Holy shit guys, I think I’m pretty ready to finish and finalize! I just need to render it out, make a new cutlist accurate to what it is now, upload it, and I can finally never watch a frame of this movie again!

(jk I will fix any technical issues anyone finds. which there will be. so many)

But this final version is actually very different from what people previewed earlier this year. I’ve made a ton of changes since then that I hope make my RotS more unique than other fan edits. I wasn’t happy with releasing it as it was back in May for a lot of reasons, one of them being because I felt like it wasn’t different enough an edit from Hal’s or others to warrant putting out there. I didn’t feel like every ambition I had for the edit could be realized. And while I still feel like I wasn’t able to really, this is probably the closest I’m going to get with the source material.

Also, I’m not going to lie, a big reason this took so long was because I had to go back and redo everything because I ended up losing the original project files to hard drive failure. But going back to redo everything allowed me to rethink a lot of what I did and do things differently than I did the first time. I ended up having a lot of new ideas in the process.

So this is going to end up on the updated cutlist, but here are the biggest changes (in broad strokes) since the preview cut:

New crawl!!!
Color grading. Alright, well, I decided to go through with the color grading thing. I’m no pro colorist, but I was inspired by emanswfan’s filmized editions of the prequels (which don’t actually exist anywhere yet so I had to do my own thing) to make the film generally look more gritty and grimy, and shot on film, and just less plastic and more visually appealing. It might look worse to you tbh, and if it does, hmu and I’d gladly render out a non-color graded version. The grain and artifacts are definitely a problem up close. But this is my edit, and I like how it looks overall, so you know.
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/116544
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/116546
Even more audio/conversation editing. When it came to Anakin dialogue and scenes, I basically left no stone unturned. There’s new audio clips in every scene with him to either add to or replace his dialogue, as well as a restructuring of most of his conversations. I’ve got him the most sympathetic, somewhat likeable, and mature I’ve personally seen in most edits of this movie. And this is the movie where he kills children, so I’m kind of proud of that.

Additionally, just a lot more casual talk and laughing/chuckles. Makes everyone seem more human. A lot more people interrupting each other or talking over each other instead of taking turns delivering lines. All of the talking/politics scenes just seem to go by a lot faster now. Mostly because they do.

I tried to make the music editing a lot better too. Like, if I inserted a track like Anakin’s Theme or Anakin’s Dream, that it was integrated into the film better, and that you won’t be able hear too many remnants of the old score I replace.
The ending. My old drafts had more or less the original ending, just with the Hal/Russian scream instead of “NOO…!” But as I was going through this again, I felt like I didn’t even want that scene in there at all. Now the movie ends as Vader takes his first breaths, and then cut to black into credits with melancholy Star Wars music (similar to TCW season 5 finale). While this gets rid of R2/3PO getting their memories wiped and Yoda telling Obi Wan about Qui Gon, I feel like it’s more powerful to end the film like this. The whole movie is about Anakin’s turn into Vader, and to see him crying about Padme as Vader undermines his cold bloodedness a lot. And honestly, that scream of anguish/“no” is the only thing that tells us that Anakin hasn’t fully become Darth Vader yet, because we automatically associate the imagery with what the character is like the OT. The “no” subverts our expectation in a way that undermines the character arc. We had to assume that this sad!Vader becomes the Vader we know in the OT somewhere in between III and IV, but the movie’s existence is more valid if he’s just Darth Vader by the end.

Anyway, the 720p version should be finished rendering in like 14 hours, so I’ll get back to you guys some time then.