The way that I think of the monarchy issue...
England has a queen. She's a figurehead, but that's it. The nation is still run by elected officials.
If you removed the "elected queen" thing, that should be enough without making drastic changes to explain things that don't need to be explained.
That's a very good point- as a matter of fact, that makes a lot of sense. It also requires minimal work compared to the other option. And in thinking about this, lines like "We are a democracy! The people have decided," in Episode I actually make it quite clear that Naboo is a democracy, even with the born queen. Padme's statement in Episode III, then, is not hypocritical because 1. Her home planet is a democracy, 2. She's been a senator since II, and 3. Who cares at this point anyway?- it isn't as if someone comes out and points out that Padme was not elected democratically. We just take out the "elected" business and leave the audience to their own conclusions. I agree that there's no need to go to a lot of trouble explaining something when all the film requires is...a lack of explanation. No contradictions this way. In thinking about how to do it, it never occured to me that you could have Padme be non-democratically elected and still have Naboo as a democracy.
Everyone- that's the official press release on the issue of the "elected queen" and the monarchy. Case closed
MagnoliaFan-also want to take this opportunity to thank you for doing your own edits. I own the original "Balance" and "Clone War", and even hearing about them before I saw them partially inspired the dubbing for this project. I knew it wasn't a completely crazy idea because someone had done it already. And yours are the only other edits that I know of to enhance storyline and characters using subtitles like that. Great job!
I hope that you are not insulted or offended when I talk about your work or discuss using it for my own edit- but know that I appreciate it very much and that you are free to use any of my ideas, seeing as yours have been such a help to me. As I've said before, this edit wouldn't be possible without a great many other people, and you're definitely one of them.
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Here are a few screenshots to give everyone an example of what I'm doing for the droid factory scene.
Comparison:
The general lighting of this turned out to be purple. I had originally made it red, but this interfered with the coloring of the blue saber. Therefore, I added some blue back in, and I came out with purple, which is still quite dramatic visually. Perhaps this will make up for the absence of Windu's purple saber
No mercy is being shown to the CG shots here. I'm changing a lot more CGI than I had planned on, simply because it's so easy and it makes such a difference in the realism of the images. I'm also going to stick to an earlier idea of mine to add white blaster flashes to the battle sequences (like in the original SW).
This visual stuff has just become very easy with my software.
Another question folks may have is... how are you going to encode the DVD? Will it be awful and pixelated, are you doing copies with the exact same bitrate for each scene, etc. I am rendering the whole film out as an uncompressed anamorphic AVI. I will then consult the official DVD for the bitrate of each individual scene, and I'll encode each scene to MPEG2 manually with the different bitrates and piece it together at the end, in an attempt to prevent too much quality loss.