I’ve got Rookies and ARC Troopers cut how I want them now, and the transition is nice and smooth.
I’m struggling a bit with Clone Cadets.
One issue I’m having is that a lot of this episode’s set up is all about unity, which both isn’t paid off well in the original version of the episode, nor paid off well in the whole arc. So I’m trying to minimise the unity aspect.
But the main thing I’m working on is that I’m not sure at this stage whether more or less is best. Essentially the decision is whether to have one attempt or two before they fail and we cut across to Rookies.
If it’s two attempts, most of the drama fits in the middle. This would be about 10-15 minutes long, enough so that it’s more than a cold open, so I’d probably have to black out after Clone Cadets in order to get a ‘two weeks later’ card in. But I feel that this way we spend too much time on the setup.
If it’s one attempt, I basically splice the first half of the first training (where they’re introduced) with the second half of the second training (where they fail). Doing it this way, the drama has to wrap around it. Right now, I have it structured like this:
- Fives and Echo tell Shaak Ti that they’re thinking of leaving. I might drop this though, because firstly it’s not clear that it’s Echo, and secondly Shaak Ti bangs on about unity, which I cut down to a more ominous “you’re where you need to be”, but that doesn’t quite land with some of her other context either.
- Bric tells Domino Squad in the barracks that they suck. This is quite nice for context.
- Shaak Ti and Lama Su talk about being low on clone DNA, and I trimmed this down to imply that maybe Shaak Ti agrees that these clones may be ‘deficient’.
- First half of the first fight
- Second half of the second fight (it’s quite a clean transition) up till the fight stops
- Shaak Ti calls 99 to clean the arena
- The general guy tells off Domino Squad, and the green triangle alien tells them they’ve failed
- Hevy plans to desert, but is convinced not to by 99 (though again, kinda via ‘unity’ messaging)
I’m not quite satisfied yet. Frustratingly, I need to make as few cuts as possible, as there’s a lot of dialogue in the same channel as the music, so it’s harder to split/merge cleanly.