The project in its original form is dead and I consider it a failed experiment, however I’ve been thinking about bringing it back in a very different form, especially after Act on Instinct contacted me about voice acting.
I made this comment about it, asking for your opinions and describing it more, if you’re just opening this thread for the first time. I didn’t think it would be a good idea to just copy the same comment here.
Original Post, since I can’t bring myself to delete it all on a preservation forum lol:
I think the worst thing about the Original Trilogy is that there are two Death Stars. Two of them. I don’t know who thought this was a good idea. But I’m sure you all probably understand why it’s problematic, so I’m not gonna get into it that much.
Around May, I was wondering if you could make a fanedit to solve this. I don’t think you can make a fanedit of RotJ with that goal, but you certainly can make a 3-in-1 fanedit of the Original Trilogy where the Death Star is not destroyed in ANH, and survives until RotJ.
So now, instead of going to the Rebel Base on Yavin IV after escaping the Death Star, they go to Hoth after escaping the Death Star. The Empire attacks the only Rebel Base while they’re analysing the plans and preparing for the assault on the Death Star.
That’s really the only story change.
There are a few other things I’m gonna be doing in this fanedit, too:
-There’s not gonna be any opening crawls. The latter two prequels repeat everything in their opening crawls multiple times, so prequel 3-in-1 fanedits get the luxury of being able to just have one opening crawl and still getting across all exposition. However, the original trilogy is reasonable and doesn’t repeat information you already know, so I have two choices: Have three opening crawls in the movie, or come up with something else. I chose the latter, and I’m using narration, in between chapters*. The narrations are accompanied by music and visuals relating to the dialog.
-Speaking of chapters, the movie is split up into 4 chapters. Chapter 1 starts with the rebel blockade runner, and ends with the crew leaving the Death Star. Chapter 2 starts on Hoth, ends on Home One (ESB is not changed story-wise). Chapter 3 starts with Lapti Nek, and ends when they leave Tatooine. Chapter 4 starts with the Rebel briefing, and ends with Vader’s funeral.
-Luke and Leia aren’t gonna be siblings. That’s the other thing I don’t like, but it’s pretty easy to do so it’s not super important.
*I’m also considering adding a narration at the end as an epilogue, but if I did that, I’d want to talk about Kylo Ren in it. However, every time you see Kylo Ren, he either has an aggressive face or a mask, two things good guys don’t have. But I don’t want to show him as a bad guy, for obvious reasons. So unless TLJ has Kylo Ren looking friendly, we can’t have an epilogue narration.
At this point, I’ve gotten the general movie done, but, at the moment, it’s 5 hours long, so a lot of fat trimming needs to be done. I’d be very happy if I can get it down to ~2 hours, but I’ll honestly be happy enough if it gets below 4 hours.
Also, I’m gonna have to replace every instance of the Death Star in Chapter 4, because it can’t go from finished to unfinished, obviously. If anything’s gonna kill this project, it’ll be this.Update: I’m adding an explanation that there was an unsuccessful attack on the Death Star before Chapter 4.
So, normally I wouldn’t have made this post until after the actual fanedit’s done, but I want to know what you guys think: Can this work? Tips? Any other form of feedback I can’t think of right now?
PS: I’m calling this “Star Wars”, because whenever I watch or think about Fanedits, Unrated Cuts, Special Editions, Directors’ Cuts, etc, I like to pretend the original media doesn’t exist, and this is the only thing that does. If that’s the case, then obviously the movie would be called “Star Wars”.
Edit: It looks like the movie’s not gonna get any shorter now, so if anyone’s interested in voicing the narration, PM me.