Crawl text is ready to go and has been sent off! Here’s what I have, and why:
After years of civil war, the Republic is exhausted by relentless attacks from the ruthless Separatist leader Count Dooku. The Senate is desperate to win the war and end the conflict.
In his boldest move yet, the fiendish cyborg commander General Grievous has assaulted the Republic capital and captured its leader, Chancellor Palpatine.
As the Separatist forces attempt to break through the blockade with their valuable hostage, Jedi Knights Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker lead a daring mission to rescue the Chancellor…
Para 1: I wanted to convey that everyone is just tired of the war continuing, and that the Senate’s approach to this is to just keep giving more power to Palpatine in order to win the thing rather than compromise by negotiating a ceasefire. In one scene of the movie, Padme practically begs Anakin to talk Palpatine into allowing diplomacy to resume; when her committee presents a plan for peace talks to Palpatine, he weasels out of it and dismisses the idea. This hopefully lends more depth to Palpatine as a canny career politician, and changes the Republic and its Senate from mindless puppets whose strings he pulls into people who have been worn down by a gruelling conflict, and have reached for flawed and human ways to end it without changing their own ways of life, allowing them to be exploited by Palpatine.
Para 2: I tried to make Grievous’ relation to Count Dooku in the Separatist military hierarchy clearer, so there’s more of a sense that the end days of the war have arrived when Dooku is killed and the lower ranking military-background Grievous becomes the Separatist leader - kind of like Doenitz succeeding Hitler, if you’re of a historical bent. I also wanted to ratchet up tension by making it clear that this wasn’t just any ordinary battle we were opening on; it was something unprecedented and could be a turning point in the war.
Para 3: I wanted to explain why the Separatist ships don’t just jump to hyperspace and vanish, and the vaguely unexplained concept of a “blockade” from The Phantom Menace seemed to fit that bill while also subtly tying the end of the prequel trilogy back to its start. I also tried to imply that Obi-Wan and Anakin aren’t the main focus of things here militarily speaking; they’re trying to be one little insignificant squad of fighters getting lost in the crowd of proper military tactics going on around them, zooming in on their own fringe mission to try an unconventional approach. Hopefully this makes them feel even more like a plucky band of heroes, and pays off with Anakin being so formally lauded by the politicians afterwards.
On the technical side of things, I’ve managed to export the movie, and I’ve also installed Handbrake. It’s like miracle software. I opened the movie file with it and it automatically set everything to the correct settings, removed the black bars, and exported it at half the file size with no noticeable difference in quality. Whoever makes this program should make all programs.
I’m going to hold off on sharing the file with anybody yet; I’m going to watch it through to “proofread” for any final mistakes that have slipped through, and I’ll wait until the new opening crawl (thank you Eyepainter!) is finished as well. This started as me just wanting to reinstate one line Hal cut from his version for my own personal viewing enjoyment, and turned into an entire fanedit of its own (albeit one I’d still consider a “tweak” moreso than a new thing in its own right, but even so). This site is a great community to be a part of.