Brothers’ Quarrel was our entry into SaberComp 2015. My younger brother Jeffrey and I had spent most of our formative years fighting with lightsabers in the backyard, and I had produced several duels whereby he had contributed to some extent, but we had yet to shoot anything with the two of us. So in the 11th hour of that year’s SaberComp, we decided to try an experiment with two core ideas:

1. Given our familiarity with each others’ fighting styles, could we simply shoot lots of coverage of us sparing, and come up with something coherent with little to no actual choreography?

2. Could we also complete all the VFX, a full sound mix, and an original score in the 2 weeks we had before the deadline?

Long story short, we pulled off both, and finally took first place after years of taking third with Alex vs Nate, AvN2, and Duel of the Dorks.

The cliff-hanger ending would of course come to bite us. As I should have learned from AvN2’s “To Be Concluded” card, these things tend to be a total jinx unless you already have the promised conclusion done. We did in fact go back a couple weeks after the competition and finish shooting the rest of the duel, and I did get it cut to together. But efforts to finish the VFX have stalled, started, and stalled a couple times over, as my compositing skills rapidly improved and I kept changing my approach.

With the release of Sisters’ Quarrel now squared away (as of summer of 2023), I’m hoping to take advantage of my current momentum and tackle the Definitive Edition of Brothers’ Quarrel once and for all; giving the edit a tune-up, a brand new color grade, and flashy new saber effects. There will be challenges as we definitely didn’t have the dynamic range of the BlackMagic at the time, but it’s the sort of thing that should keep my mind stimulated while we develop the next adventure.

Do keep a lookout for updates :)
-Nate (August 1st, 2023)