The recent new clip has some outstanding work by adywan once again. A LOT of the stuff in this sequence of the movie was unfinished on his exclusive ‘workprint’ from a few years ago, and I’ve been especially keen to see how the messed-up positioning and backgrounds featuring Vader would turn out eventually…
…as it turns out, the whole thing is an absolute triumph, and works bloody marvellously now! 😃
Whenever I used to watch this scene in it’s original editing, I used to have to ‘imagine’ that after Vader first spoke to Piett on the right-hand alcove of the EXECUTOR’s bridge…that he then watched the Falcon from that side alcove window when we returned to our first close-up of him…and that he continued to ‘speak’ to Luke from that same alcove window when we returned to him again…and that he’d only ended up moving (unseen by us) to the very front windows of the bridge before the Falcon went to hyperspace, at some point during the last moments where we reverted back to the inside of the Falcon - this was the best I could make of Vader’s original positioning for myself, but some of the backgrounds during Vader’s close-ups looked distractingly wrong, regardless…
But not anymore! - the whole of Vader’s positioning on the EXECUTOR’s bridge flows smoothly and obviously now, and soon after his initial talk with Piett, he is shown to walk directly to the front of the bridge when we next see him in this version …and that establishing shot, along with all the latest properly-matching Vader backgrounds that follow, make for some terrific consistency in the scene now.
Then there’s also the matter of Piett’s shots…as like the Vader shots, there was problems there too - as it looks like Piett nods downwards at the commander of the bridge ‘pit crew’ which seems close to him…except it shouldn’t be right beside him, as Piett is in a part of the ‘control room’ set which is supposed to be a good distance away from the bridge ‘pit’…and even worse, the commander and ‘pit crew’ do not belong to the EXECUTOR superstardestroyer in the first place…as they are the same actors who were seen earlier in the movie aboard Captain Needa’s AVENGER stardestroyer!
However, for adywan’s ‘workprint’, he’d actually re-done this differently to the final version we see now - he’d only re-used the first-half of the earlier Piett shot (which comes after Needa’s death), where he starts off saying “Alert all commands…”, and then cut to an earlier shot of the AVENGER ‘pit crew’ as we heard the words “…ready for the tractor beam” - and this was still an improvement over the original version, because at least it looked like Piett was further away from the ‘pit crew’ in the ‘control room’ section at this point…
…but it still wasn’t perfect unfortunately, as it still had those same AVENGER stardestroyer ‘pit crew’ actors in the scene…and even more disconcerting for me, the re-used, earlier shot of Piett still included Vader walking away from him and exiting the bridge in that unfinished version…which made it almost look as if Vader had suddenly ‘gone off to the loo’ at this point in the proceedings, compared to where he was meant to be…at the front of the bridge!
…of course, I shouldn’t have worried…as the scene has ended up being altered in the BEST possible way now, as far as I’m concerned - because the shot of the AVENGER ‘pit crew’ actors has been removed altogether, and although a slightly longer portion of the earlier Piett ‘control room’ shot has been re-used…it’s now changed to have him saying “Alert all commands, ready for the tractor beam”, rather than the “Alert all commands, deploy the fleet” line he said in the same shot earlier. This, combined with the fact that adywan has magically managed to REMOVE Vader walking away from Piett in the shot (and replace him with a couple of bridge crewmembers instead), give this new shot a sufficiently different look and feel to it now at this point…and it works PERFECTLY as a substitute for the original imperfect footage!
I am exceedingly impressed and happy with how this has all turned out. 😃