I think that’s the only way that it would work, since you wouldn’t be able to just reposition the Falcon in the frame to fix its trajectory.
Nice engine glows!
However, one thing I can never unsee in this shot is how the Falcon doesn’t fully rotate toward the planet. All the other ships are facing forward with their engines pointed back at the camera while the Falcon’s engine is doing the Corellian Drift.
“The Motionless Picture”
Looking at the full quality file, I think the issue is actually that the edges of the model fall off into darkness which doesn’t look right when placed in front of a bright explosion. It would probably be a good idea to use a 3d model so you could get some light bleed from the explosion on the ship model as it passes in front of it. Another option would be to put some blur on the physical model as it passes the explosion and/or more aggressively matte out the edges during those frames.
The compositing of the larger X-wing looks a bit odd, though. I don’t think it should be lighter than the explosion.
Yeah, but then you have to explain how the heck a single Final Order ship was able to leave Exegol without the rest of them.
Isn’t Sheev’s ‘plan’ to guide them out with the stationary beacon on Exegol? I assume that would work for one ship just as well as a whole fleet, and the only reason why the whole fleet didn’t deploy earlier was because some of the ships weren’t quite ready yet.
I think the Kijimi scene could be kept in if it were altered to just show the city being destroyed. When I considered that option a few months ago, it seemed possible with the shiny new dialogue tools at our disposal.
Showing a Dreadnought Cannon in action would also emphasize the capabilities of this weapon for viewers who don’t make the connection to TLJ or who missed Poe’s line earlier in the edit. Even if that change is clear, illustrating it here makes it more ‘real’.
I couldn’t get even halfway through that trailer.
Blech.
I actually really like Yoda’s death scene. There are aspects of it that are rather goofy, but Hamill’s performance sells every moment with that puppet, and it puts me in such a wistful and melancholy state of mind.
An aspect of Dune: Part 2 that felt very lacking to me was Sietch Tabr. What was shown was nice, but it felt like we barely got to see how the Fremen lived within the Sietch.
That’s why I liked Part 1 more, if just slightly: that’s where much of the worldbuilding happens.
“Somehow, Darth Maul’s legs returned.”
I just had a thought about the Poe/Holdo subplot in TLJ, which is this: Poe should have had Holdo’s objective, and Holdo should have had Poe’s.
Consider: Poe at the beginning of TLJ is painted as a brash, risk-taking daredevil who doesn’t flinch at throwing away ships and pilots if it allows him to destroy the enemy. As a foil to this, Holdo is painted as a commander who would rather run and regroup with her forces in order to live and fight another day.
And yet, when it comes to Poe’s mission, he decides on a course of action which would allow the Resistance to flee from the First Order in order to live another day, whereas Holdo’s course of action is predicated on sacrificing their one and only capital ship and regrouping on a fortress planet where they may be forced into making a final stand, and this is without the later plot development that requires Holdo to destroy their capital ship in a Hyperspace maneuver.
So as a little thought experiment, let’s just imagine a movie where Holdo has Poe’s mission and Poe has Holdo’s mission:
Holdo, as leader of the Resistance following Leia’s incapacitation, consults with her officers and crew and decides that the best course forward is to send a team to infiltrate the Supremacy and deactivate the Hyperspace tracker. To do this, she needs a codebreaker capable of bypassing the Supremacy’s shields, and so she herself volunteers to go to Canto Bight and find such a codebreaker (Perhaps she even knows such a hacker personally, since she has lived with such people in the New Republic for years). She orders radio blackout to protect against First Order interception, and leaves the Raddus with a handpicked few.
Poe mistrusts Holdo’s intentions, and believes that there may not even be a Hyperspace tracker. He suspects that Holdo is in fact a First Order spy, and her leading the mission to Canto Bight is her way of escaping a doomed ship. He speaks with Finn and Rose about an alternative plan if Holdo turns out to be a traitor, and together they discover that they may be able to evacuate the ship with cloaked escape vessels and ram the Raddus in to the Supremacy, destroying it.
Meanwhile, Holdo’s plan on Canto Bight is a success, and her team successfully infiltrates the Supremacy.
While this is happening, things on the Raddus have reached a breaking point. With no radio updates, Poe believes that Holdo has abandoned them and puts his plan into action. They load the crew into escape vessels and breaks the radio silence to tell Holdo that they are going to implement his plan.
On the Supremacy, Poe’s message is intercepted and because of this Holdo’s team is found and killed. Holdo is taken prisoner, and the First Order learns that the Raddus crew is being launched toward Crait, and they begin to light up the space around the Raddus with lasers, destroying some of the cloaked ships by chance. Poe, Finn, and Rose are the last ones on the Raddus when they realize that Holdo’s plan would have succeeded, and now they must rescue Holdo as well. Finn and Poe decide to go to the Supremacy on a rescue mission, and Rose stays behind to ram the ship into the Supremacy upon the completion of this mission.
However, Holdo tells Poe to escape and lead the Resistance in her absence, and detonates a hidden explosive on her person, killing herself and Captain Phasma in the process. Rose, in her grief, then makes the decision to sacrifice herself to destroy the Supremacy.
Finn and Poe, now escaping with the rest of the survivors to Crait, must weather this storm of their making, and lead a speeder mission to take out the big gun. Finn has decided to follow Rose’s lead and sacrifice himself to save the Resistance, but Poe wants Finn to survive, believing that someone will show up and allow them to be rescued, but Finn has lost all hope. Poe, however, has regained his faith because of Holdo and uses Holdo’s own words about living to fight another day. He rams Finn, and they both crash.
Anyway, all this to say that in this version, Poe makes clear mistakes and has an arc of recognizing his risky and destructive decisions and atoning for them through the foil of Holdo.
I notice that the original frame has a lot of dirt and scratches, but apart from that the underlying film grain is quite fine. In the cleaned version, there seems to be a noticeable grain that has been added. Is that an inherent part of the cleaning, or has that been added later, such as to help mask film damage?
I added the heavy grain to help hide the missing details and temporal smoothing, and so that it would blend better with 4K77 No DNR if anyone chose to integrate these sequences.
Gotcha.
I notice that the original frame has a lot of dirt and scratches, but apart from that the underlying film grain is quite fine. In the cleaned version, there seems to be a noticeable grain that has been added. Is that an inherent part of the cleaning, or has that been added later, such as to help mask film damage?
Here’s my quick attempt at restoring the Tosche Station scenes:
That looks amazing!
Yeah, this is a great idea, though it’s honestly too good for Disney at the moment. If this was any other Star Wars project, I’d laugh and say there’s no way in the galaxy they’d think of doing this, but with Andor there may just be hope.
There’s a lot to like about this direction.
I wonder, however, if we can incorporate much of this idea simply by keeping Kylo’s offer vague. In the original speech he says they will kill Palpatine, but if it was left open ended, then he could be offering to run away with her and say to hell with Palpatine and the Jedi.
Since my current idea has the Sith dagger be something forged and planted by Palpatine purely to corrupt Rey, here’s what the dialogue could look like with that in mind:
“Rey….wherever you are…You are hard to find.
“You are hard to get rid of.”
“I pushed you in the desert because I needed to see it…I needed you to see it…who you are. Darkness is in your nature. Rey…”
“You’re lying.”
“You said your parents were nobody. But the dagger you found tells another story.”
“Don’t!”
“It revealed your parent’s fate. Are you still afraid to see it?”
“I don’t want this!”
“Search your memories!”
“No!”
“Remember them. See them!”
(Rey sees her parents protecting her, and their death)
“They paid for your protection…in more than one way.”
“Stop talking.”
“Rey…they were protecting you from Palpatine”
(Cutaway to heroes capture)
“I didn’t believe Palpatine either, when he told me who you were. He has lied to me for years…inside my head…in the voices of Vader…Snoke. But the dagger proved he was right…about who you really are.”
“No!”
(Vader’s mask falls to the ground)
“So that’s where you are.”
“You know why the Emperor’s always wanted you dead. I’ll come tell you.”
…
“Why did the Emperor come for me? Why did he want to kill a child? Tell me.”
“Because he saw what you would become. You don’t just have power. You have his power. You’re his granddaughter.”
“You know what you will find on Exegol, Rey. Darkness…or death. I made that same choice, once. But now we’re connected, by a power the Emperor cannot comprehend. Join me, and we can forge a new destiny…together.”
“You know what you need to do. You know.”
“I do.”
…
Now we get some of that recognition from Kylo that he’s been lied to, and that’s why he has no interest in following Palpatine or anyone else. The only reason that he believes Palpatine is because of the dagger, and in my concept this will be proven to be planted evidence.
This version even keeps the concept of Rey having the choice between the Dark Side or death on Exegol.
That’s a really interesting angle, RL! I like it.
So how would such an idea be implemented? I imagine that it would be a change to Kylo’s Quarters duel and the hangar scene, and then some of Kylo’s dialogue would need to be removed on the Death Star so that his action of destroying the Wayfinder is purely so that Rey will abandon her quest to find Exegol and run away with him instead.
Although, if Kylo’s purpose now is to have Rey run away with him, what is the motivation behind their duel? In the original film the reason is also a little unclear, but perhaps Kylo is giving in to the inevitability of his role as a new Vader, and Rey wants to defeat him because he’s still evil and now has the only way to get to Exegol. With Kylo’s new motivation, he wants only for her to run away with him, so why fight?
That’s what I was thinking, just mix and match sounds to get something better.
Maybe Rey’s “I am a Jedi” to make the am clearer?
That’s definitely one I’d like to hear improved.
Outer Wilds and its DLC, Echoes of the Eye.
It’s gotta be one of my favorite games. For anyone who likes puzzles and exploration, it’s a must.
Indeed! The powerful artifact that corrupts the bearer is also very LOTR, and very fantasy in general.
I think that if we clearly make the dagger bait planted by Palpatine, this would allow us to have the dagger show Rey visions of her past as well as her future that aren’t necessarily true. Thus, we could reincorporate the flashbacks to Rey’s parents:
“Rey….wherever you are…You are hard to find.
“You are hard to get rid of.”
“I pushed you in the desert because I needed to see it…I needed you to see it…who you are. The Dark Side is your destiny. Rey…”
“You’re lying.”
“The dagger offered you visions…visions of your past…and your future.”
“Don’t!”
“You said your parents were nobody. But you lied to me.”
“I don’t want this!”
“The dagger showed me the truth.”
“No!”
“Now see the rest of your story!”
(Rey sees her parents protecting her, and their death)
“They paid for your protection…in more than one way.”
“Stop talking.”
“Rey…they were protecting you from Him.”
(Cutaway to heroes capture)
“The spirit of Vader spoke to me as well…when I was training under Luke. It’s the same future…the same choice…that has now been revealed to you. Ascend the Throne of the Sith…or die.”
(Rey sees the two visions together, Rey on the throne and then dead on Exegol)
“No!”
(Vader’s mask falls to the ground)
“So that’s where you are.”
“You know why the Emperor’s always wanted you dead. I’ll come tell you.”
…
“Why did the Emperor come for me? Why did he want to kill a child? Tell me.”
“Because he saw what you would become. You don’t just have power. You have his power. You’re his granddaughter.”
“My mother was the daughter of Vader. Your father was the son of the Emperor. What the Emperor doesn’t know, is that we are connected by the Force, Rey. Two…that are one.”
“We’ll kill him…together.”
“You know what you need to do. You know.”
“I do.”
…
With this, we can basically keep the hangar exposition the same.
So the concept for the visions in this edit would be:
If we have Finn’s dialogue confirming that Ochi never owned a dagger, it would probably be enough of a negation of the flashbacks that they would be clearly seen as fabrications by Palpatine imparted into the dagger. This is strengthened by Kylo’s connecting Rey’s visions with those given to him by the ‘spirit of Vader’, which has already been revealed to be Palpatine in disguise.
JEDIT: I’m not sure which sequence of events would be more natural in Kylo’s quarters. If we put the flashbacks together early in the sequence like I have it here, that means that Kylo’s discussion about his own visions is pushed back and then he’s talking about Rey’s past and why the Emperor wanted her dead, and this creates a weird segue.
On the other hand, we could have a sequence similar to the one a few posts back where the ‘Dark Side or death’ visions happen first, and then the flashbacks to Rey’s parents happen later, making a natural segue into why the Emperor wanted Rey dead. But then the Vader mask isn’t brought in at the precise time of Kylo’s revelation.
I guess it depends on which bit of exposition is more important, Rey’s past and parentage, or the Dark Side or Death visions. Thoughts?
I just thought of another connection. If we wanted to show the origin of the dagger, there’s a shot of the ape-creature re-forging Kylo’s mask on an anvil which could be repurposed with a dagger-shaped lump of metal replacing the helmet pieces. This, and a brief shot of the Knights of Ren standing over the dagger like in the mask reforging scene, could appear to Rey during one of her visions.