Ah, I see. I’ve never really branched out into any print media, so I was unaware that books took place between the events. Thanks for such an in-depth response!
Don’t feel bad. I had to do some pretty indepth research to even find this info. Luckily, it’d been a topic some of us on Force.net had already been debating for some time, so I was ready to find a solution to these problems when the chance came.
But to make it clear, there are multiple sources outside of the films/cartoons themselves that helped me decide the order of events for the entire cut…
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Labyrinth of Evil, the EU Novel.
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The Revenge of the Sith Script.
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The Revenge of the Sith Novelization.
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Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader (occurs after the film, but still ties into events and characters seen in the deleted scenes, giving them some extra context)
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Numerous Documentaries and Interviews
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A handful of NuCanon Sourcebooks to validate old EU info (Star Wars Lightsabers and Star Wars Women of the Galaxy both recanonize much of the Battle of Coruscant’s onscreen events)
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The Revenge of the Sith PS2 Game’s Timeline of Events
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A rather in-depth study of the directing and editing styles of both Dave Filoni and George himself. Comparing their similarities, and differences, and blending their two styles together where possible. Some transitions are based on the types Dave would use, while others are classic George wipes. 3D to 2D scene switches tend to use deliberately harder edged wipe effects, and the opposite for switching between Live Action and 3D (softer, more feathered transitions are used). This helps the viewer more naturally adjust to the different visual styles. While some transitions have technical limitations (not enough frames between shots, software glitches with certain transitions in the specific version of Adobe needed to make this cut work), most should follow the above rules. As another example, emotional scenes in 3D Clone Wars would sometimes use slow cross fades (something the films almost never did), and so I was willing to use them a few more times here, as that was part of Dave’s own unique editing style that was different from George’s.
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George often broke down the prequels into multiple subplots happening simultaneously and would switch between them every few minutes to keep the pacing/flow of the story interesting, even if it wasn’t perfectly taking “real time” into account. He especially liked to break down the finales of these films into A-B-C plots which the viewer switches between rapidly to keep from getting too bored. I tried to keep this style intact when adding the Clone Wars footage, while still keeping events relatively close to real time. It was always a balancing act between these 2 ideas, but I’m pretty happy with the overall choices. I also broke down the events of the film into a roughly 6 day timeline, and kept track of each day’s rough chronology (even if time didn’t flow exactly the same on one world vs another) and edited according to that too.