Malevolence nitpicks:
Right, time to properly eat into these.
Again, Padawan gets a capital letter, for some reason.
You know what, I think I’m going to opt to ignore this convention. I can accept ‘Jedi’ as effectively a title, but I think I’d rather treat ‘padawan’ as just a regular noun, like ‘apprentice’. (No offence meant to you of course, Sade.)
Interestingly, this time around you’ve done the opposite with the intro transition, having the episode audio come in before the picture does. I think it could be slightly more gradual, but I understand that the music is tough and the usable footage is limited because of originally having the newsreel audio.
This is probably more just chance of the scenes I was given than anything else. Once I have the final music from McFibb, I’ll review the intros and outros of all of the episodes produced to date, and make them smoother. With Christophsis, someone mentioned that it was cool to have the motorbike sound before the shot opened, so I kept it (even though I only did it by chance). In Malevolence, the music before the image was quite immediate, so I went for a quick music fade to image fade, mainly to distract a little (passed off as urgency). But as I say, I’ll clean these all up.
[Many technical points]
Thanks very much! I do watch and rewatch episodes as I create them, but this one had around a hundred scene and shot changes that I’d shifted around so I was bound to miss a few.
I hadn’t even realised you’d replaced Plo’s dialogue until Ahsoka abruptly cuts him off mid-sentence for a hug. I quite like intercutting Plo’s dialogue with the clones getting ioned, but Ahsoka just butting in out of nowhere doesn’t really work for me. The footage reversal for the wipe is also not subtle.
Yeah, I think I will just drop this scene. I actually had to have Ahsoka interrupt him because his full sentence has beeps, and I wondered if I could get away with it. Looks like not! But that’s fine, there’re other ways to work this scene. And yeah, there was a chance the reversal would be obvious. Annoyingly, a reversal with a wipe is too much for my PC to process for a preview in real time, so it’s arduous to check the quality on layered changes like this.
I think I’ll change this whole sequence, so that basically they bring Plo on board, he mainly talks about the clones surviving (as in the original), but then have him just mention “it was an ion cannon”. No actual scene of the Malevolence destroying the medical transport. We don’t need a description of an ion cannon because it’s irrelevant to the plot. If you didn’t know what one was, you’d know that whatever was happening, it was absolutely knackering ships, so it’d make sense to target them later. Plo can either mention it being an ion cannon as he’s rescued or later, as Yularen says “he’s heading to the Rendellia medical station”.
At 18:28 when Yularen says “Skywalker”, the audio editing seems a little odd, like the music suddenly lowers (presumably to mute whatever Ahsoka is mouthing) and then it comes back in.
I thought this’d get pointed out. It’s a weird glitch in the original, and by coincidence it’s the first issue I noticed that the series itself has, because I happened to pick Malevolence and randomly that scene back when I did my first pipeline tests. “Skywalker” is actually on the front channel rather than center, so I guess they were trying to do a ‘far away voice’ thing. But it sounds odd to my ears too. I might just do without it, and cut straight into Yularen getting down to business.
I hear voice echoes at 29:11.
I think that’s on me. The medical station voice hits all channels, I guess to simulate reverb in that room. So editing that scene is a pain.
I’m enjoying this excuse to rewatch TCW and engage with it a little more than I did the first time. I don’t really remember the original episodes, but this edit makes a pretty fun short movie. You’ve merged the episodes well. The start is really engaging, as it quickly makes Grievous seem brutal and coherently sets up the threat. The medical station scenes work cleanly where you’ve put them. All the Plo Koon rescuing stuff is enjoyable enough - Anakin and Ahsoka’s interactions are exactly the sort of set-up I did feel was needed for the nitpicks I mentioned in my last post; and even though we haven’t seen lots of Anakin/Ahsoka missions, this episode does a good job implying there’s been a few offscreen.
It’s good, isn’t it! I’m enjoying it a lot more on rewatch and detailed dissemination too. When it first came out I barely paid attention to the episodes because season one was so agressively bad. And I didn’t give most episodes after that a good chance too. Especially since the show kept throwing Shadow Warriors and Droids in the Voids at us even in the good seasons. I really hope I preserve everything good about this show; I really don’t want to be a butcher.
The Shadow Squadron space battle section is watchable but not my favourite aspect of Star Wars. Whatever editing you did in this bit worked for me, though I can’t say I recall how it was originally. I was freaking out wondering how you’d managed to drag another thirty minutes of episode out after the Malevolence blew up but thankfully it’s just an accidentally left in black screen, haha.
Agree. This cut absolutely whips through it, and puts it in what I think is a far more compelling order. It also now gets straight to the point. But the space battle itself isn’t great, and there’re way more exciting ones later. This does suffer a bit from originally being episode two then three of the original arc, since the story loses a bit of momentum after Anakin destroys the Malevolence’s main weapon, giving us about three minutes of it slowly limping away while Obi-Wan’s fleet just batters it until it dies. But again, I just cut through the main points of that as quickly as I could to get us to swift victory, because by then all the emotional beats had been hit.