This campaign is closed, but thanks for all your support! If you'd like to continue to be a part of our adventure, please visit phase two of our campaign here!
Help me solve a Star Wars mystery! I'm Jamie Stangroom, and over the past few years I've been tracking down Star Wars actors big and small - from Darth Vader to Jabba's tail - for my YouTube channel, 'These Are the Actors You're Looking For’. I sit them down for a chat and then see if they've still got their moves today via a fun short scene or a sketch. It's been fun and rewarding, and the Star Wars online community has been incredibly supportive. Millions of views, thousands of subscribers, features everywhere from the Daily Mail to the AV Club, it's been amazing. However, for all my successes there's been one actor who's so far eluded me. I always wanted to find the Stormtrooper who hit his head, a moment so immortal in film history that when remastering the original movies George Lucas felt compelled to add a comedy sound effect highlighting the moment.
I wanted to track him down, and relive his memories of that fateful day. It sounded simple, until I actually started looking. It wasn't that I couldn't find him, it's that I kept finding more of him! I now have three suspects, and no idea who to trust.
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THE THREE MEN WHO CLAIM TO BE THE CLUMSY TROOPER...
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As you can see from the trailer I've already done some groundwork, and conducted initial interviews with the main players, but there's so much more information out there. I want to get first hand accounts from the people there on the day, actors, stagehands, producers, and find out more about the design for those original Stormtrooper costumes. How heavy were they? How much could you really see through the helmet? If I raise enough cash, maybe there could even be a polygraph machine on the horizon. Two of the three actors/suspects have already agreed to take the ultimate test.
WHY INDIEGOGO?
My YouTube channel has gotten bigger than I could ever have imagined, and making regular content for it has been a lot of fun, but - and this is really why I'm here - it's also been pretty expensive. We have no sponsors or advertisers, or, well, budget, so every cost, from hiring equipment or coffee for the crew to a parking ticket outside Darth Vader's house (really!), has come out of my pocket. Once it became obvious that the Stormtrooper mystery was going to be something much bigger than we'd done before, I decided crowdfunding was the best way forward for us to tell this story. The final film will be a minimum 30 minutes long, compared to the average 7 minutes of my standard Youtube episodes, this is a huge increase!
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WHERE THE MONEY WILL GO
We've done as much as we can with a budget of zero, so we want to go all out and step things up. We'll need funding for equipment hire like microphones, cameras and lighting, post production costs such as sound mixing, editing, grading, as well as actor's expenses, props, travel, location fees...and I am not kidding about that polygraph test. Not even a little bit. But it really will depend on reaching our goal as they don't come cheap, and of course regular production costs have to come first. If we manage to even surpass our goal then the money will be used to help produce more episodes of These Are the Actors You're Looking For, and we hope to come up with cool ways to involve you guys in which actors we try to track down in the future.
Here's a visual breakdown of where we see the money going:
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THE PERKS:
You can of course contribute as much or as little as you like, anything is massively appreciated! In return for contributions we're offering a wide range of exciting rewards and we'll be revealing more as the campaign goes on. Right now we have exclusive opportunities to feature in the final film as part of our 'virtual jury' who will line up alongside celebrity Star Wars fans and actors from the franchise to cast their vote on who they think is telling the truth - this can be submitted via self recorded video or even in text form from an email. We also have complete one off perks available such as signed props from the documentary and the opportunity to be immortalised as our executive producer! And you can even have 'The Empire Strikes Door' logo printed on a T-Shirt darker than a Sith Lords heart...
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Or you can get your hands on a piece of miniature history with a Lego Stormtrooper signed by at least one actor. Only 10 of these are available and they'll be numbered /10...you're welcome to add impact marks to their helmets!
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MY TEAM & I
I'm a presenter, producer and journalist, although I'm happy to accept 'professional fool' as a more accurate title. I have over 10 years of experience working for the BBC, Comedy Central, XFM, AMC, The Huffington Post and 'The Star Wars Show' on starwars.com. I've conducted well over a 1000 interviews with the biggest names in music, film, TV and sport...Liam Gallagher hates my guts, Adele is a little confused by my hair but at least Dave Grohl likes my knees. Here's a video of my most recent BBC project featuring stars from Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter and Star Wars, obviously...
My team consists of myself, my producer Vincent Ives, and our cameraman Charlie Barclay. Together we've previously shot interviews with high profile stars like Slash, Rebel Wilson and Josh Homme, through to Star Wars heavyweights like Dave Prowse, Billy Dee Williams and Jeremy Bulloch. We've seen it all, and are ready for whatever scenario this quest can throw at us. So please, spare whatever you can, and let's bust this mystery wide open.
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OTHER WAYS YOU CAN HELP
Even if you can't afford to support us financially, we'd love it if you could share our story on all the social media platforms. We'll be pushing the hashtag #empirestrikesdoor for the duration of the campaign, and we hope you will too!
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This truly is my greatest challenge yet. Of course, there's a chance that we won't 100% be able to prove who it was, but whatever the result it'll certainly be a lot of fun along the way.
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