogether I agreed, with the proviso that the comic be finished by the end of 2004, since I knew that 2005 would be a very busy year with prepping a new feature film we had in the works, and in May 2004 Antoine began work on the BA2 comic.

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Antoine's work was excellent, however real life problems and work/family issues dictated that the overall production rate of the comic was not progressing as planned. By December of 2004 only 6 pages of the comic had been finished, in black and white only with no colouring, or captioning/text frames. It was obvious the comic was not going to be completed by the end of 2004, and at that rate of progress, would take over 4 years to finish. With the feature film a priority in 2005, which I wanted to make my primary focus, it was with regret that on January 1st 2005 I officially cancelled all incarnations of the BA2 project and finally let it rest in peace.

2005 stands to be a very exciting year. With the script for the original sci-fi feature film project almost complete and concept artwork starting soon it proves to be a busy and exciting year for the team that brought you Broken Allegiance. I wish to thank everyone involved in BA2 for all the dedicated and hard work they put into the film in the period from August 2003 till December 2004. I have confidence that had the film been finished it truly would have met and exceeded the standard on the first film and fan films in general. Everyone should be proud of the work they did.

Keep your eye on the Feature film page for upcoming information on that project.

All the very best,
Nick Hallam.