A Beautiful Star Wars Piano Medley Played on a Star Wars Piano

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Player: Piano is pianist Sonya Belousova's and filmmaker Tom Grey's ongoing series of performances of geeky music on ornately decorated pianos. In the past, we've seen her play the Tetris theme and the Akira theme. Now, in her most extraordinarily elaborate performance, the concert pianist treats us to a beautiful mixture of Star Wars music arranged for the keyboard.

The outside of the piano appears to be modular. As she plays, it variously resembles Darth Vader's suit, the Millennium Falcon, and R2-D2. Belousova herself changes costume appropriately, looking at times like Princess Leia, Lord Vader, and Han Solo.

Simeon Cortezano of Nerd Bastards interviewed Belousova and Grey about their work. Grey described the creation of the pianos:

Nerdbastards: Can you tell us about the custom pianos used for the shoot?

Grey: As the crazy person who comes up with the idea to makes these custom pianos, I can answer this one. It started with our very first video, the ‘Walking Dead.’ We didn’t really customize that piano like we do now, but for that video we had a heavy upright that we bought off of craigslist that was the biggest pain in our side. It was incredibly difficult to transport, I cut my hand on it at one point, and it even broke the ratchet strap holding it to the truck and fell over onto a bunch of our equipment. Naturally when we finally got it on set I asked my production designer, Megan Burns, to go to town on it and rip it to shreds. We hadn’t planned on actually doing that, but I really hated that stupid piano. But ultimately it looked really cool and part of the scene we were creating. After that, it evolved and Megan at this point has become a wizard at modifying pianos.