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Star Wars: Path of the Jedi - Preservation Effort (Released)

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 (Edited)

Note: I believe this project fits into the Preservation section rather than Fan Edit section as it is a preservation of an official piece, but please correct me if I’m in the wrong here.

Also, I have adapted this post from an essay I wrote about my experience creating this, I hope that’s okay also! This includes footnotes, whenever you see one of the little numbers you can check the corresponding footnote at the bottom.

I recently made a video where I have recreated the official montage recap film Star Wars: Path of the Jedi¹ in high definition. To see this officially it is currently only shown in theatres at Disney theme parks around the world, with no news or rumours on an official home media or streaming release.

I didn’t realise at first how big a task this would be. I had to watch through comparisons frame by frame to make sure I had the timing for transitions right. For the sections where I was unable to find the right audio track I had to make my own version of the audio by mixing together multiple phone recordings I was able to find.

I first sat down and watched the phone recorded video a few times over, writing down each new shot, what movie I thought it was from and where roughly it would be in the film. I also wrote a quick description of the colours and look of the shot, so I didn’t need to keep coming back to the video.
To my surprise I was probably around 90 per cent accurate at guessing the movie based on the shot. The few shots that I wasn’t certain of were often of the Millennium Falcon zipping around in space. I started off working through it film by film so I could jump into The Phantom Menace, grab everything I needed from it and jump back out. This fell by the wayside a little as I got excited to work on the more ‘montage-y’ moments, and I also waited to put together some of the larger sections, saving the two lightsaber fights between Luke and Darth Vader for the end².

When I couldn’t identify a shot immediately I worked through some logic in my head to narrow down the place in the saga it would be (So in that shot they’re in the Falcon but Leia is in her Hoth uniform, Han is on the Falcon here so it won’t be from most of Return of the Jedi) and when I really had no context at all I found a few shots by watching through the movies in fast forward, but in reverse. I found this really helped me focus more and not get stuck assuming what the next shot would be. The process of cutting together the video took about a weekend. I was not expecting so many shots to have been slowed down, flipped horizontally, sped up or even completely reversed!

After I had my rough cut of the video I put together a side by side video to compare the recorded version with my final version. This helped me fine-tune the last few shots, and helped me notice a couple of transitions I had completely forgotten to add.

Comparison video screenshots, source video on top and my version beneath it.

The closer I got to finishing the video side of things, the more anxious I got about approaching the task of rebuilding the audio. I figured at least with video I can actually make each shot and transition perfect to the frame, the video reference was more than I needed to go off to get it just right³.

Final Cut Pro timeline of my finished video project.

For the sound side of things, between the fact that I don’t have access to any clean source, audio being harder than video to match for timing and me being generally inexperienced in it⁴, I found this to be an absolutely daunting task and a really tough nut to crack. I decided to go through in three phases: I would put together the music cues first⁵, then the dialogue, then the sound effects.

This didn’t really work out as planned. While I was able to recognise the music cues for most of the video, around about halfway through I hit a road block with what sounds like a version of Yoda and The Force that is much slower than anything I can find officially available⁶, and then right after that a version of the Imperial Theme that was slower and broken down in a way I could not find either. I was able to make my own version of the Imperial Theme by playing around with one version of it in Adobe Audition but I had to go back to the drawing board for my method of putting this all together. If I only used the officially released audio, I would have a big missing section for the part with Yoda and The Force.

I found many more versions online of phone recordings of Path of the Jedi taken in the theatre at Disneyland and Disney World; throwing them all into audition and mixing them together to get the cleanest audio possible for whatever moment. My idea was to then use this track as a bed to replace when I could, but also be able to rely on as “good enough” when I couldn’t. This doesn’t mean that for the parts I couldn’t find the music for I only used this audio, I still layered in dialogue and some sound effect audio over the top, which helped make it a bit cleaner.

Final Cut Pro timeline of my finished audio sync project.

This helped clear my head a little. From playing around with the mixing of these different versions I had spent some time thinking about sourcing some of the sound effects, as that was another beast to tackle. I know that there are exhaustive Star Wars sound effect libraries available online, but I wanted to stay as close to my personal challenge of only using the movies and their soundtracks as sources as was possible. I had already betrayed this by mixing in audio from the phone recording videos, and didn’t want to do that again. I correctly guessed that most of the sound effects were from the moment in the film that was being shown⁷, and so decided to extract the surround sound audio channels from the Blu-ray copies of the films and work with these. The dialogue was pretty simple, though I did resort to reading the scripts of the movies though to find some of the shorter bits of dialogue I couldn’t identify immediately. The surround sound channel containing the dialogue on the discs was not perfectly clean, and often included sound effects and music. This was generally pretty easy to drown out with other sounds and music in the final video however.

For the video, I generally didn’t have to go back and forth comparing my version with the original, as any direct cut I just matched the first and last frame, easy. I did have to do some more detailed comparisons when there were effects or transitions on the shot itself, like fading in and out, speed changes and cropping.

For the audio, almost every moment had one of these detailed comparisons. I would listen through a one second clip from the original, then the same again with my version, then back again, then back again. I was waking up with a clenched jaw having been grinding my teeth all night. I had to take a few days break from this when I realised I wasn’t sleeping very well, suffering headaches because I just had Star Wars music in my head all day. I realised at a certain point that it would cause a lot less stress to treat the audio side as more interpretive, and to be less stringent with finding the exact same sound effect as used in the film. I realised this after I was unable to find any clean version of Darth Maul’s lightsabers igniting. Every channel of the audio found in the film has heaps of music over the top, and was just impossible to work with.

I saved my favourite section for last, the montage towards the end which begins with Han Solo saying ‘Bring ‘em on, I prefer a straight fight to all this sneakin’ around’. This section was a joy to edit, mixing the sounds and the music together was great fun. There was a lot of give and take with the music editing, and a delicate balance to hiding some of the sharper transitions between the different music cues.

The final step was creating the thumbnail image to use for the video. I decided to make a composite image of each star field from the opening titles of episodes one to six, and added the text in. I’m pretty happy with the results!

This has been a labour of love and a homage to a great work and one that I’ve grown up with, Star Wars. If I’ve done my job right, you won’t be able to notice any of this and will just be able to enjoy the video. I’ve really enjoyed it and have learnt a lot of new editing skills, particularly in audio mixing. Maybe I’ll look at rebuilding the newer sections that have been released since with the newer movies. I might also try making my own recaps.

I believe I cannot link directly to the video, but if you want to watch it you can search for Path of the Jedi Remade in HD on either YouTube or Vimeo

Footnotes:

1 At the time of writing the Walt Disney World attraction web page for Path of the Jedi has the browser page title “The Way of the Jedi: A Star Wars History”, which I can’t find a reference to anywhere else online. Is this a previous working title for this short?

2 Strange little fun fact I noticed that I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere, the shot where Vader says ‘No, I am your father’ ends with twelve frames that are repeated and reversed. At the end of this shot, Vader does a very short breathe in and out, the ‘out’ breath is actually the previous twelve frames in reverse. I wondered at first if this was a timing change made for one of the Special Editions, however I confirmed this is the same in the original by comparing it with a 35mm scan of The Empire Strikes Back.

3 I did make the choice to use the frame blending option ‘Optical Flow’ in Final Cut Pro for most of the slowed down shots. It appears that the original video occasionally uses the ‘normal’ way to slow shots down but I think it creates an inconsistent look and personally consider this an improvement.

4 I have only started learning how to edit audio in the last eight months, when I started editing a movie podcast I host. It’s called Hollygood, check it out. We’ve even done a few Star Wars themed episodes!

5 Fun fact, most of the music cues that are from themes repeated through the saga are from the version included in the Phantom Menace soundtrack, which is interesting considering how little dialogue is used from The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones.

6 In the final video this is the section from around 3:13 to 3:34, if you can identify an official version of this music please let me know!

7 I would guess something close to 90 per cent of the sound effects are from the direct moment in the film that is being shown at the same time.

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This is incredible! I’ve been waiting a long time for someone to get around to this, well done!

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samcj said:

This is incredible! I’ve been waiting a long time for someone to get around to this, well done!

Thank you, I’m glad you enjoyed it!

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emmett said:
In the final video this is the section from around 3:13 to 3:34, if you can identify an official version of this music please let me know!

I just watched your recreation and I’m speechless. I saw Path of the Jedi in April 2016 at Disneyland and got chills all the way through, both back then and watching the recreation. To answer your question the music at 3:13 to 3:34 is original to PotJ and there is no where else it can be heard. Excellent work!

P.S. Is it possible you could make the version that included a section for The Force Awakens (Not the version that simply added the Sept 2015 TFA Trailer, but the 2017 one that starts with the Han Solo voiceover “Ever since Luke disappeared…”)?

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CarterStarkiller said:

I just watched your recreation and I’m speechless. I saw Path of the Jedi in April 2016 at Disneyland and got chills all the way through, both back then and watching the recreation. To answer your question the music at 3:13 to 3:34 is original to PotJ and there is no where else it can be heard. Excellent work!

Wow! Thank you so much, what a compliment! I have LOVED hearing this from people who have seen it at Disneyland and found it moving, I look forward to one day being able to see it for the first time properly!

Also THANK YOU SO MUCH re: the music! I have not been able to find anything that sounds close to that section and it was driving me mad searching for it! So glad to know that I’ve managed to make the closest to what it should be with my version.

CarterStarkiller said:

P.S. Is it possible you could make the version that included a section for The Force Awakens (Not the version that simply added the Sept 2015 TFA Trailer, but the 2017 one that starts with the Han Solo voiceover “Ever since Luke disappeared…”)?

I have actually been working on a TFA update based on the 2017 update section. I’ll send you a PM with a link to a work in progress version if you’re happy to watch that, I might also pick your brain with some more music help!

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A really cool recreation - and great for those of us who that haven’t been to the Disney parks to view the original.

Great website, podcast and youtube channel you have too, emmett - nice one, thank you 😃
 

A little patience goes a long way on this old-school Rebel base. If you are having issues finding what you are looking for, these will be of some help…

Welcome to the OriginalTrilogy.com | Introduce yourself in here | Useful info within : About : Help : Site Rules : Fan Project Rules : Announcements
How do I do this?’ on the OriginalTrilogy.com; some info & answers + FAQs - includes info on how to search for projects and threads on the OT•com

A Project Index for Star Wars Preservations (Harmy’s Despecialized & 4K77/80/83 etc) : A Project Index for Star Wars Fan Edits (adywan & Hal 9000 etc)

… and take your time to look around this site before posting - to get a feel for this place. Don’t just lazily make yet another thread asking for projects.

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Thank you so much for the kind words everybody! My apologies that I haven’t updated the project yet - been busy with university for a lot of the year. I will get to it though!