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Post #1407089

Author
GMatias
Parent topic
Star Wars: Serialized (WiP)
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1407089/action/topic#1407089
Date created
1-Feb-2021, 12:44 AM

RELEASES

  • I - Rebel Dawn = TBA

  • II - Dark Lord’s Fury = TBA

  • III - The Tragedy of Anakin Skywalker = TBA

  • IV - Prophecy and Destiny = TBA

  • V - Gambits = Feature-Length Edit Workprint Link Available

  • VI - Forces & Counter Forces = TBA

  • VII - The Last Battle = TBA

VIDEO CLIPS

Original ‘Proof of Concept’ Clip
https://vimeo.com/545276729

Kylo/Rey Interrogation & Force Duel
https://vimeo.com/571096628

Palpatine Takes Over
https://vimeo.com/682548733

Poe + Ren at Scarif (test)
https://vimeo.com/687559188

Hosnian Destruction & Holdo Escape (test)
https://vimeo.com/691641417

INITIAL POST (JULY 2022 VERSION)

After being a SW fanedit follower for years and a lurker here on & off almost as long, I’ve decided to pull the trigger and make one of my own!

The approach I’ve settled on takes inspiration primarily from THE BLACKENED MANTLE prequel 3-in-1 edit that used a less straightforward editing approach with a Japanese dub & re-written (sometimes drastically) subtitles to recontextualize existing footage in meaningful ways.

Also in the mix for this is:

  • The b&w FLASH GORDON adventure serials,

  • THE HIDDEN FORTRESS and other chanbara films,

  • “The Machete Order”, and oddly enough

  • ROBOTECH.

Put all that in a pot to stew and you end up with a Japanese-dubbed, English-subtitled saga spanning all three Skywalker eras.

OUTPUT:
One constant for this project has been frequently reevaluating the shape of the end product. Originally it was going to be seasons of a chapter-based serial. Then, since I figured folks would just wait for the whole thing to be released to watch it anyway, I decided to just skip to traditional films. I strongly wanted it to be B&W, but I kept realizing I missed color too much. So many choices! And when you put this much work into a project, the last thing you want (or at least I want) is to have a list of “should’ve dones” when it’s finished. Finally I realized that a lot of this work won’t translate as well in full-color because the changes in grading between the films is SO much more jarring in color than B&W.

So here’s how I’m looking to release the story:

  • Seven individual films with internal chapter breaks

  • One serial with seven seasons of roughly 5 episodes each

  • The content difference between the two (other than aesthetics) should be minor.

OVERALL GOALS:
This project is trying to feed a few different birds with one scone:

  • Help me get more comfortable and fluent in Adobe Premiere.

  • See if I can solve some narrative challenges with making X amount of footage accomplish Y objective.

  • Make something as expansive yet self-contained as possible for my partner to watch & enjoy.

  • Put something out there that’s a little bit different.

  • Hopefully interact, collaborate, & learn from the super-talented folks on OT.

  • Not kill myself in the process!

STORY ORDER:
I will be using material from all 11 films to craft a story roughly broken into the following sections:

  • I - Rebel Dawn
    ANH with few changes.

  • II - An Empire’s Fury
    ESB with even fewer changes.

  • III - The Tragedy of Anakin Skywalker
    TPM/AOTC/ROTS heavily edited following Darth Lunar’s THE BLACKENED MANTLE

  • IV - Destiny of the Jedi
    ROTJ and SOLO heavily edited following Spence’s cut of the former >>

  • V - The New Order

  • VI - Forces and Counter Forces

  • VII - The Last Battle
    TFA/TLJ/TROS/RONE chopped up and reassembled into these three films a la THE BLACKENED MANTLE.

WHY THE WHOLE SAGA?
It’s all Mon Mothma’s fault, really.

I wanted to use R1 footage in the ST era and while I could make everything else I wanted basically work, I kept tripping over her looking exactly the same in her single ROTJ scene an acknowledged 30 years earlier. How do I fix that? I make a canonical ROTJ without her in that scene.

And then the floodgates opened…

CRAWL?/NO CRAWL?
Each serial chapter will open with a brief text piece bringing viewers up to speed for that episode.

Each film will have… something.

RELEASE:
Films first, then serial.

FORMAT:
Aiming for 1080p 5.1 Japanese AC3 mkv file.

SOURCES:
The starting point for all of these edits are the R2 blu-rays & their 5.1 AC3 Japanese audio output. Where needed and as they become available, I will use Adywan’s REVISITED releases w/ JPN 5.1 audio sync.

CONTINUITY:
I’m approaching this whole endeavor with a kind of ROBOTECH mindset: taking separate stories that share a lot of elements and rearranging them with some rewriting and changing context into something new.

I just ask that viewers take into account what I actually show or don’t show on screen when judging whether or not I’m making a continuity error.

For example - I consider having Jimmy Smits from R1 interacting with Carrie Fisher from TLJ as fine, as long as I don’t specifically identify him onscreen as her adopted father Bail Organa and just have him as a fellow Senator or some random dude in a cape.

CHANGES:

Without getting into specifics yet, I’ll throw out these random opinions I’m carrying into the start of this project as clues:

  • Building a nearly complete second Death Star in a few years when it took you almost 20 to build the first one makes no sense.
    Repairing a damaged Death Star, on the other hand…

  • Between Leia, Rey, Jyn, Holdo, and the rest, it seems to me that women have to do the heavy lifting fixing the galaxy after the Battle of Endor.

  • The galaxy is a BIG place. Lots of people and planets and infrastructure and material that don’t immediately disappear because something bad happened in one spot on one end of it.

  • It’s much easier to use old things already on hand while you slowly make and replace them with new things than wait until you have everything you need all shiny & new.

  • From a certain point of view, you could tell someone Kylo Ren betrayed & murdered Ben Solo, if you felt guilty about your part in Ben turning to the dark side.

  • Rey & Jyn could almost be sisters.

  • What the hell was that blue energy shooting out of the shaft Palpatine took a header down? The stuff that washed completely over Vader & Vader’s helmet that wasn’t vaporized in the Death Star explosion?

  • Being referenced on screen is almost as good as being seen on screen.

  • Greedo never gets to shoot, just like Jabba never goes to Mos Eisley.

  • The Executor is always ready for Vader’s arrival.

  • I really wish there was a scene of Leia in the Senate.

HELP WANTED:
I’ve already incorporated a ton of ideas directly or indirectly from other fanedits, so you’ve all already been a huge help. (I’m thinking of having a text commentary track just to help point out in real-time where certain ideas or bits came from, in addition to listing names in the credits)

But I will more than likely be reaching out for feedback, tips, and possibly some FX/audio work as things progress. As much as I’m using this as a personal teaching opportunity, I’d be a Jabba-sized fool if I didn’t take advantage of the talent here!

Thanks for stopping by!

JUNE 2022 PROJECT UPDATE

I’m holding myself to a very soft July 1 deadline for putting out THE NEW ORDER’S workprint.

  • The only real FX work is the basic masking of the Tarkin scene mentioned above, which is 6 shots I’m about 20% thru right now. (And let me take this opportunity to again say how bullshit rotoscoping is. Every time I feel like I had a good run of adjusting keyframes on a mask, I play it through and realize I forget a whole section of the shape for half the runtime…)
  • The next heaviest load is making or setting audio for 3 scenes I’ve rewritten dialogue subtitles for. Part of that is manipulating audio from named characters (Galen in one scene & Maz in another), while the other is an extended version of the “droid stole a freighter” scene from TFA with different context. That should be easier if I can squeeze out audio from an online translator service. Fingers crossed.
  • Last is a general cleanup pass for subtitles, title cards, jump cuts, bad audio fades, etc.

So fingers crossed for July 1 (or thereabouts) for a release of THE NEW ORDER’S workprint!

JUNE 2021 PROJECT UPDATE

Work has continued full steam. With a project of this scope, I’ve found myself bouncing around the timeline a bit, but mostly focusing on the Sequel Era chapters as they require the most reconfiguring with the combination of RONE, TFA, TLJ, and TROS into one narrative.

Right now I have the Sequel Era breaking into roughly 15 chapters (or three ‘films’ of roughly 2hrs each). A few chapters are straight uninterrupted chunks of one movie, but most mix & match a little bit. The first chapter, for instance, pulls footage from ROTJ, RONE, TFA, TPM, and an AOTC deleted scene, so you can see how things can get tricky.

My July goal is to get the workprint of that first 2hr film done & available for review. I’d say it’s ~80% there now; the big tasks left are another subtitle editing pass and audio transition fixing. So I think July is a reasonable goal.

And I’d put the rest of the Sequel Era footage at about ~60% ready. The assembly is there but all the above work needs doing plus some extra narrative stitching needs attention (like having Poe at the Battle of Scarif…whuh?).

And I ordered a copy of the LEGO STAR WARS: FORCE AWAKENS PS3 game in Japanese to hopefully get some rips of isolated Sequel Era SFX & dialogue, especially from processed voices like Kylo or Snoke. Because again why the hell not, at this point?

MAY 2021 PROJECT UPDATE

(End of) April Mini-Update!

Wanted to hold off until I had a video to show, and I am close on that, but I also didn’t want to get into May without giving an update. So while some of this is already integrated into the first post, here’s what’s happened since the last update:

  • I’ve expanded the story scope from ‘just’ the Sequel Trilogy to the entire Saga (including SOLO, which I wasn’t originally planning to do). So looking at around 40ish chapters instead of around 15.

  • REALLY kicked the tires of Premiere Pro to figure out workflow & best practices for things like captions & proxies & color grading & organization & exporting & future-proofing & VFX work and more thru a ton of trial & error.

  • Got R2 blurays with appropriate audio for all Saga films.

  • LOTS of YouTube tutorial watching.

  • Remapped the entire story (see OP), most notably having RONE footage take place parallel with the Sequel Trilogy material instead of between the Prequels and the OT. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but I’m finding its cinema style syncs up with the Sequels so much better than ANH that you can buy it being part of that era easier.

So what’s the plan now?

My next goal for May is to get the first chapter of the Sequel era out as a workprint. Clocking in right now at around 30 min, it so far pulls footage from RONE, TROS, TFA, and TPM, so it should be a pretty good barometer for seeing how stuff originally from different eras can work in different contexts.

How close to final will that be? I’m guessing there will still be audio work to finish and placeholder cards for a VFX shot or two, but the pacing, grading, and re-captioning will be done.


I wasn’t exactly planning on releasing something today, but when I noticed how close I was to finishing off the intro test I’d mocked up from an idea Eyepainter reminded me of, I figured it was worth burning a little midnight oil to get something out on this particular date.

So with that said, here’s a link to a Proof of Concept workprint of Chapter 1’s first sequence (with intro & prologue):

https://vimeo.com/545276729

I ended up doing more of a dialogue pass than I thought, even on lines I wanted to keep, to get the subtitle readability & timing to a comfortable speed.

JAN 2021 PROJECT UPDATE

Since my first post I’ve been able to acquire Japanese blu-rays of Eps VII to IX, so I’ve decided to mash the silent film and BLACKENED MANTLE approaches together and do my edit of these three films as a (roughly) 15-chapter B&W Japanese dubbed & English subtitled adventure serial a la FLASH GORDON. Each chapter will have its own prologue recap, although I won’t be using a traditional crawl.

I’ve almost finished the first chapter already, so will hopefully have some test or workprint vids up soon…

ORIGINAL DEC 2020 POST

I’ve been a SW fanedit follower for years and a lurker here on & off almost as long, so I guess it was about time I pulled the trigger and made one of my own! I talked about it and SW fanedits in general terms a few weeks ago on an episode of FORCE GHOST COAST-TO-COAST (http://www.multiversitycomics.com/podcasts/force-ghost-coast-to-coast-season-iii-episode-xliv-fan-edits-ashes-of-the-empire/), but now that I’ve actually started working on it in earnest I can get more specific:

OVERALL GOALS: This project is trying to feed a few different birds with one scone -

  • Help me get more comfortable and fluent in Adobe Premiere.
  • See if I can solve some narrative challenges with making X amount of footage accomplish Y objective.
  • Use new subtitling along with video edits to make story adjustments.
  • Put something out that’s a little bit different.
  • Hopefully interact, collaborate, & learn from the super-talented folks on OT.
  • Not kill myself in the process!

I’ve been looking for a project to help me get some Adobe Premiere time-on-task, and a SW fanedit sure seemed like a fun way to do that.

I was really impressed with the way THE BLACKENED MANTLE used subtitles to (in some cases drastically) recontextualize existing footage in meaningful ways, and wanted the same kind of leeway in planning my edit. I went back & forth on whether or not to go full TBM and use a different dub for audio, but I think a music-only ‘silent’ film is both aesthetically cool and hopefully saves me a headache or two!

(I’d actually forgotten about the music-only version of THE LAST JEDI until after I’d made the decision to go that route!)

I might do an ‘old timey’ version later on, but for now this the THX version of a silent movie: 1080p widescreen HD full-color!

CHANGES: I don’t want to give everything away, plus its still VERY early in the process, so I’ll just throw out SOME of the big beats in no particular order for now and update as things progress -

Han lives! While I thought him dying in TFA was handled pretty well, I thought him surviving (props to THE FORD AWAKENS) was a cool enough WTF idea that it got the brain-wheels turning. Why isn’t he in the rest of the movie or the other films? If he is, where does that footage come from? How involved can you make him?

They’re not really rebels! This is probably semantics, but it just irks me that Leia’s group are called the Resistance when, in fact, it’s the First Order that’s resisting against the New Republic regime. I know why it makes metatextual sense to give them that name, and I read some Wookiepedia entry with a canonical explanation I can buy, but the films themselves don’t give enough context for that or a few other related things. So for the purposes of this fanedit:

  • The Resistance are referred to as the Republic where possible.
  • The First Order is still The First Order but it’s more explicit that they are Imperial remnants.
  • Starkiller Base is now Tarkin Base because: (1) it kills planets, not stars; (2) I know it kills stars to power the gun, but that’s more like eating stars and it’s not called Stareater Base; (3) ex-Imperials would name a base after one of their former generals.

Not everything is about Luke Skywalker! TFA’s opening crawl reads like the First Order was waiting for Luke to disappear before coming out of hiding, and ONLY Luke can put that genie back in the bottle. The map-guffin is, of course, a map to Luke. I like Luke as much or more than I like Han, but putting all this narrative pressure on him right up front seems to take away from what Leia and the Republic. could and should be trying to accomplish instead of hoping Luke can bail them out. So for the purposes of this fanedit:

Max von Sydow is a First Order defector instead of a Jedi archeologist. The flashdrive doesn’t have the map to Luke on it, but rather 3 pieces of info:

  • The location of Tarkin Base (since it can fire through hyperspace, it can fire from anywhere)
  • The existence of the SD fleet (not nearly as big and not Sith-provided; old stockpile of automated ships run with skeleton crews)
  • Confirmation of Snoke and Kylo Ren as Force users

Why is the last bit important?

Han/Leia don’t know Kylo = Ben! When the Knights of Ren burned down the Jedi academy and killed students, Leia & Han assumed Ben was one of the dead/missing. Luke was so distraught over his actions that he didn’t correct them; better to let them think a rogue element like Kylo killed him than Luke’s own actions turning him dark. That shame compounds things until Luke disappears. So in another instance of Star Wars rhyming poetry, Leia/Han get the truth of a family member being betrayed & murdered “from a certain point of view”.

Finding out the First Order has at least two high-level Force users in their ranks forces Leia to put the past behind her and reach out to Luke.

RUNTIME: I was originally going to post this as just a 3-in-1 edit attempt but the more I play around with things, I see ways to do this story as a single film, a duology, or a trilogy.

Right now my ‘assembly’ cut is running close to 4 hours, so the duology might be the optimal fighting weight for this project, but I know I can do a trilogy and am really curious to see what a 1-film version would look like!

HELP WANTED: I’ve already incorporated ideas from other fanedits into the plan (like moving the destruction of Hosnian Prime later in the story) so you’ve all already been a huge help. But I will more than likely be reaching out for feedback, tips, and possibly some FX/audio work as things progress. As much as I’m using this as a personal teaching opportunity, I’d be a Jabba-sized fool if I didn’t take advantage of the talent here!

Thanks!