Right, good editing session today, and I’ve got a couple more good opportunities this coming weekend too, so I hope to finish this next episode then.

I’ve been working on the v2.0 polish pass for s01e01 The New Padawan, which is my Christophsis episode (and the first proper episode of the series).

That one was already only barely holding together, but now that I’m a more capable editor, I’ve actually restarted the entire episode from scratch, including reviewing the original content for useful scenes and shots. It’s more work but totally worth it, and I’ll be very pleased to finally finally have this episode put to bed. I’ve gone through the first five minutes, which is actually nearer 70% of the effort for the episode, and it’s already far more polished now, with smoother audio, and the narrative makes far more sense.

Bail Organa didn’t quite work in this episode so I’ve taken him out, and for now I’ve cut my special cold open where we see Maul meet Mandalorians, which I’m not sure about but I’ll let you guys see what you think.

The crawl will do some heavy lifting to give context to the simpler start to the episode, establishing that:

Christophsis produces ray shields (explaining its strategic importance, and since we see them use ray shields later, that moment is now a bit more punchy since it shows their plans worked).
The newly-knighted Anakin and Obi-Wan are stranded on the planet, barely holding off the Separatists with only a tiny clone force and some heavy cannons defending their base.
The Separatist blockade has forced the Republic support fleet to retreat to a nearby staging area, which combined with a comms blackout (that the fleet is unaware of) is leading to fears that the Separatists will land a full army and take the planet.
Anakin and Obi-Wan should be taking preventative steps against invasion, until they detect Assaj Ventress’ signal at the Sep HQ on the dark side of the planet, so they pursue her as a priority mission.

We open the episode now seeing the Republic fleet flee (it’s our establishing shot before we join the ground action), then Anakin and Obi-Wan’s pursuit of Ventress IS the distraction which enables the Separatists to land ground forces. As they fight her, Yularen gets the call from Yoda and Mace saying they need to speak to Obi-Wan, but he informs them of the blackout. We cut back to Ventress, but after Anakin and Obi-Wan have dealt with that, we return to a second Yularen call where he’s told that, since it’s urgent, they’ve sent a messenger (who implicitly can bypass the blockade since it’s just one ship, to get around their comms blackout). I use some nice alternate footage to actually show Ahsoka arriving, so this is all nice and smooth. We’ll learn in the next episode that the urgent issue was the destruction of clone medical stations by Grievous, which Obi-Wan takes point in.