BURBANK, CALIFORNIA (Reuters) - While fans will have to wait until December to see Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, they don't have to wait for the new Star Wars figures which are out now.

"George Lucas did something brilliant with Star Wars which nobody else had done which was to make so many toys that you could have just the random background characters, you could have the major characters and you could basically create your own Star Wars world with toys," said Star Wars Go Rogue writer and animator Kevin Ulrich.

And that's what Disney are asking fans to do - create a short film with the new toys to win a chance to see their film on the big screen at an early preview of Rogue One at Lucasfilm in San Francisco.

To launch the competition, #GoRogue, they hand-picked three superfans to show what could be done using just Star Wars toys, a bit of wire and some clay.

"One of the things that any stop motion animator has to fight is keeping the characters up, being able to walk around fighting gravity so one way we get around doing that, if you look here, each of these characters has a wire propping them up," said Star Wars Go Rogue animator and co-director, Tucker Barrie.

"With the Pop figure of Krennic, he's a villainous evil person but he looks very cute here so we basically took clay and created eyelids that we could make characters blink but we could also turn them a little more menacing," said Star Wars Go Rogue animator and co-director, Benjamin MacKenzie.

And animating with the Lego characters has its very own issues.

"For like the black series action figures you'll get 30 to 40 points of articulation, for a Lego character you'll have seven (does movements). You don't have elbows and you don't have knees," said Mr Ulrich.

Even though the superfans got access to the figures earlier than everyone else, they learned little information about the new film, or did they?

"There was a lot of feedback from Disney and Lucasfilm where it was. I'd make something up and maybe it would be too close to the actual film so then we'd have to change it because it had to be different but we were always shooting in the dark," saidn Mr Ulrich.

The only figure the fans didn't get access to was Darth Vader, but he'll be seen in all his glory when Rogue One: A Star Wars Story hits cinemas at the end of the year.