A Collaborative Star Wars Saga Edit — Page 2

Leave Empire Strikes Back completely identical to Harmy’s then I’d be fine.

I can do voice acting if you would like, I can do a pretty good Palpatine and I can accomplish a Snoke using audacity. As well as Yoda and a few other voices.

paja said:

LordZerome1080 said:

I can do voice acting if you would like, I can do a pretty good Palpatine and I can accomplish a Snoke using audacity. As well as Yoda and a few other voices.

Hear We must.

In a video I will do this.

OutboundFlight said:

I think we should limit our canon to just the 9 films. A trilogy of trilogies. Thankfully Rogue One and Solo are standalone, so we can avoid them entirely without many contradictions. TCW and Rebels, while good parts of the story, are not the main focus and shouldn’t be catered too. We should make the prequel films are good as possible.

I think we are all pretty close to the same page, just leaning in various directions on certain things, which I think is a good thing for this kind of discussion. Some might feel we should cater to the TV material on a certain matter, whereas others feel a bigger change could benefit the story, or vice versa. EddieDean made this guideline earlier: The TV series are not [unbreakable canon], though we should try to avoid any major contradictions unless otherwise unavoidable.

Obviously the degree of “trying” and what is and isn’t “unavoidable” is the grey area. But these are just situations where we weigh the pros and cons and discuss it. I still think good ideas, even if they might contradict the TV shows, should still be up for discussion.

That being said, I fear this thread will quickly become a mess. I could go on and on with possible changes from all over the saga. I suggest we start with fixing bigger story contradictions, like Leia remembering her mother. After that we narrow down, focus on the prequel’s overall story and the clone wars origin. Then narrow down further, focus on the individual changes for the TPM, and so on. Then the originals, then the sequels (by then ep 9 will have come out).

I agree with you there. I don’t want this to become a mess. While I love discussing the more subjective changes, I think concentrating on continuity issues would be the most focused strategy for now. We were debating on creating separate threads for the individual films earlier, but I wonder if maybe dividing threads into the three categories (progress reports and general discussion, continuity discussion, story improvement discussion) or something similar would help prevent conversations from getting tangled. Or just have two, one for work (this one) and another for general idea discussion.

I think it’d also be helpful if the OP updated the first post to include a list of all the agreed changes (and editing progress for them) so everyone can know what’s happening easily.

I’ll totally do this. I’ll probably post a simplified version of the spreadsheet/list that EddieDean is working on.

Here are all the major contradictions through the saga I can think of. I think we should focus on inter-trilogy changes first:
–Leia remembers her mother
–Obi-Wan never remembers R2 (fix: “old friend”)
–Your father wanted you to have this (fix: “would’ve wanted”)
–Death Star I takes 19 years, II 3 (fix: cut the cameo in ROTS or use Snooker’s sovereign with his permission)

Hal also had an idea of putting the laser dish on the equator to imply that it is a prototype Death Star rather than the final one we see in ANH.

–Who made the Death Star again? (fix: cut the cameo in AOTC)
–The Jedi wear hermit robes (we probably can change this but worth mentioning)
–Anakin is no “good friend” (fix: edit AOTC throughout and remove temper tantrums)
–The First Order somehow rose from nowhere (fix: end ROTJ without galactic montage, it’s only a major victory not end of the war)

I haven’t mentioned this on the Revisited thread, but I think it would be interesting to have a shot of Star Destroyers jumping into hyperspace in various directions after the Death Star is destroyed to hint that the Empire might not be gone forever. Maybe I should post this thought, but I agree with you and I also think the Ady will make a similar version of this concept.

–Luke doesn’t kill Vader but almost murders Ben (how about instead of him attacking that causes the rise of darkness, it’s his refusal to fight the rising darkness which is more true to his character)
–Snoke (fix: Darth Plaguies)
–The rebels didn’t accomplish anything (fix: merge the resistance and new republic… leia is commanding a regiment in the outer rim)

Although I personally lean on the side of lighter Sequel edits, I do think these things merit more discussion. And at the very least, discuss how such changes could be hypothetically implemented. While I don’t know about changing Luke’s moment of weakness, I’ve thought about ways to change it, and ways to foreshadow Snoke (maybeplagueismaybenot) possibly.

I definitely agree that I would like more political recontextualization in the sequel films though. I think Restructured helped pave the way for that. I have a few ideas that I would like to discuss with you as well!

I’m going to put all of these on a list, thanks OutboundFlight.

CourtlyHades, I definitely agree that ESB could probably go pretty much untouched. Personally, I think I’ll eventually have a box set of all the films, and in them I’ll have the theatrical version and an edited version of each film (so probably the Despecialized for the OT). So for me, I think ESB should still be different from Despecialized. That’s why for this I think it would be nice to use Adywan’s Revisited as a basis, and maybe make two or three additional changes that I think 95% of people might not even notice.

LordZerome1080 said:

I can do voice acting if you would like, I can do a pretty good Palpatine and I can accomplish a Snoke using audacity. As well as Yoda and a few other voices.

This could come in handy! Thanks for the offer Zerome.

Needless to say, Han is going to shoot first in these editions.

Let’s use the DEED as a base for the OUT and for the prequels use the new canon cuts.

EddieDean said:

• I think we should keep our hands off the Sequels, at least until they’re done.

I agree, and by the time IX is released, they’ll be a lot of edit ideas to pull from once we get to them. I also agree that edits like changing the Jedi robes would be extremely difficult (as cool as it would be) so it maybe keeping elements that lean into that monk concept would be a good idea since it’s how we explain that issue. I do think Outbound’s points should be on a continuity or discussion list though.

You’re all right that this thread could quickly get out of hand. I think we should focus on top level goals before we get into minutiae or even specifics. (BTW, in real life I’m a ‘Solution Designer’, my job is to run projects from beginning to end for customers, where we always outline goals first, long before getting into requirements, then design the solution based on the limitations of the product. And prior to that I was a data analyst, so I have infinite tolerance for spreadsheets and reams of data.)

That is really convenient! Hopefully this kind of thing is a more entertaining project to use your work skills on.

1. Individual movies should be as enjoyable as possible
2. Individual movies should be as internally consistent and clearly plotted as possible
3. The saga as a whole should be as internally consistent and clearly plotted as possible
4. The saga as a whole should respect the canon of the TV series as far as reasonable
5. The saga as a whole should be as enjoyable as possible

I think this is a really solid goal list. Thanks for taking the time to write all of this out. I feel like “enjoyable” is pretty subjective, but I guess that would come from general consensus on whether people like them or not? I feel like art and film critique rides a thin line between subjective/objective criticism, so it’s the best we can do.

I don’t really have any criticisms of your outline at the moment. I think it is really solid and a good place to work off of.

This item also leaves room for the removal of non-fun elements, like the Droid Factory, and the changes we’ve seen in traditional edits.

I’m the sure this will be a fun future debate, but I know that during Hal’s editing of AOTC, people discussed the Droid Factory scene a bit, and we should eventually discuss the merits of keeping a trimmed/altered version of that scene for pacing/narrative reasons.

One thing I don’t think we need to overthink is whether or not to include anthology movies. Mainly because Rogue One really doesn’t break anything, nor is Solo likely to, now that the Story Group has a good handle on things. I doubt this project will make any demands of either. As I suggested earlier, once we have our goals we should be able to rank existing edits or original versions against them, and we may likely find that we’re closer than we think. In the ideal world we don’t create new edits from scratch, we just tweak our best existing sources to make them CONPoV compliant.

True, though the anthology films are currently in a grey area that might cause some issues later. Like with Rogue One, we see the the Death Star get it’s laser dish in the film, but it already seems to have it at the end of ROTS. You could argue it is a placeholder or etc., but I also think this project is trying to avoid this kind of hand waving when possible. It’s not really a big deal but it’s something worth discussing I think!

I imagine, at least for the prequels, it end up being a fusion of two or three major edits plus some additions of our own. I do think starting the process by looking at the theatrical versions first might be useful, and then comparing them to relevant edits and how they handled their issues.

Again, thanks for breaking this down. This is great.

CourtlyHades296 said:

Needless to say, Han is going to shoot first in these editions.

Definitely so, if no one is against it.

LordZerome1080 said:

Let’s use the DEED as a base for the OUT and for the prequels use the new canon cuts.

It’ll either be DEED or Revisited, since Revisited fixes so many internal continuity issues already. And I really like NFB’s new canon cuts too. I loved reading his thoughts/motivations on his character changes for Anakin, and he has executed a lot them really well I think! I think his should be one of the major edits we look at.

jarbear said:

For the Obi Wan and R2 part, that would work pretty good since it keeps the connection between the two of them. After that, he keeps up his facade with Luke (after he is revived) with his semi truths & stories. That is later reinforced at Obi Wan’s house with his reaction with Luke’s questioning about his father.

I was worried that it might be too much, since within the film we get no explanation of how R2 is an “old friend”, so it does bring up a question within that film. But, ANH does establish Obi and Bail knew each other so I don’t think it would be a stretch to think he might’ve known R2 as well.
Then again, should the audience at that point not immediately know that is Obi-Wan? Are we suppose to be obvlivious like Luke? Might be worth further discussion.

This whole thread is a lot to go through and I’ve only really skimmed the posts so far, so maybe what I say has already been touched upon. I personally think a collaborative edit is a great idea, though one that’s probably unrealistic. Having spent a fair amount of time here, it’s clear that it’ll never really be possible to come to a consensus in regards to fan editing these movies.

How Hal’s TFA v2 came together is a good example of collaboration, though I think that’s in a very specific context, i.e. working together to make one (and only one) specific change work, with the edit being available as a base for people to make other changes they want to make. So I personally think the lesson is the collaboration can work, in regards to specific edit ideas.

Essentially what I mean, is there are certain edit ideas like “let’s move the destruction of the Republic to the third act of TFA” that can be done better collaboration, though I don’t think specific edits of whole films can. Basically, I do think it’d be really cool to have a thread that serves as sort of resource for specific idea conception and execution. So instead of collaborating to make whole edits, it’s collaborating to make small cuts that anyone can take and insert into their own whole edits.

I’m going to make my voice test video this weekend or failing that after the 27th.

Thanks for chiming in Dom! You were definitely a person I was hoping to get input from.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I sort mentioned in my last post, that fan editing is so subjective, so coming to a consensus on every little detail will be really challenging. But, I see this project having one major goal, to make edits for certain continuity issues between the movies. So at the very least, this project could create a database of continuity edits that the community can use for their own projects, kind of like you described.

In that case, we may want to avoid things like color grading in order for these edits to be implemented more easily into other people’s edits.

Thanks for your thoughts, Dom. I think we could still stay on track on making a list of continuity errors and other issues. Because I think that is our strongest focus of this project. And if these edits interest people for their own projects, they can use our various fixes as we produce them.

And if multiple people get behind other ideas they would like to see executed, people can collaborate on here to try to make those edits work.

And cool, thanks Zerome!

I do really like the idea of continuity edits (it’s something I myself have been mulling over, in regards to the OT specifically), but even that can get complicated. Already I’m seeing things that are subjective. Like, the fact that Obi-wan saying Anakin was a good friend doesn’t gel with the prequels, and while I’m sure most would agree on that, it’d be hard to come to a consensus on how to actually fix that.

Smaller and more concrete solutions (like “old friend” instead of “little friend,” which coincidentally is something I’ve had in mind for awhile) seems a bit more feasible. Not trying to discourage or anything of course, just thinking out loud, don’t mind me.

No, you’re good! I really appreciate your input.

I would be interested in hearing more about what you were mulling over regarding continuity in the OT trilogy.

That’s the same example I had been thinking of when it comes to the bigger, more subjective changes we could make.

At the very least, we could make a “canvas” edit with the smaller, more concrete changes that people could use for their own edits. And then if the people involved wanted to, we could make a separate, larger scale edit implementing additional changes that might be more subjective.

And that’s interesting that you had the same thought on that particular edit! I think that type of change should be worth consideration.

Sounds like good guidelines so far, Asimov’s laws of robotics are a helpful way to think of this!

Separate threads for each trilogy could help spread things out, threads for each films might be too much though. Or threads by project category (reports, discussion, etc) could work. Depends what you’d prefer to set up, RogueLeader.

I have a few suggestions that I’ll throw into the ring here:

• Give Mace Windu a blue lightsaber (I think this has already been done for ep2 by Jackpumpkinhead).
• Relation between Obi-Wan and R2 (PT and ep4): cut “I don’t seem to remember ever owning a droid” in ep4. Apart from this line it doesn’t bother me too much, Obi-Wan is deceiving Luke in general and it’d be too difficult to remove all scenes with R2 and Obi-Wan in the PT.
• Two Death Stars in the OT: This seems to me like the major contradiction within the OT. If Lucas knew he was going to continue past ep4 then the Death Star wouldn’t have been destroyed in that film, but editing the final battle to avoid this would be a major (and likely problematic) change.
• The incest subplot (Han and Luke being jealous of each other throughout the OT, and the kiss between Leia and Luke on Hoth): shouldn’t be too difficult to cut, and makes Leia’s comments in ep6 less weird. Also removes some of Han’s more annoying bits in ep6.
• Vader’s reference to Obi-Wan in ep6: where he says to Luke “Obi-Wan once thought as you do”, as in ep3 Padme tries to turn Anakin back from the dark side. Could simply cut the line?
• Clone Army retcon in ep7: as lines by both Hux and Finn state that the stormtroopers are no longer clones. I know this is also in parts of the EU, but if the troopers aren’t clones anymore then the whole Kamino investigation subplot of ep2 is a bit of a waste of time.

Dom, you make a good point about the feasibility of the project 😕 though even if it does end up being a collective resource that would still be useful. If this becomes the revised aim of the project, then perhaps it would be better to work towards slightly more intensive changes (like making Windu’s lightsaber blue or replotting the vague reference to Sifo-Dyas), as simple dialogue cuts are easy enough to make for individual projects.

I say keep Mace’s lightsaber purple and give make Anakin’s turn red during the order 66 thing then turn blue again when he gets conflicted on Mustifar.

OutboundFlight said:

LordZerome1080 said:

I say keep Mace’s lightsaber purple and give make Anakin’s turn red during the order 66 thing then turn blue again when he gets conflicted on Mustifar.

So saber color changes based on emotion? That’s an interesting thought, but I don’t know if something so radical would work for a collaborative edit.

Let’s let the OP decide.

stickydixon said:

Very interesting idea. I’ve thought of this hypothetically before. This could be good, though potentially problematic when ideas clash, which I’d definitely see happening. But count me in nonetheless.

Either it’s the definitive version (which will inevitably vary from person to person), or it’s a radical transformation that makes a fun side thing. I can’t think of any other reason to make/follow an edit. I agree a community edit would be lots of fun to make, but we should aim for something more like the second type, where it’s not really meant to be the definitive version, but rather some weird novelty. We’ve already got the Ridiculous edits for comedy, so idk what we’d do for this. I guess we could revisit the idea of converting the movies into one continuous show. That’s something that’s obviously not meant to replace whatever is your go-to version of the saga, but gives us lots to do and plenty of wiggle room.

Vader’s reference to Obi-Wan in ep6: where he says to Luke “Obi-Wan once thought as you do”, as in ep3 Padme tries to turn Anakin back from the dark side. Could simply cut the line?

The popular approach is changing it to "Padme once thought as you do.

The rebels didn’t accomplish anything (fix: merge the resistance and new republic… leia is commanding a regiment in the outer rim)

My preference is making the conflict of the ST a proxy war with two groups within the Senate funding the Resistance and the First Order.

Come to think of it, I wonder if something about it could come up in Canto Bight…

Mentioning padme by name in the OT is popular?