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Mister Clean

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21-May-2014
Last activity
6-Sep-2022
Posts
23

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Post
#1106156
Topic
STAR WARS: EP VI -RETURN OF THE JEDI &quot;REVISITED EDITION&quot;<strong>ADYWAN</strong> - ** PRODUCTION HAS NOW RESTARTED **
Time

Not sure if this has been mentioned yet or not, but I have a suggestion regarding the Sarlacc scene:

It has always stuck out to me that neither Jabba’s sail barge nor the skiff hover in any way – it’s really obvious that they’re both stationary and fixed to the ground; they don’t feel mobile. I suspect this was Lucas’ reasoning behind adding the new digital shot of the barge in motion at the opening of this sequence, but now that new moment underscores how motionless the thing is throughout the rest of it, in my opinion.

Take for example the bit where Luke is on the deck of Jabba’s barge, with his lightsaber – the sand dunes and sky in the bakground are 100% static, which makes the shot feel more artifical, in my opinion. Likewise, in the shot where the skiff lurches and Han falls off, the skiff appears to be rigged to fall over, and it sort of klunks into place, almost bouncing from the momentum, which is exactly what is happening. A good practical effect for 1983, but by modern standards it looks rather dodgy.

I’m sure it would be no small task to successfully animate these vehicles to appear more like they’re floating, but it seems to me that it would add a much stronger sense of reality to that sequence. I don’t think we need to see the vehicles “doing donuts” or anything as dramatic as that, but just some subtle motion to make them more ‘real.’

ROTJ has always felt the most “stagey” of the OT to me, and the one that was the most unconcerned with shots looking less than impressive. Some of the sets and locations really feel like sets and locations, and I’ve always felt it was detrimental to the suspension of disbelief necessary for a fantasy film. I’d be thrilled to see this kind of thing minimized or eliminated for ROTJ:R.

Post
#1103745
Topic
STAR WARS: EP VI -RETURN OF THE JEDI &quot;REVISITED EDITION&quot;<strong>ADYWAN</strong> - ** PRODUCTION HAS NOW RESTARTED **
Time

ANH:R and ESB:R are both towering achievements of fan-editing; easily the best ever made. I’m thrilled to know that this project is underway, and I look forward to seeing you make your way toward the finish line over the next however-long-it-takes, Adywan.

Regarding your decision not to devote years of your life to working on the Prequels, I think any rational person will understand and respect you for it. I was always intrigued to know what you might do on them, but I can see how not having a passion for those films would make the idea rather… off-putting? The younger set seem to love the Prequels in a way those of us north of forty don’t – perhaps there’s a twenty-something Adywan, with a lot of capital and even more time, waiting in the wings.

Best of luck on ROTJ:R, Adywan.

Post
#1097286
Topic
STAR WARS: EP V &quot;REVISITED EDITION&quot;<strong>ADYWAN</strong> - <strong>12GB 1080p MP4 VERSION AVAILABLE NOW</strong>
Time

I’m about 30 seconds from watching this thing. I’ve been watching this project and lurking in this forum since the beginning, and I’m absolutely THRILLED to see this come to fruition after all this time. Adywan, a HUGE congratulations to you on completeing such a massive project – I know there must have been times when it felt endless, or like you wanted to give up, but this is obviously a gigantic achievement. As a Star Wars fan, I can’t thank you enough. I hope someday I can buy you a pint in gratitude. I hope you’re celebrating today; you deserve it.

Post
#1008428
Topic
The Retro Star Wars Thread
Time

ZkinandBonez said:

So, did people actually wear these?
(I know they still make SW pins, but I’ve never seen anyone actually wear them.)

Buttons/badges were pretty big in the late '70s and early '80s in the US. I remember seeing this kind of thing quite a lot back then, particularly among kids and teens. I actually still have my “Darth Vadar Lives” button; it’s identical to the picture above, roughly three inches in diameter, and it’s proudly pinned to the giant, three-foot-tall Vader action figure in the corner of my art studio.

Post
#787500
Topic
STAR WARS: EP V &quot;REVISITED EDITION&quot;<strong>ADYWAN</strong> - <strong>12GB 1080p MP4 VERSION AVAILABLE NOW</strong>
Time

xxtelecine 7xx said:

What channel format are you planning on releasing? 5.1 or 2.0?

Unless I get a lot more ambitious than I am right now, it'll be 2.0 -- I'm trying to think of this as creating a tool for making fan edits (my own included) more than as the audio tracks of a fan edit, if that makes sense. So when editors use these files, it'll be on them to place them into discrete tracks. I'm just trying to supply them with usable, clean dialogue and/or sound effects.

Post
#786766
Topic
STAR WARS: EP V &quot;REVISITED EDITION&quot;<strong>ADYWAN</strong> - <strong>12GB 1080p MP4 VERSION AVAILABLE NOW</strong>
Time

I absolutely plan on it, but it'll be some time until I can do so (probably months, at least).

My first job is to clean up as much of the dialogue as possible, removing the music (and sound effects), and then I'll be replacing any unsalvageable bits with clean dialogue from various sources. As far as I can tell, this should be possible for a good 95% of the film, if not more -- but there is the possibility of unpleasant surprises.

After that, the last thing to do will be to make sure it's all at the proper levels, then probably a final pass for polishing anything that doesn't quite cut it. If possible, I may release two versions: one with dialogue only, and one with sound effects only (that way editors can pick and choose which sound effects to keep, if any). Ultimately I plan on releasing the whole thing as a set of .wav files -- I'll most certainly make the announcement here on the forum when the time comes.

And then, y'know, I'll start working on Empire. :p

Post
#786742
Topic
STAR WARS: EP V &quot;REVISITED EDITION&quot;<strong>ADYWAN</strong> - <strong>12GB 1080p MP4 VERSION AVAILABLE NOW</strong>
Time

I've had a fair bit of success scrubbing music and sound effects from dialogue using Sony Spectralayers. It isn't 100% perfect, and it can be quite laborious, but I have been (very) slowly picking away at A New Hope for a few months and I'd say I now have about a third of the film's dialogue in a usable state. I haven't tackled Empire at all though, so I can't offer any clean dialogue from that one.

Spectralayers is quite good for removing more 'spare' bits of the score (a single flute or horn, for example) -- there are occasions where I've been pretty amazed at how easy it can be to seemingly obliterate the music -- but it gets a lot trickier when the full orchestra is swelling behind a line of dialogue. Still, with trial and error and a lot of time, it can produce some really good results. Food for thought, I suppose.

Post
#785023
Topic
Info Wanted: Question about 1980 uncut Empire
Time

This is an Occam's Razor situation, folks. 

Which of these is a more likely scenario?

Scenario One:

At nine years old, rancher saw a very different and thus-far-undocumented cut of one of the biggest movies of all time, in which there was footage from a number of scenes which have long been considered to have been excised from the film for various reasons, yet not a single person of any significant credibility (i.e., someone involved in either the making of the film or the distribution of it in those early days) has ever mentioned this markedly different cut's existence in 35 years.

Moreover, practically no one at all has suggested they saw any such cut, save a few people online who, like rancher, insist that they remember doing so, but can't really back it up with anything beyond "but I remember it perfectly". 

Decades of interviews with cast and crew have failed to document this rare early cut of the film, and the thousands of obsessive, hardcore fans out there have simply received bad information for all these years:

The scenes that we've always been told were never finished? They totally were.

The Wampa scenes that we thought were abandoned in mid-shoot because the effects simply looked terrible, for example? Nope! They actually figured out how to make it all look good enough to be included in the most anticipated special effects film of all time, without concern for it sticking out like a sore thumb against the rest of the cutting-edge effects in the film.

Oh, and that footage also didn't look anything like the few bits of deleted Wampa footage we have seen so far, obviously, since that footage is so totally unconvincing that it's clear why they must've started over with something else.

But despite all that, they cut it out anyway.

Basically there's *a lot* of fully-complete -- but deleted -- scenes from The Empire Strikes Back which no one ever talks about for some reason, and the entirety of the rabid, fanatical Star Wars fan base has somehow missed it all. 

Scenario Two:

Rancher is mis-remembering.

I mean, come on.

Post
#767925
Topic
STAR WARS: EP V &quot;REVISITED EDITION&quot;<strong>ADYWAN</strong> - <strong>12GB 1080p MP4 VERSION AVAILABLE NOW</strong>
Time

Amazing, amazing work overall, Adywan -- and that McQuarrie spider creature is stunning. Great work on the bat (?) creatures as well; really lovely stuff. Vader's new neck is also utterly seamless. Incredible.

As for the comments about the new longer take for the establishing shot of the swamp, I have to say I think it only looks like it's too long now because we're seeing it in direct comparison with the original version. Try watching it while ignoring or blocking the Bluray portion of the screen, and I think you'll agree it flows quite well. If not, well... different strokes for different folks, I guess. 

Keep up the great work, Ady. 

Post
#743464
Topic
Fan-editing in Premiere Pro: scene-by-scene or all at once?
Time

I've been tinkering with some editing ideas for a long while now (i.e., a few years of stops and starts), and I've made a number of dry-runs in Premiere, slowly gaining some proficiency in the nuts-and-bolts of editing, but I've never gotten a clear understanding of how i should approach a feature-length edit.

So far I have minimal experience with rendering and exporting (so much so that I think I need a better understanding of the distinction between the two), and I think this is where my problem lies.

Should I be doing my editing in small chunks, one scene at a time, and then cobbling those bits together into a full-length film and rendering/exporting from there? Or would it be best to create an entire 90 minute+ edit and then finalize the thing? 

Is there a "gold standard" guide to fan editing in Premiere? One that might offer a step-by-step, soup-to-nuts breakdown of the process? I'd like to share some of my edits eventually, but I think I'd do well to find a thorough guide I can follow in order to get there.

Thanks all!

Post
#742122
Topic
STAR WARS: EP V &quot;REVISITED EDITION&quot;<strong>ADYWAN</strong> - <strong>12GB 1080p MP4 VERSION AVAILABLE NOW</strong>
Time

Mr Ghostface said:

Regarding the podcast, I've never actually heard of it as I don't bother with fanboy stuff on either side of the fence these days

Says the guy posting on a Star Wars message board.

I do apologise for anything I expressed with a bad attitude, offence wasn't the intention, 

Says the guy who rests on the old 'geeks have no girlfriends' trope as a means of insulting the people he's talking to.

but I certainly don't apologise for daring to express criticism of Adywan or fanboys who are wasting years of their lives

There we go.

in awe of someone who is, at the end of the day, nothing more than a fan editor tinkering with movies and receiving far more credit than is due.

Glad we have the arbiter here to clarify exactly what Adywan is contributing to the world and precisely how excited or not we should all be over his work.  

I remember members, like Angel, who were incredibly talented artists, who suffered the wrath of the mob for daring to criticise.

I'm not the first to say such things, and I doubt I'll be the last.

 Subjectivity is subjective.

Post
#708127
Topic
STAR WARS: EP V &quot;REVISITED EDITION&quot;<strong>ADYWAN</strong> - <strong>12GB 1080p MP4 VERSION AVAILABLE NOW</strong>
Time

Lest it get buried by the debate over the canyon collision sequence -- and for my two cents, I like Ady's original pass at it myself -- I thought I'd reiterate that there's a minor technical error at the 2:30 mark, just as the spinning TIE Fighter explodes: the edge of the matte for the explosion effect is visible against the star field. Looks to me like some opacity tweaking would solve the problem.

Here's an annotated screenshot. It's harder to see when it isn't in motion, so I cranked up the brightness to make it easier to see what I'm talking about (here's hoping this works; never posted an image here before):

The edge is visible for roughly 1-1.5 seconds.

Ady, I hope this is a help to you, and I congratulate and commend you on your continued, mind-boggling achievements with the Revisited series.

EDIT: Arrgh. Here's a direct link to the image instead: http://imgur.com/Xe8ESJ3

Can anybody tell me how to insert an image here?

 

Post
#706965
Topic
STAR WARS: EP V &quot;REVISITED EDITION&quot;<strong>ADYWAN</strong> - <strong>12GB 1080p MP4 VERSION AVAILABLE NOW</strong>
Time

Stunning stuff, Ady. Gorgeous work. But I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that I noticed some matting issues with one of the TIE Fighter explosions at 2:30. There's a hard edge to the glow, cutting off at roughly 1/3 of the way from the left side of the screen. Not to be a killjoy or anything.

Hi everybody. First time poster, longtime lurker.