Anjohan said:
They should watch all seasons of Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad, analyze it and realize how good, female characters are written. Even for short appearances.
Ironically, Deborah Chow and Kelley Dixon are BB/BCS alum. The director and editor both contributed to those shows haha
Idk, it doesn’t seem like that that much of a stretch for Vader’s reputation to grow in political/Inner Rim circles, while being completely irrelevant to the day to day on a backwater planet without any consistent Imperial presence.
Ben is specifically keeping out of The Fight and to himself too. I think it makes a lot of sense and works towards establishing just how much he’s isolated himself. If it’s contrived, I don’t mind it. It’s small detail that says so much more about the character than the alternative IMO
Obi-Wan realizing Anakin is alive is also one of the only emotional beats that would have made this show worth making anyway, do we really want that to have just happened off screen?
I’m very excited for edits of this and to take a crack at it myself. So far, I’d just tone down the Inquisitors/Mercenaries. Cutting the Leia chase, some of Flea, and a bit of the exposition about the Inquisitors and their methods.
I actually think her performance directing and emotional blocking was the strongest part of all this, if anything. I think her weaknesses are related to the Volume and where she is in that technology curve. (And certainly not the pioneer Favreau is in that regard).
Budget constraints and the less-than-stellar script certainly don’t help but her character work has always been strong.
Alright, after having slept on it more, here are more of my thoughts…
Things I liked:
Things bad:
Anyway, everyone who wasn’t excited about this was right to be so, this just about met (and a little less) my generous expectations. I’m just happy to see stuff like this with a character I like.
I’ve been so burned by Star Wars stuff recently that I’m just happy for a Star Wars show that is approaching its story in the way that it is.
It may not be the plot or production value I would have expected or even wanted, but its measured storytelling and solid character work is all I’ve been asking for from this franchise. I like that the drama and action is derived from intersecting character motivations (and they feel like characters, not templates!), I like that Kenobi’s psychology serves as the personal, thematic throughline. It’s more engaging than the pulpy, trope-driven Favreau shows and more emotionally interested than Filoni’s fables.
It’s just good TV, perhaps in a cultural moment with an abundance of great TV, but it’s solid work.
And this is Star Wars. It’s Obi-Wan! I care more than I’d often admit, but I do enjoy these actors and this “lore” enough that competent work within it makes me happy.
The Inquisitors were definitely the hardest part to get onboard with, but The Third Sister is compelling enough by the end of those two episodes. You really get a feel for why she is the way she is, and they haven’t even explained it yet. It’ll be interesting to see her aggressive campaign cross over with the Vader/Kenobi feud. She’s out of her depth there, and not [just in] her skills and ambition.
I wouldn’t have had Leia in this show at all, but she was fun here. I enjoyed seeing Obi-Wan connect with her a bit, and it makes all the sense for her to be the only thing to draw him out. I kinda wished Obi-Wan had been more reminded of Anakin with Leia, rather than Padme. Leia’s snarky, fiery spirit feels more like her father’s thing. Luke if anyone was more like Padme between the two.
All of Dave Filoni’s shows are decent but overrated at best (ATLA/TCW) but mostly kinda bad. The Mandalorian is his best show, but it seems that it was good in spite of him. The two episodes he directed were the worst two.
what is this ATLA slander
Dave Filoni has been good at that before, I think.
I agree Deborah Chow might be a better director though, and I hope she gets lots of praise for her work on this series. Jon and Dave can’t have ALL the spotlight.
I think he’s understood the broader beats of character drama, but I’ve always felt like he’s lacked subtlety that makes his characters truly feel real. Emotional moments for him are big moments, the in-between filled with external action that [can] tee up character changes without being the point. Development only happens via plot triggers, characters don’t have to explicitly carry anything with them to the next arc if it’s not the point.
I don’t quite know how to articulate it, but I don’t think Filoni would have approached the scene the way we just saw in that clip, if he would have even approached character work in that way to result in a similar scene at all. It’s way too understated and nuanced for him; Owen and Ben behave like real people with storied friction, as opposed to just vessels for the emotional concept, if that makes any sense.
I’m probably overthinking it. I’m just excited to see a non Abrams, Filoni, or Favreau Star Wars. Hell, even Non Lucas.
i just want to say i’ve been waiting so long to see star wars characters talking to each other about their lives and emotions and not just stoic one liners and exposition. this is all i’m excited about, im telling you deborah chow >> filoni/favreau’s action figure mentality
I have a lot of [perhaps naive] optimism for this show based entirely on the strength of the behind the scenes team.
No other live action Star Wars show yet has had a team this good. On Mando and BOBF, Filoni, Favreau, and Rodriguez were all varying degrees of indie/fanboy/amateur. Star Wars to them was an action figure playset for fanservice and innovative technology.
It’s the girl who threw eggs at Simon Cowell!
You left the bombastic music in! I was saying you could just go straight from A New Home to a quieter end credits theme, sorta like I did here but without Binary Sunset. But whatever, it’s not my call to make how you make your edits.
I think the idea is cool but the transition in this clip is too smooth and it happens too quickly? Trying just having a beat of nat sound and a fade out, before you start the piano music. If you even need the music at all.
I love Timothy Olyphant, I don’t think I care about anything else in this show but Timothy Olyphant, I hope Vanth isn’t dead. 😦
This is a weird specific crit, but I don’t like the bacta dreams as a framing device for the flashbacks? Why couldn’t the editing just take us back and forth, maybe even some on-screen text denoting “Months Earlier” or whatever? I think it only makes the present day plot feel like it’s spinning its wheels; it explicitly demonstrates that there’s just stretches of time where Boba and Fennec are doing basically nothing. At least with hard cuts, we can assume no time has passed since the last present day beat, or even that Boba and Fennec were busy doing anything else in between.
that’s been only takeaway since episode 1 lmao. I don’t get why the story can’t be told outside the diegesis
Episode 4:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km2K8NL1YZo
…And that’s a wrap! Had a lot of fun working on this. First time directing voice actors and animating at this scale!
Anakin Starkiller said:
Anakin’s age in TPM is another one. Shoulda been 19.
Something I’ve whipped up
Revenge of the Sith with TCW opening
https://youtu.be/YQkq54AmaM8
i see you 😄
I’ve been combing through the behind the scenes footage, mainly because I’m hoping to incorporate some extra shots into the Kijimi sequence. As I was going through though, I also went ahead and pulled every other shot I could find that might potentially be added somewhere in the film with minimal touch-ups. I know some shots have been considered or even included in Ascendant already - and the shots that remain likely won’t work for any number of reasons - but I thought it might be worth looking through them again with fresh eyes. Maybe add an extra landscape shot or two on Pasaana? More footage at Leia’s funeral? An extra shot on Endor? I dunno; I’m just looking for more ways to slow the pacing.
I rendered it as uncompressed to preserve as much information as possible, so the file’s kind of large.
https://mega.nz/file/5TZm2RjR#L3H4Qiw4714bxSnaHAu3IzdeVc0RAGe19Ng8HjezJEc
whoa this is the first thing to really excite me in regards to TROS editing
I haven’t done anything with this for a while. I felt like I needed to step back after getting pretty burnt out, but once I did it was hard to get back into - well, Revenge of the Sith of all movies. Hell, I’m not even as into The Clone Wars as I once was.
I don’t recall if I’ve said it publicly here, but I realize that a lot of what I was doing was experimental and ambitious. It didn’t always work as a cohesive whole. The project basically became a canvas for every individual idea that came to mind. At some point in the whole process was probably as good as I was going to get it, but those versions are long gone, and the current available workprint is chock full of partially-realized ideas and radical changes that need editing themselves. It’s not something I stand by anymore, and I can’t find the time or motivation to “fix” any of it to my liking. If I even like this movie anymore. Or rather, even want to in the way I hoped I could.
That said, my return to this isn’t off the table. I’m sure once the Kenobi ball next year starts rolling, I will be a slut for Star Wars again and my inspiration will come back. Would absolutely be starting from scratch since I have a much better computer than the laptop I edited this on initially, but I’ve redone and resourced some of the most essential changes to this three times over already. I could probably do them again, and better with all I’ve learned in the time spent away from this.
JEDIT: Rewatching some of my clips, and it’s not as bad as I remember, and I am proud of what I was able to do with this movie, but it’s still not something I would commit time to fully polishing at the moment
It’s probably the most radical full edit of Revenge of the Sith (that doesn’t change the film stylistically or tonally) you can find, so I’d still give it a shot if you’re interested. I do feel like Anakin, Obi, and Padme are genuinely different, more relatable characters here than they are in the theatrical, if you can get past some of the jank and pacing problems that accomplish that.
RETURN OF THE JEDIT: So yeah, I did say something like this before:
I guess I should probably be more open about this; I haven’t been working on this at all since April/May.
I’m still sending out links to the workprint, (just sent a few today actually) but it’s looking less likely than ever that I’ll ever go back and “finish it.” I use quotations because for the most part, I think I’ve more or less done what I wanted to do. But the audiovisual quality, as well as an array of minor issues, really hold it back for me from being final final. It’s like 720p stereo, and color graded by an overzealous 22 year old.
I don’t know. I’m too burnt out now to revisit it, even to just walk back one line of added dialogue or fix a 3PO line overlapping itself. And I don’t want to lose another day of access to my computer to export a higher quality file that I’ll end up wanting to tweak again and so on and so forth. The way this project was set up is also a nightmare in the first place. I’ve grown so much as an editor since I started, and this was pretty early on in that journey. I’ve basically been fighting my past self to even get the more recent stuff out.
So, forever “unfinished” unless I change my mind when Star Wars Ep X comes around. But that’s not a huge deal because it was basically done anyway. I just wish that it was available in a way people could use my choices for their own edits. I really do.
I want to thank Hal, snooker, Mithrandir, Artan42, Octorox, sade1212, RogueLeader, IlFaneditore, Delpheas, etc, etc for contributing a lot to this project and helping me out. (God, I’m leaving out so many rn) And thanks to basically anyone who watched any of the thousand versions or showed interest. This doesn’t exist without all your contributions to the fanediting community in the first place. Sorry I couldn’t keep loving Star Wars.
Less harsh on myself but more conclusive about it, versus today where I’m harder on myself but more open to returning. That said, don’t hold your breath
Yo, this ruled.
We did a quick one-off short related to this series here:
https://youtu.be/rZXFxu4gfcY
Episode 3:
https://youtu.be/M4ncyBqMn4E
But like why is Beethoven better than the Weeknd, objectively?
^Rey finding self worth for herself alone, would still serve Rey better than the ol’ friends-and-family-help-me-realize-what-it is-vaguely. You’re Not Alone and being validated by everyone, is not the same as accepting Being Alone and trying to make something out of it. The fact that she even has something tangible to reject to find purpose already takes a lot away from her TLJ arc.
There’s really no justifying this imo - Rey Palpatine is a completely different arc, and if you think otherwise I don’t know if you understood the ethos of TLJ.
That came off a bit rude, let me rephrase:
If your specific complaints aren’t your “point”, and the show just isn’t for you, I don’t understand what value you’re bringing to the conversation. If you’re just complaining about the show to complain about it, with none of your reasons being the “point”, then why bother?
I just don’t get why you’d complain about specific things to only turn around and say those specific things weren’t your actual complaints.
Not to speak for them, but I do find that Dad Batch™ is within the same broad trope as Mando and Grogu. People’s mileages on that sort of thing can vary, so I could absolutely see it not being different enough, especially for audiences who imagine or desire more for the franchise than the same narrative progressions told in three different ways. Poetry and rhyming and all that, but there is more possibility with the universe.
To speak for myself, it’s not necessarily the family orientation that’s the problem, but that this is really the only way that can be thought of to make something family oriented. LFL for as much they make SW for kids, doesn’t seem to have enough faith in kids, and has always been miles behind its contemporaries in animation writing.