I’ve had a bit more time to think through this, proper feedback here-
The New Padawan
Not too much to complain about “The New Padawan” overall, bar its weak first third. It is, in essence, a forgetable pilot episode meant to introduce everything and it gets the job done. Many dialog scenes are still cringeworthy but that is the material that is there. It is still much more watchable than the original stuff.
I agree with all of this. It’s got a lot of necessary introductions, but is ultimately forgettable. I think I’ve got it to the place where it gets us up and running as painlessly as possible, but I agree it’s still just not very good. I am totally out of remaining ideas for improvement, however, so I’m always interested in further suggestions.
The opening text is a mess in my book, because it seems to paint the picture that various things have happened, especially the retreat to a medical station. Yet, the episode actually opens with the retreat and we see ships arriving later.
Now this is a good shout, I agree that mentioning the medical station doesn’t work both because we see the retreat after, and it adds little to the next episode. So I think I’ll reword it to something to emphasise that the Seps have the overwhelming advantage here, and remove the medical station reference.
I also think the first third does not work as a story: If there is a blockade in place, how is anyone being dropped off through that? Why is the Admiral talking about dropping Ashoka off personally but is actually not?
I think this stuff’s OK though. Not every blockade is perfect, so simply saying someone ‘bypassed’ it should be sufficient. A small scout force can be assumed to not have much of a problem, and they are Jedi after all. I might look for another establishing shot before the bike shot though.
Furthermore, I found a few of cuts a little too hard and disjointed, the very first one is a good example, but others are very distracting as well: some in tone, for example the 5:52 one from “prepare to march” to “our cruiser must be back”, and some in simple execution, like 14:16 one from space the ground. The biggest base-challenge for every fan edit, making a cut feel like it belonged there.
I’ll review these again, but I’m quite limited in options here, and have tested a lot of approaches. I’d be interested in ideas. Perhaps I need to find a new scene to place between ‘prepare to march’ and ‘our cruiser must be back’.
Malevolence
First things first, we never see the enemy super weapon.
This was deliberate - the actual ion cannon to me looked very goofy and not very Star Wars, so I opted to reframe it as the Malevolence itself being ‘the weapon’ - it’s huge, it has a load of heavy artillery, and it’s got an ion cannon to disable opposing tech with. And I found that not seeing the ion weapon kept it a little mysterious. For me I felt that worked, but I’d be interested in second opinions here.
Considering this is supposed to be about the Malevolence, I find it strange that only about 50% of the runtime is actually dealing with that vessel. Instead, we get lots of debris-field action. I do not remember what was in the original episodes but I find the focus of the episode strange.
This is also deliberate. The emotional core of the episode is Ahsoka’s persistence in wanting to save Plo, which is an important part of her early character development (and the reason this episode was included in the first place - I had originally wanted to cut it). We haven’t lost much actual Malevolence content at all though - only the scenes actually within the ship, which was way too goofy - the original trilogy was (1) almost all debris-field action, (2) half meandering round space whales and half bombing run, and (3) within the ship until it explodes. So you’ve not lost much - if anything the proportion of Malevolence scenes is probably higher than the original two episodes. But the key is Ahsoka and a bit of development for her relationship with Anakin.
Story-wise, I find it strange that Ashoka has been doing “a great job” according to Anaking (26:30) when, at least in my book, she really did not do too much. Anakin wanted to search for survivors on his own (and R2 found them) and during the battle, no of her actions was that noteworthy. Not sure if she even fired a single shot. From what I watched, she was out of line and then along for the ride, nothing more.
Eh, she kinda pushed them to keep searching for Plo, I think there’s a decent enough argument that her persistance was a major factor in saving him.
There is the obvious problem of Anakins strange ship, which is, if I recall correctly, some freighter they picked up during the original pilot. No idea how to deal with this, but it sure is weird in that episode. What ship is that? It looks very un-republic…
If you choose to assume that the Republic has access to a few more specialised ships, and that this is a decent enough scout/recovery vessel that Anakin seems to like, it saves you from having to get into the horrible Hutt Baby plotline.
Stylistically speaking, there were some fades-to-black (seemingly always to a Hyperspace Scene), which I found to be totally out-of-place. No idea if they were there in the original but to me, they felt super strange.
Noted. I’ll review that again and see if they work better with fades. I don’t think I use more than one other fade to black throughout the entirety of the other episodes I’ve yet edited - I try to keep my wipes as close as possible to the exact style of the originals.
Maybe this episode has an expectation problem from my end, but while I found the first one to be simple and generic, that second one just felt broken somehow. Pretty sure that first fade-out is partially to blame, as I was totally out at that point.
That’s fair, and again, I’m interested in any other second opinions here and suggestions to polish it further.
General Feedback
I really liked the pseudo-concept-art approach in the credits as a call to the live action shows, but I think the filter is a little bit too agressive and simple. But alas, that is really not the focus.
Fun fact! This is real concept art. So sometimes it’s a bit basic, but like the show itself, they get more attractive as the show goes on.
Overall, I found the watching experience weirdly choppy from a framerate level. The files I have seem to be encoded at 23.976 frames per second, which is pretty normal and my screens framerate of 120Hz divides evenly enough. Yet, the footage seems very uneven (I also compared to some other files encoded at that framerate), I wonder if your export is buggy. Are you re-targeting the framerate by accident?
I’ll check this but I’m pretty sure that it’s all tight from my end.
Gonna continue watching, but I must admit that I probably had unrealistic expectations of what could be achieved with TCW. So many people say there is good Star Wars in there, so I am going to keep looking for a while longer.
Please do. I’m as frustrated as you are that the opening of the original show was so weak, and that due to necessity I have to include some content that’s also weak. While I want to be outputting content that’s as good as possible, what I have to work with doesn’t always lend itself to meeting the standards of good, so I have to simply settle for better than the original. I’ll always look to improve those episodes, especially the very first where TCW:R remains weakest.
That said, the first two episodes of TCW:R are easily the worst of the entire batch (and as I say, episode four is a bit meh too). TCW got materially better throughout its run, and I think and hope that you’ll find that TCW:R does that far more quickly than the original show. Feedback here has been positive on the other episodes and there are very few other episodes that I’m dissatisfied with - I’m confident that I’m giving viewers a solid TCW experience that’s materially improved over the originals and lets the great parts of the show really shine.
I’m always open to feedback so please keep it coming, and I hope you enjoy the rest!