3D Printed Lightsabers Return in New ‘Sweded’ Full Star Wars Trailer

I’m not going to lie, I’ve seen the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer once or twice. Or nine or ten times, or whatever. I’m not the only one; the official trailer has, at the moment I’m writing this, 61,982,240 views on YouTube (note: at time of editing, it’s up to 70,166,200). We nerds love our trailers.

I’ve also seen the new “sweded” trailer a few times, as well, because it’s pretty awesome. Last December, a group of entertainers that call themselves Dumb Drum released their own, low budget version of the brief teaser trailer that had just come out from Lucasfilm. With a plethora of homemade props and scenery that included a 3D printed droid and some 3D printed lightsabers, the group created a frame by frame remake. Now that the new, extended trailer has been released, Dumb Drum naturally had to follow up with their own take.

Ladies and gentlemen:

Like the first sweded trailer, this one utilizes an amazing low-budget collection of household materials to recreate the big-budget scope of the official one. Highlights include a plastic toy soldier army of storm troopers, a Wookie in a cardboard suit, and some airborne battles on strings, along with a great cast of actors. A fabulous a cappella chorus provides the music.  And, of course, those 3D printed lightsabers have returned, along with a couple of X-wings.

“Our friend Kevin Sawyers helped us 3D print some of the items we used in our trailer,” Bryan Harley of Dumb Drum tells 3DPrint.com. “He used the (Makerbot Replicator) 2x Experimental Printer.  We 3D printed the lightsabers we used – the red one (Kylo Ren’s) and blue one (Finn’s).  And we printed a couple X-Wings, which were interspersed with some cardboard ones we made by hand.”

Since the new trailer introduced new lightsabers, Dumb Drum returned to Thingiverse users LeFabShop, which had provided the files for last year’s lightsabers, for their designs. Their X-wings came from another Thingiverse user, Edmund Keefe, aka 660.

If you’d like to compare Dumb Drum’s trailer to the original, you can see the two of them side by side here:

Besides their Star Wars trailers, Dumb Drum has created an impressive catalog of sweded trailers for movies such as The Avengers, Pacific Rim, and The Dark Knight Rises, just to name a few.

You can check out their full collection here. Think you can do better? Dumb Drum is willing to accept that challenge. You can show off your own sweding (swede-ing?) skills at Swede Fest, a film festival that the group created for all those with a love for low-budget remakes. This year’s festival just ended, but, as it was the fifteenth one so far, chances are good that there will be another one next year, so get to creating. And let us know if you use any 3D printed props.  Discuss this story in the 3D Printed Lightsaber forum thread on 3DPB.com.