I feel you, man. I’ve also been more on the discussion side of things lately than doing any actual work to show for it.
As far as your storage issue, whenever you get back to working on stuff, maybe you could go through and delete any redundant videos you might have on there, or consider using something like Google Drive as well.
I’ll go ahead and share the other thoughts I had as well since your more idea-focused atm.
Thought 1) I like the reydream in the desert, but do you think it might be too early in the film to show Rey having apparent Force-visions?
Kylo Ren does say she “imagines an ocean”, but in TLJ Rey says she’s only seen the island (and the Force tree?) in dreams. She does say though that “something inside me has always been there”, so you could argue for the island-vision being placed before her journey begins, but would adding this mystical foreshadowing vision to the tail-end of her opening montage take away from it’s sympathetic monotony?
Another option could be for Rey to be having an actual dream of the island and possibly the Force tree (maybe the dolly of the sacred texts) and hard cut to Rey waking up in the interrogation room.
I still like the reydream, just food for thought of a possible alternative. I try to imagine people’s reactions if we had seen the reydream in theaters.
Thought 2) Possibly add voices/sounds during Rey and Kylo’s mind invasion, to further imply the transferring of information. I like the subtleness of it as is, but could be interesting to see. At first we are hearing voices and sounds related to Rey, but as it progress, it slowly transitions to voices/sounds related to Kylo Ren. I went back and read your cutlist and it seems you actually sort of had an idea like this already. I don’t think visuals are necessary, though. It helps keep things vague, imo.
Thought 3) This isn’t a really big deal, but I feel like Phasma should be removed from third act of the film. I think this would honestly improve the movie, and improve Phasma’s character in general. I would argue it is the second biggest universal complaint next to Starkiller. We all brushed it off because we were hoping it would create interesting dynamics for Phasma in the next film, but we really didn’t get any of that, so overall I think it would be best to cut it out altogether.
How to do this, though? Obviously, you would need to cut most of the shots with Phasma in it. It would be nice if one could possibly photoshop her out of one of the shots of the screen that shows the shield’s status, and trim the scene short to remove her completely. Maybe an alternate, static shot of the screen could be made in its place to get that information across.
At the very least, trimming the way Finn is handling the situation might help. This is idea isn’t really related to your plans and I’m sure you’ve talked about this but I’m curious on your thoughts regarding Phasma.
I have a lot to say about Finn’s arc and how it could be improved too, but I’ll probably put that on the general TFA edit idea thread since it isn’t necessarily related to your edit.