Community Focus Thread 1: The Phantom Menace — Page 13

I love a lot of ideas here. Cutting the entire negotiation at the beginning does seem to be a common thing tho which I don’t think would be best since it’s the only thing that shows what the Jedi’s main job is supposed to be (diplomats that are meant to resolve conflicts, hence why Mace says they’re “keepers of the peace, not soldiers”). I don’t see why so many people dislike it since it basically just turns into an action sequence, it’s not like you actually see the negotiation. I understand cutting down the opening act a bit since I do agree it goes on for a bit too long but I think removing that they’re there to negotiate wouldn’t be best.

G&G-Fan said:

I love a lot of ideas here. Cutting the entire negotiation at the beginning does seem to be a common thing tho which I don’t think would be best since it’s the only thing that shows what the Jedi’s main job is supposed to be (diplomats that are meant to resolve conflicts, hence why Mace says they’re “keepers of the peace, not soldiers”). I don’t see why so many people dislike it since it basically just turns into an action sequence, it’s not like you actually see the negotiation. I understand cutting down the opening act a bit since I do agree it goes on for a bit too long but I think removing that they’re there to negotiate wouldn’t be best.

I’m on the same boat. I kept the scene in my edit, although I shortened it a lot. Most of what I cut was stuff involving the Gunrays. Stuff like the opening “This invasion is perfectly legal” speech, mentioning the Neimoidians being cowards, lines and shots demonstrating that cowardice, etc. I also ended the scene with Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan deciding to take separate ships instead of Nute’s discussion with Amidala. Taking a lot of that stuff out makes things go by faster while also removing a lot of the weaknesses of that scene.

Has anybody thought of using Liam Neeson voice AI to have Qui-Gon explain what the force is to Anakin like Obi-Wan did to Luke in ANH for chronological viewing sake?

There’s merit to that idea, but you’d need footage to play it over too.

I’ve just been watching ROTJ as I do the prep for that movie’s focus thread, and like TPM its ending cuts between many different locations - three compared to TPM’s four. Notably it cycles between all three settings pretty quickly at times, and personally, I didn’t feel like it felt too ‘choppy’ or that it had high cognitive load like the original TPM ending does. Sometimes it only spent as little as 30 seconds on a single scene. Both of the Padmé being captured scenes total about 30 seconds, and while they don’t naturally flow back to back, I think there may be a possible reordering of shots which makes them flow into each other nicely, which might make them work as a single short (but not TOO short) scene.

And here’s an attempt to blend the two scenes of Padmé captured into one.

Best option seems to be to bridge them with a reaction shot of Gunray looking at the door, as an SFX of the door opening plays, then cut to Padmé being marched in. There’s less available footage than I thought, so I cropped this bridging shot from a later longer shot of her marching in from another angle. This bridging shot is cropped from a quarter of that shot’s frame, but you could get it to 1080p since there’s a 2160p source available.

Failing that, you could maybe use an upscaled and colour corrected shot from a cut scene - there’s one with Gunray and the other Neimoidian staring, which is useful.

But ideally, I think a better shot of Nute and the other guy standing in another location, would be composited onto a suitable background plate.

The music here I think is fine? But it’d probably be nice to find a smoother single track to carry you through this whole section.

Anyway, what this would achieve if it works would be removing the main criticism of this attempt at the ending sequence, which was that the two short Padmé scenes both felt too brief.

That works pretty well! It’s a shame there isn’t some final shot of Padme reacting to Nute, but there isn’t much to work with.

There might be a rearrangement where you end up on Padmé staring, while covering the same beats, but yeah, that’s all she does in that scene.

Lucas always meant for the movies to parallel one another, so I think following a very similar structure to ROTJ’s final act would work to trim it down but still make it feel like a Lucas Star Wars film and not a fan-edit.

My feeling from this recent review pass is that the majority of TPM could stay, so long as it’s shaped right. I think the ending can lose about ten minutes, but that’s the most in a single area. Small cuts in aggregate might give you another ten minutes off, and reshaping the content before Theed might take another five minutes out. But that’d leave you with 1h50, which I don’t think would feel too abnormal.

SpenceEdit said:

Pacing is more important than length.

Exactly this. How it feels when you watch it, the peaks and troughs of emotion, and natural flow, are what make the movie work.

As someone who has read almost every screenwriting 101 book out there (From Syd Field to Robert McKee to Blake Snyder), and as someone who has read Aristotle’s Poetics, I’m a strong believer in the phrase, “less is more.” For every movie that’s too short, I could name a dozen or so other films that suffer from being too long.

In all fairness, I believe that when you force a movie into a certain runtime, there’s a greater chance that the movie will be less than the sum of its parts. But not every movie that is three hours in length is automatically The Godfather, and while I’m about to generate some controversy for saying this, I have to say it. Not every Star Wars movie should be two hours or longer. In fact, I think this is what’s making Star Wars movies less interesting as of late. If you look at each trilogy and ignore the special editions, the original trilogy that is so highly revered is also the shortest one, with the longest movie being 132 minutes and also the weakest. The sequel trilogy on the other hand, is arguably the longest of the three trilogies and one of them is a whopping 2 1/2 hours!

Too many movies nowadays are bloated, and while there’s always a movie or two that gets away with a long running time (such as Avengers: Infinity War), I honestly wish more movies were shorter right now. Finding a movie that is only 90 minutes today is becoming an increasing rarity.

EddieDean said:

Exactly this. How it feels when you watch it, the peaks and troughs of emotion, and natural flow, are what make the movie work.

Yeah. I mean, watching Revenge of the Sith certainly feels a lot faster then watching Attack of the Clones and the time difference is literally two minutes.

That’s really interesting. I imagine AOTC to feel really short, because I feel like it has very little “meat”.

EddieDean said:

That’s really interesting. I imagine AOTC to feel really short, because I feel like it has very little “meat”.

That’s probably why it feels slow to me. Stuff with lots of meat feel fast to me because I’m more engaged, and the more engaged I am the faster time goes.

I find ROTS far more interesting then AOTC (both conceptually and in execution). The action-packed opening, Anakin turning into Vader, Order 66, the final duels, I love it all.

The Clone Wars really should’ve started earlier then the end of AOTC, like halfway through, so we could get more of Anakin being a hero. You can have a situation where Anakin has to protect Padme in the midst of a battle so it’d have been more engaging rather then having the romance be so separated from the other stuff going on. But I’m going on a tangent.

That’s a good point, yeah. It is technically four. And one of those plots is very quick with just the main beats (bombing the shield generator) and another has no main characters (the ewok battle, until our main characters return from the shield generator).

If anyone’s able to cleanly merge those two scenes of Padmé getting captured, to 1080p/23.95fps, I’d really appreciate it. From there I think I’d be able to put together a really good ending, and I’d try to incorporate RogueLeader’s ideas for Anakin’s space combat scenes.

I’m not particularly a fan of this idea myself, but I thought I’d put it here for discussion:

Famously the machete order removes TPM from the viewing, arguing that the movie doesn’t carry any context that isn’t otherwise given by AOTC. I’m not suggesting anything about viewing order here, but I wonder if it’s worth thinking about the impact of TPM. What information is conveyed in TPM that isn’t covered by other movies?