Jamie Benning

An unofficial documentary commentary on the making of Steven Spielberg's JAWS (1975)

A documentary about the career of legendary production designer Joe Alves and his four decades in Hollywood.

After the success of Star Wars Begins, filmmaker Jamie Benning (aka Jambe Davdar) embarked upon a new adventure. This time turning his attention to the first film in the Indiana Jones Trilogy (yes, trilogy!). Raiding the Lost Ark, A Filmumentary is the culmination eight months of reading, trawling, interviewing and editing. This time Jamie has sourced some of the interviews himself, with contributors from Wolf Kahler (Colonel Dietrich), Brian Muir (legendary sculptor), Mark Mangini (part of the Oscar winning sound team) and most surprisingly Sean Young (talking about her audition for the part of Marion Ravenwood).

Documentary about the puppeteering in Jabba the Hutt for Return of the Jedi.

Returning to Jedi is an in-depth look at the making of Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi. It features rare alternate takes, production audio, on-screen facts, cast and crew commentary, storyboards, behind the scenes footage and reconstructed scenes.

Back in January 2015 I had the pleasure of talking to Garrick Hagon aka Biggs about his role in Star Wars.

Filmmaker Jamie Benning has finally finished his trilogy of documentary-commentaries. This final chapter concentrates on the first Star Wars film. Like his two previous documentaries, Building Empire (2006) and Returning to Jedi (2007), Star Wars Begins is an unofficial look at the creation of the classic movie and features deleted scenes, alternate takes and different angles, bloopers, original on set audio recordings and a huge amount of commentary from cast and crew, culled from every corner of the galaxy.

Building Empire is an unofficial commentary on The Empire Strikes Back. Starting with the movie itself, it adds behind the scenes footage, audio interviews with the cast and crew, alternate angles, reconstructed scenes, text facts and more to give an in-depth look at the process which brought the film to the big screen.

During the production of my Jabba documentary short, Slimy Piece of Worm Ridden Filth, I was put in contact with Toby Philpott’s colleague and Jabba’s right hand man. Literally, his right hand man, puppeteer Dave Barclay. Dave helped us, along with Toby (Jabba’s left arm), Mike Edmonds (tail) and John Coppinger (animatronic engineer) to reconstruct just how it was inside that filthy Hutt. And of course it couldn’t have been done without the amazing work of Eletrographica aka Pete Starling, who rendered all that information into a multilayered illustration. Dave was so impressed with the Jabba documentary that he asked if I would consider doing one on Yoda. Dave aged just 19 in 1979 was involved in building and puppeteering Yoda for The Empire Strikes Back. After a few email exchanges, Dave kindly found time between his work on The Muppet Show for an interview.

Kevin Pike talks about his location special effects work on Return of the Jedi (1983).