For the ground-breaking effects of the original 1977 Star Wars, the filmmakers didn’t have racks of servers and terabytes of computing power to create the movie’s fantastic alien worlds and spectacular space battles. They used the practical tools at hand and combined them with the creative, “anything is possible” sensibility of a mad scientist.

With that type of approach to their work, you can imagine then that those original special effects artists might have a certain level of admiration for what filmmakers Bryan Harley and Roque Rodriguez recently pulled off.

The friends and Star Wars fans finished a “sweded” version—a low-budget, quickly made adaptation of a popular, big budget movie—of one of the latest trailers for the film series’ upcoming installment, The Force Awakens. That trailer was posted Wednesday by Reddit user troyisprettydamncool in the Star Wars community after it popped up on YouTube.

“Making this was just like being a kid again, except we had to build our toys from scratch,” Harley, operations manger of a Fresno, Calif., TV station, shares with Upvoted.

Some of those homemade playthings that were used to re-create the teaser footage included corrugated doppelgängers on sticks for the Millennium Falcon, X-wings, and TIE fighters; plastic toy soldiers as stand-ins for the evil First Order army; and a ton of cardboard boxes that doubled as droids, Stormtrooper armor, and the desert planet Jakku. (Thankfully, a large work shipment provided Harley with a huge supply of empty cardboard boxes.)

“It took about three to four weeks in between sleep, our day jobs, and other commitments,” Harley, 31, says. “We’ve been working on it pretty much since Lucasfilm released the trailer online in October. We also had a lot of help from friends—playing the roles, building props and costumes, and actually executing the shots. Some shots required up to four people just to hold or puppeteer the various set pieces and props.”

The biggest challenge for Harley and Rodriguez was finding innovative and inexpensive shooting solutions for scenes that captured the feel of the originals they were mimicking.

“BB-8 was definitely a big challenge because we wanted him to roll, but also had to keep his head from moving,” Harley says about bringing to life the mechanical breakout star of The Force Awakens, an astromech droid that looks like R2-D2’s head attached to an orange-and-white beachball. “The hyperspace shot was difficult, too. It took several attempts and a couple failed concepts.”

Harley and Rodriquez are no strangers to making sweded movies and trailers. They’ve been doing it since the 2008 release of Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind, the movie that popularized the concept and coined the term. Their YouTube channel, Dumb Drum, hosts sweded versions of Die Hard, Pacific Rim, and other blockbusters. In 2011, Harley and Rodriguez gained attention for their sweded trailer of The Avengers.

The duo also has taken the idea of sweded movies a step further and used it as the foundation for a yearly event.

“We decided to create an annual film festival here in Fresno called Swede Fest where we encourage movie fans of all ages to re-create their favorite movie in under four minutes, and then we get together and show them on the big screen at a local movie theater,” Harley explains. “We always create our own sweded film to show at the event.”

Harley and Rodriguez’s next undertaking is to rest and recover from their grueling Force Awakens shoot. But the filmmakers are definitely planning to do more sweded trailers in the future.

And how does the sweded trailer for The Force Awakens compare to the official version? Watch this side-by-side video and decide for yourself.