I just finished watching this and I have a few comments.
1.) First of all, overall… WOW! So well done, the edits are just fantastic. It plays seamlessly for the most part like a SW film. It’s just so good. I’m hella, hella impressed. I just can’t say enough how awesomely a job you did, smudger, in taking a 10 episode show with running times between 25 and 40 minutes and turning it into a 2 1/2 hour movie. So, so good.
2.) With that said, I do think that the beginning is probably the weakest part with too much reliance on the crawl as the set-up. Without having seen the episodes first, I probably would have been more confused.
3.) I personally would have liked more Kuiil in the beginning scenes to give more meaning and resonance to him in the end, thus yeah, include a bit of the Jawa stuff.
4.) There are a couple of other things I’d include, not include, but that’s for ME and this is your edit and, again, overall SENSATIONAL job.
5.) I do have to agree with (I think jakeryan) that the Moff Gideon reveal should be before the end credits. I could see it fit beautifully right after Mando flies off with Baby Yoda, cut to the Jawa creatures all giddy around Gideon’s ship then to Gideon being revealed alive, and then cut to Mando putting the grave together for Kuiil. Those flow together nicely. The OOH! of the fly-off, to the jittery ooh! of the Jawas transition, and then the dun-dun-dun of the Gideon reveal which is a oh no! to the downer reminder of Kuill’s death. I think that has a good flow.
But again, it’s YOUR edit. And again, fabulous job!
I spent quite a few moments here and there marveling how great it was. I really had no clue where episodes ended and began unless I remembered it specifically because you did SUCH a great job. Starting with that first episode end on the child to the next episode swipe which was just chef’s kiss !!! PERFECTION!
Thankyou so much for the feedback. The episode transitions were the most challenging part but having access to the full episode soundtracks was a real help. The one I was actually most pleased with was the episode 2 to 3 transition.
You‘ve pretty much summed up the areas that were wither heavily debated or reluctantly cut. As a stand alone movie when I edited it, I stand by my decision to omit the Gideon ending scene. However, having now got a working first cut of episode 2, I‘ve had to completely alter the way in which Gideon‘s survival is revealed to Mando and it has lost some of its impact. Therefore I may need to put it back into episode 1 so that it works better for the viewer.
There were many things that were cut to get this down to a manageable sub 2.5 hours that were difficult to lose. I don‘t think losing the opening Nevarro scene is a problem, maybe its my opening crawl that causes the confusion. The Jawa scenes were very difficult to cut because they were one of my favourite parts of the season. However, the egg was ultimately a side quest so they had to go. The adverse effect was losing some Kuill scenes.
Having now had 2 full seasons, I‘m contemplating doing 2 movie streams. A single movie per season as the initial release and then either a 2 movies per season stream or an ultimate 3-hour plus version of each movie.