Nathaniel Caauwe's YouTube Videos

Chaos: SaberComp 2025 Promo

Sun, 04 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

As an admin of SaberComp for over 10 years, I’ve campaigned for our yearly theme to be “Chaos.” We finally agreed to do so for 2025, and my brother and I volunteered to make the promo announcing it. This is what we made.

Core Differences - Remastered

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Years of online feuding over the look of a lightsaber comes to life as NateCow and VaporTrail finally meet in person to settle their differences. Now, 10 years later, a bored and unemployed Nate has been unleashed once more to remaster this short quarrel in 4k, and redo all the saber VFX in Nuke… because why the hell not?

Sisters' Quarrel - VFX Breakdown

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Enjoy this visual effects breakdown for “Sisters’ Quarrel” that demonstrates the work involved in everything from lightsabers to sparks and fire, chopping branches and trees in half, and ruthlessly erasing my brother’s breakout debut as a saber hilt wrangler.

Sisters' Quarrel

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT

In a distant land beyond the lake where brothers once quarreled, the next generation enters the arena. Will their imaginations meet the family legacy? Or ignite something beyond?

The Making of Alex vs Nate 2

Tue, 20 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Attack of the Drones

Fri, 20 Nov 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Brothers' Quarrel

Mon, 28 Sep 2015 00:00:00 GMT

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:

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?

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, Alex vs Nate 2, 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

That last paragraph has aged like milk.
-Nate — June 15, 2026

Core Differences

Wed, 05 Feb 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Years of online feuding over the look of a lightsaber comes to life as NateCow and VaporTrail finally meet in person to settle their differences.

Alex vs Nate 2

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Simple Science Productions presents the promised sequel to LCC5's third-place entry, Alex vs Nate. The two combatants return to a familiar scene to finally settle... whatever it was they were fighting over in 2007. Frankly, they've probably forgotten by now.

Duel of the Dorks

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT

This 7-minute epic takes the audience through a multitude of locations as a couple of dorky theater employees battle it out over a coveted movie poster... and takes third place in the contest while they're at it.

Alex vs Nate

Fri, 04 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT