It’s good to hear that the decision to record in L.A. had more to do with J.J.'s editing style than Williams’s health. Those “few short references” had better include the love theme.
New Chinese trailer! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECYgD7zylrE
There are discussions about all of those things in the Preservations forum: http://originaltrilogy.com/discussion/Star-Wars-Preservations-and-Other-Fan-Projects/id/17
Word of advice: when you get there, browse the conversations that are already going on before starting a new thread; chances are there’s already a discussion about what you’re looking for.
As for myspleen, check your pms.
I always figured it was reasonable that a guy who looks and sounds exactly like the clones would want to do whatever he could to change his appearance and voice in the wake of the Clone Wars. That’s why I think it would be easy to cast an actor who looks nothing like Temeura Morrison in the rumored Boba Fett movie. Just say he had reconstructive surgery and cultivated a different accent or something.
As for the re-comps, I think those I will leave for v2.5. The plan is also for v2.5 to have a more careful restoration of the 35mm shots, like stabilization and manual cleanup - in 2.0, they’ll probably stay as they are in the WP.
I think the 35mm stuff immediately after the funeral pyre leading into the Ewok celebration (approx. 2:04:34-2:04:54) really ought to be stabilized in the final 2.0. The other instances of gate weave aren’t too distracting, but right there it gets pretty extreme.
That’s not how executives will see it in fifteen years or however long we’re talking. Honestly, it would set a dangerous precedent that in no way would be worth it. Better to focus on making the new movies good than pouring energy into a do-over of something most audiences are content to just ignore.
And that’s without even getting into the continuity nightmare it would be. It would be one thing if Disney had been completely abstaining from producing anything set before the OT since the reboot, but the fact is the prequels are already load-bearing elements in the new canon. The Tarkin novel, the Rebels cartoon, the Kanan comic, the Vader comic, the upcoming Obi-Wan and Anakin comic, and the five-and-a-half seasons of still-canonical Clone Wars cartoons would make it impossible without splitting the timeline and creating an alternate continuity, and we saw how well people reacted to that with JJ’s Trek. It would be extremely risky and an enormous amount of work for something that ultimately isn’t terribly important one way or the other. Never going to happen.
The only way I’ll be all right with Snoke turning out to be Plagueis is if whatever he’s up to has nothing to do with reestablishing the Sith. I was so excited when we first heard about the Knights of Ren and it looked like we were going to get away from that. If all it amounts to is a half-assed segue into immediately bringing back the old bad guys, I’m going to be upset.
I’m pretty sure his species was recanonized as Muun in Tarkin.
I just used Plex to stream it to my Roku and the timecode didn’t show up at all. I don’t know if it’s my contrast settings or it’s being cropped out or what, but it’s missing on the TV but present on my laptop. I’m not complaining, everything else looks spectacular.
I think Jodorowsky’s Dune doesn’t get thrown around with Flash Gordon and The Hidden Fortress when people talk about Star Wars influences mostly because it doesn’t actually exist and any attempt to explain it to the uninitiated would completely derail whatever Star Wars-centric documentary/interview/article the conversation is meant to be a part of. Jodorowski’s Dune is most definitely a huge influence. I think equating Han’s spice with melange is a bit misleading, though. The idea of spice being a valuable drug definitely comes from Dune, but in the novel the spice is a huge part of the central conflict, whereas in Star Wars it’s just a throwaway reference that’s never mentioned again outside of the EU.
Man, I was just listening to that Grimes album with all the Dune references, and now this. I need to read Dune again.
I’m about halfway done downloading. I’m supposed to have a marathon on Saturday so I won’t be watching this in its entirety before then, but I plan on watching a good chunk of it before I decide which one I’m going to show.
The Plagueis truther community on Reddit is freaking the hell out over this image that showed up in a Mexican magazine purporting to be Snoke:
On the right is the Snoke image, the left is a result that comes up on the first page when you plug “Darth Plagueis” into google image search that it seems to be traced off of (the image they have of Kylo Ren is similarly traced off of a photo of a fan’s D23 costume). After all that stuff in the Andy Serkis and JJ interviews about how Snoke’s bone structure would be impossible to pull off without mocap, and how the look of the character continued to evolve into post-production, are we to believe they just lifted an existing (and rather lame) character design? It seems so obviously fake that it shouldn’t even warrant discussion, but then Collider Movie Talk claimed that they’d verified it with three different sources, and then shortly after that Disney contacted them requesting they edit the segment out of the episode. I honestly don’t even know that I’d hate it if Snoke was Plagueis in itself, because I know nothing about that character beyond his single mention in ROTS. I kind of assume he sucks because he’s from ROTS and ROTS sucks, but I have no concrete reason to be against this beyond a general desire to ignore the prequels coupled with a significant case of Sith-fatigue. In this last year of perusing TFA speculation stuff, though, I’ve found the Plagueis truthers themselves to be so insufferable that I think a major reason I’m upset about this is that I don’t want to see them validated. It’s not real, though. There’s no way.
Packaging for a new Rey action figure that seems to confirm that Finn carrying the Skywalker saber is misdirection:
I don’t think this rules out Finn being Force-sensitve or becoming a Jedi; I’d guess he’d probably need to have some aptitude to be able to make any use at all of a lightsaber. On the flip side of that, though, I’ve seen a lot of people elsewhere on the internet (who presumably haven’t been following this as closely as us) despairing about Finn wielding the saber because they’re convinced it means Rey won’t be a Jedi. It sounds like a ridiculous idea because everything that’s been revealed points to her being the main focus of the film, but it’s a thing people actually seem to be worried about.
Hey guys, I’ve just recently downloaded the AVCHD of SW and TESB, the .iso versions, but I’m having issues trying to burn them to a DVD+R DL on my Macbook. Trying to use Disc Utility, that’s a non-starter…it errors before I even start.
I’m presume the majority of users here are Windows, but if there are any Mac users on here that have had success burning these please relay your process to me.
Thanks in advance.
I had no issue at all using Disk Utility for the AVCHDs, but I made my own ISOs from the BDMV folders by running imgburn with a wineskin (I couldn’t burn straight from imgburn because it couldn’t find my disc drive). I wasn’t aware there were premade ISOs out there. Maybe there’s something wrong with those particular files? If not, I’ve got nothing.
Evidently some of the staff involved in the Time cover story were shown the first 20 minutes of the film. I don’t have the whole article, but Star Wars News Net posted a few excerpts and it confirms a few things that we pretty much already knew (Finn and Poe stealing the TIE, Rey hanging out with BB-8, etc.) No word on the lightsaber in space thing, which is really the only thing I’m still dying to know about for sure before I see it for myself next week.
Also, Vulture asked George what he thought of the film face to face (Kathleen Kennedy said he “really liked it”, but I didn’t put a ton of stock in that). His response was so passive aggressive I can really only grin and shake my head.
“I think the fans are going to love it,” he said. “It’s very much the kind of movie they’ve been looking for.”
Somehow, this makes me feel better than KK’s quotation. Full article here: http://www.vulture.com/2015/12/george-lucas-delivers-a-verdict-on-force-awakens.html?mid=twitter_vulture
I’m sure I’ve said it before but thank you again, Harmy. Thanks to you, tonight I was able to show Star Wars as I remember it to my fiancee (who is also carrying my son so hopefully he caught some of it too 😄).
Her only complaint was the lack of female characters. I quote:
“The only other female was the aunt and all she did was put some cabbage in a blender and then got killed!”Lol. Great evening. 😃
I feel the need to acknowledge your signature in some way. Wonderful. Bravo.
In all fairness, her death was unrelated to the cabbage. Unless she offered some to the stormtroopers off screen…
“We were going to let you go, but this is terrible.”
(I’m kind of wondering what shot(s) goes in between these two. It seems unlikely that these reaction shots are right next to each other.)
I think both shots are probably from after the Starkiller battle, though, because it’s the only time we’ve seen either character in a different costume. If we’re going by the MSW outline, my guess is this is right before Rey leaves to find Luke.
Rey-centric ABC Family segment with some new footage: https://streamable.com/1bed
Check out the OT-era Rebel helmet just before the halfway mark.
Also, here’s a Spanish language Univision spot introduced by Oscar Isaac, again with a few new shots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n72hz_hsuEI
Highlights from press day: http://www.ew.com/article/2015/12/06/live-blog-star-wars-force-awakens-press-conference?1212
Quick hits -
-J.J. thinks that Maz and Yoda have met at some point
-J.J. explicitly states that there won’t be a post-credits scene
-Production on Episode VIII begins next month
-Rian Johnson has had/is having lengthy discussions with J.J. about continuity
The rest is mostly the cast sharing stories about production and stuff like that. No revelations, but very funny and charming. Worth a look.
Check your PMs.
Oh jeez. My slip. Anyway yeah, if you can burn to a proper blu ray disc, use the MKV.
The MKV is the 20GB-ish video file on myspleen. The AVC is a lower quality encode that’s already in a BD directory, so if you’re using that you don’t need to convert it in tsmuxer, you can just go straight to disc with imgburn or whatever equivalent program you’re using. Are you trying to burn to a blu ray or a dvd-9? If you’re using a proper blu ray disc, I’d strongly recommend using the MKV.
So I just had a thought about the role of Poe Dameron and the way the film is being marketed. The heavy focus on Rey and Finn made me think that maybe Poe isn’t as big a character as we were initially led to believe (I remember a lot of talk early on about him being included with the other two in a “new big three”). I just saw that Oscar Isaac has a print interview out this week and he finally got a character poster though, and I was reminded that in his Nerdist interview over the summer Isaac said he wasn’t going to be doing much press for TFA because he would be in the middle of shooting another movie by then. Do you think it’s possible that the marketing has been holding off on Poe simply because Oscar can’t be as visible as Daisy and John in the media push?
Yes, if you open the MKV in tsmuxer there’s an option to export it as a BD disc image. No idea how to do it if you want to get fancy with menus and what not.
The DE is an enormous hit here as well. We just finished Empire, I think we’re going to put a pin in this and do the rest tomorrow because it’s almost 1:00.