Star Warp’d is a rather pioneering film as it was a very early (and maybe the only) blending of clay stop-motion animation with computer animation. The stop-motion scenes were shot on 16mm film.

It is a spoof of sci-fi genres, mainly Star Trek and Star Wars. But furthermore it’s a “Celebrity Deathmatch” of sorts with other notable characters from sci-fi epics like Robocop, Terminator, E.T, Predator and more.

As a project it was a big success, scoring an early Internet distribution deal with GalaxyOnline and then later a DVD distribution deal with Synapse Films with rental through Netflix. Rather incredibly, it was again picked up only recently by Wild Eye Releasing and can be found streaming on Amazon Video and elsewhere, remastered in HD.

Pete Schuermann comments:

The lure of making a movie can overcome reason in some cases, but Star Warp’d was something that was just too fun in concept to ignore. A love of science fiction fueled the effort. In retrospect I feel so much could be done differently, mainly in an approach to project management that could have allowed me to pay more attention to the creative elements over administration and just plain keeping the project moving forward.

In the end, the project was successful in many ways as a business endeavor, which really is what counts at an early stage.