Hi, I just wanted to post in here and say this is incredible work! Your Clone Wars (Batch 1 and 2 particularly)/ROTS edits will particularly come in handy when my husband and I do a chronological watch-through this spring/summer, but I’m going to include the extended cuts and the Rogue One/ANH edits as well to really make it an in-depth experience. 😃
Just out of curiosity - what was the decision to not include your EP3 of the micro series with the ROTS edit? It seems like it could work as a prologue of sorts since it leads into the events.
The chronology and order of events was the main reasons. If you looked up the old EU material around this time period, it was eventually determined that the Battle of Nelvaan happened a few days before the Battle of Coruscant, so was therefor better cut as a separate “Episode” event for the 2D Clone Wars cuts, despite appearing in the original show as happening concurrently.
This meant I had room to fit the beginnings of the Battle of Coruscant and intermix that with the 3D Clone Wars Battle of Yerbana, since Kenobi references the events seen on Coruscant during the end of the Yerbana campaign. All of this was decided after years and years worth of debates on how the old EU Clone Wars timeline actually worked and how it could be at least partially integrated into the current canon. We’ve been arguing about this for a decade elsewhere and this was my final answer. The novel Labryinth of Evil was already causing timeline confusion back then, so sorting through all this to find the best solution was nothing new. Finally, since so many people tend to still reject the 2D series, I wanted to include the events from it that’d been most directly endorsed by other canon source books (kidnapping of Palpatine, Shaak Ti’s chase, Grievous killing Roron Corobb, ect. ect.) within the Episode III cut. The fact that they chose not to reanimate the Battle of Coruscant for the show’s finale, but instead verbally reference its events without many changes gave me room to recut the 2D material in a way that was more canon friendly without altering it too much. It not being “canon” meant I was more free to make changes to it as I pleased, but I still wanted to salvage as much of it as reasonably possible. All things considered, I’m very happy with the end result. It’s all my final personal solution to a 15+ year old set of canon issues.
Have you ever thought about doing just an extended edit of Revenge of the Sith and its deleted scenes without adding in the Clone Wars material? I think that would be a popular edit too, mainly for people who would want a consistent live-action look throughout the edit.
I prefer to try and avoid the chaos and confusion that gets caused by hosting multiple versions (aside from resolution) of the same film, especially since so many other editors have already tackled the material of just restoring deleted scenes back into Episode III alone. Having said that, it seems no one else has done pure “Extended” cuts like I have for Episodes I and II without any removals of other material, so maybe at some point. We’ll see.