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Battle of Exegol extended and enhanced

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 (Edited)

Hello everyone!

Let me preface this off by first celebrating all the amazing work done by incredible fan editors in this forum. I’ve never seen such a location where people are able to make amazing, wild, and never expected changes come off as seamless and have impacted and enhanced my viewing of a saga we all cherish and love for the better.

A little bit about myself, I love the sequel trilogy. However, there are definitely things that can be improved to make it more enjoyable. In particular, I really like episode 9, though admittedly it unloads a larger check it can cash. I’ve been watching OT forums since 2021, and there are a ton of amazing edits of all star wars movies. What struck to me was the large plethora of episode 9 edits. One aspect of episode 9 that has stuck to me is the battle of exegol. If one is to go through the minutia, numbers, and details of it, it should theoretically be one of the largest battles of the entire skywalker saga. While there are notes and broad strokes within the battle itself that had hints of it, there was definitely the feeling that the battle could’ve been more than what we got .

For example, when lando arrives, books and expanded material say that the Galaxy fleet/citizen’s fleet is 10000+ ships with new designs of Mon Calamari cruisers (MC95A, B, C etc.), mandalorian fang fighters, N-1 naboo star fighters, firespray ships etc etc. However the large pan shot of lando’s arrival doesn’t give us enough time to appreciate the diversity of all those ships, with the only main takeaway “Look at this! so many ships!” Luckily in Hal’s Ascendant and other TROS edits, we see the re-insertion of a deleted/cleaned up ILM demo reel which adds an extra pan shot to better appreciate lando’s arrival.

While that is an amazing addition to the battle (and probably the most professional/seamless addition), I feel the battle of exegol in episode 9 can be more. So where do I come in? My goal is make additional shots that can hopefully be incorporated within the movie.

This is NOT an edit of the whole movie. I’m just working on random scenes here and there. I made a post of my “personal cut” on the forum over a year ago, which I discontinued working on it. Admins if you see this as a double post, I apologize and can delete this post and modify my older thread.

Additions I plan on making

Adding shots FO TIE fighter pilots scattered throughout the battle

  • One of the reasons why the space battles in the original trilogy felt so cool to me, is that you have transition shots of a rebel pilot getting shot down then following a shot of a TIE fighter pilot and vice versa. It just adds the feeling of intensity to the battle, and a slither of emotional feeling to the battle, in my opinion. I will address this by adding/re-using flipped or modified shots of FO TIE fighter pilots from the previous movies and adding them in shots that seem appropriate.

Adding a shot of the CR90 Rebel blockade runner in action

  • We see the rebel blockade runner take off, arrive on Exegol and that’s about it. Oh wait, it then shows up when palpatine does the dark empire like lightning storm and then the fate of the ship along with Nien Nub is unknown. I have rotoscoped parts of a cool shot from a video from skyforge on youtube from a video called Conveyor station. I used a couple seconds of a shot from his video of a CR90 corvette shooting down a TIE fighter and rotoscoped it onto an exegol background. I’ll upload the draft and update this post.

Enhancing the Galaxy/Citizen’s fleet arrival

  • I’ve shown this in the TROS redux thread, here’s a more updated version. In The Phantom Menace, Anakin said “The biggest problem in this universe is no one helps each other.” and The Rise Of Skywalker beautifully showed how that changed. The entire galaxy resisting evil because they were inspired by the legends of Anakin’s children; Luke’s inspiration and sacrifice during the Battle of Crait.

I took inspiration from Hal’s Ascendant fan edit of TROS by incorporating the comm chatter upon the Galaxy fleet’s arrival. I enhanced this by adding shots of different aliens, pilots and appearances taken from different scenes and deleted scenes from star wars. I also rotoscoped parts of Lezly’s blender battle of endor on youtube and put in Exegol as the background. This is a cool way to have the millenium falcon fly in and blow something up before leading the additional ships to take out the xyston star destroyer cannons. We only see the falcon do a fly by, and rescue Finn and Jannah towards the end of the battle. Some masking needs work, and some scenes need additional clean up. This is just a proof of concept.
https://youtu.be/Lr8I9j_FDW4

Final Order Star Destroyer fires its supercannon at the Galaxy/Citizen’s Fleet

  • One thing that I always pondered is that when Lando arrives, there isn’t so much resistance shown against the incoming galaxy fleet. Clearly the final order has tens of thousands of sith TIE fighters and thousands of star destroyers, if it was a pure slugfest between two forces, the final order fleet should be able to put up some sort of resistance. I’ve always wondered if the supercannon just fired upon an incoming large cruiser ship, similar to what we see in ROTJ with the death star firing its super laser to pick off the rebel alliance fleet cruiser by cruiser. To do this, I rotoscoped the star destroyer firing on kijimi and had it firing on a Mon Cal cruiser and having it blow up. This can give some tension to the battle, that Final Order can fight back, but also can further enhance/justify Poe’s line of saying “hit those underbelly cannons”

https://youtu.be/h3RXQ1yG_Is

The big one. Capital ship battle - an MC85 Cruiser versus a FO Resurgent Star Destroyer

  • While the Xyston star destroyers have their cannons exposed as a highly exploitable weakness, the first order still has a sizeable presence aside from the final order. The only way to get rid of the FO resurgent star destroyers is to destroy them ship by ship. In the same manner heavily inspired /influenced from the Venator vs Invisible Hand scene from ROTS. I have rotoscoped many different shots of MC85 cruiser from TLJ and various shots of FO Resurgent star destroyer from TFA, TLJ, SWBFII and borrowed various shots from rogue one, a youtube video called battle of the dreadnaughts to bring you a draft of my proposed capital ship combat on exegol. MC85 and FO star destryer approaching each other, firing cannons at each other, side to side flybys with cannon exchange with the MC85 emerging victorious. This is also a very rough Work in Progress. The sound effects is half assed to just give a workprint draft of this scene. I have plans to add an admiral ackbar like figure (ie: Admiral ackbar rotoscoped shots into the TLJ) or Crix Madine deleted scenes (Will need extra work to age Madine and clean up the quality of the deleted scenes)
    https://youtu.be/YIgMTbIEFvs

If you made it this far, I thank you for reading up to here. As you can clearly see, I’m a huge noob at making these vfx shots. There are many super super skilled editors I’ve seen that I can only dream to be a fraction of their ability and to be able to apply that skill to the shots I have envisioned. That being said, I want to give a call for help. I know there are some masks that aren’t as tight (I can fix through meticulous reviewing), and I have absolutely no sense of lighting/lens flare and glare to make the shots look more realistic and seamless. On top of that, many things I didn’t think of nor am able to realize. Though I wont be surprised if I’m just told the cold hard truth; the scenes i’m envisioning are too challenging, complicated and there’s no point in further pursuing this. I know I’m not making changes that affect the nuance, narrative or character development within the movie so the other side of me thinks there’s not as much motivation nor priority to further develop these scenes. All in all, I did all these scenes myself (except the sources from the movies, and sources I got from youtube/the internet) and am proud of the progress I’ve made so far for whatever it’s worth. I hope this post at least brought some entertainment to you guys, May the Force be with you all.

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I feel like the improved Fleet Arrival and Captain Ship battle could work really well in the film with some extra work.

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Well… Vimeo removed all of my videos due to violation of guidelines. Has this happened to anyone before?

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I updated the OP with YouTube links. I’ve combined the galaxy fleet arrival and that rotoscoping scene together into one clip. You can see the update.

For the capital ship battle, I did some tweaks to improve upon it. Enjoy!

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Is that final shot of TIE fighters at the end of your preview clip an unused VFX shot from an ILM reel?

“The Dark Side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.”
-Sheev Palpatine, Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (2005)

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CamSMurph said:

Is that final shot of TIE fighters at the end of your preview clip an unused VFX shot from an ILM reel?

It’s actually a reused shot from earlier in the movie, when the Resistance was about to start their assault on the navigation tower.

My preferred Skywalker Saga experience:
I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX

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CamSMurph said:

Is that final shot of TIE fighters at the end of your preview clip an unused VFX shot from an ILM reel?

Nope, it’s literally the same exact shot from earlier in the movie before Snep says “incoming TIEs” I figured showing this clip here would give the viewer a feeling that the final order will still fight back, adding some difficulty for the galaxy fleet.

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jadenkorr41 said:

Nope, it’s literally the same exact shot from earlier in the movie before Snep says “incoming TIEs” I figured showing this clip here would give the viewer a feeling that the final order will still fight back, adding some difficulty for the galaxy fleet.

Right. I reckon that demo reel doesn’t feature many extended shots.

“The Dark Side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.”
-Sheev Palpatine, Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (2005)

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CamSMurph said:

jadenkorr41 said:

Nope, it’s literally the same exact shot from earlier in the movie before Snep says “incoming TIEs” I figured showing this clip here would give the viewer a feeling that the final order will still fight back, adding some difficulty for the galaxy fleet.

Right. I reckon that demo reel doesn’t feature many extended shots.

Nope, aside from what previous editors have uncovered. Which is why I started doing the work I present here in the OP. Battle of Exegol is severely lacking

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I see. I’m looking forward to seeing how this turns out! TRoS is in dire need of an alternate cut or something. ^^

“The Dark Side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.”
-Sheev Palpatine, Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (2005)

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Check out the capital ship battle of u haven’t already. That took a longggg time but I’m satisfied with its progress so far

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 (Edited)

I think the fleet arriving sequence has some weird pacing stuff going on. Maybe instead of letting each shot finish when they’re all checking in have a little overlap between them. Like cut as a character is finishing saying “standing by” instead of after they’ve finished saying it. If that makes sense.

Right now it feels like clips spliced into another scene and I think that could make it feel more organic and part of the same scene.

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Do you mean like cut after they say “standing”. Can you give me an example so I can experiment/try this out? thanks

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Yeah like cut the video after standing and have the audio spill into the next shot.

I’d also probably just do several call-ins in a row instead of cutting back and forth between individual people and the whole fleet.

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I’ve updated the OP to show my proof of concept of the final order star destroyer firing its super-cannon on a mon cal cruiser from the incoming galaxy fleet. The background needs to be stabilized and not shake, so working on fixing that up. And yes, pryde shouldn’t say “ion cannon”, should say “use main cannon” or whatever sounds appropriate

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 (Edited)

Hey everyone,

Here is an update I’ve been working on recently. Because the ILM BTS and extended scenes shows some mandalorian fang fighter, gauntlet class ships, I’ve worked on incorporating some of these ships into the battle of exegol, thanks to the tons of footage from Mandalorian season 3. I’ve been working on incorporating Bo Katan, Din and Boba Fett into the mix. While there are tons of footage I can rotoscope and attempt to composite into exegol, I wanted to keep the incorporation of these characters and ships to be brief as quick cameos for fun.

Attached is the youtube link. In the description of the YT video I put in timestamps so you can just jump straight to the new scenes.

https://youtu.be/2Nb43_v7P84?si=AigOe51poBe7DAqA

Description of scenes:
1:07 - Mandalorian inside N1 starfighter. Rotoscoped a shot of Mando inside N1 starfighter with galaxy fleet arrive in background
1:33 - Mandalorian inside N1 starfighter, performing a spinning maneuver in cockpit in response to Poe calling to take out the star destroyer cannons
2:07 - A sequence of shots in the order: Side cockpit view of Bo Katan piloting Gauntlet fighter approaching star destroyer cannon, Boba Fett cockpit view rogering that, Outside ship shot of Mandalorian fighters with Slave I with resistance ships blasting a star destroyer cannon, Switch to Bo Katan’s POV blasting star destroyer cannon, to two mandalorian gauntlet fighters flying off from the imminent blowing up destroyer. ~8 seconds long

Remaining scenes that need to be cleaned up/worked on.
ROTJ deleted scenes (Nien nub pilot, Mon calamari pilot scenes)
Deleted General Crix Madine scenes - will work on aging him up

If you checked out the video, I thank you so much for your time. Please drop a comment or feedback if you can. I worked tirelessly on these clips by myself and I have absolutely no VFX or film editing background. If you can drop some feedback on how to make these clips better I will greatly appreciate it. My goal is to attempt to make these clips as seamless as I possibly can. Thanks and MTFBWY!

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I’m loving the Improved Fleet arrival! Yes please! I wish you luck in completing these updates, hopefully they’ll see use!

My Edits:
Revenge of the Sith: Refocused Available

The Clone Wars Refocused: The Chosen One (Mortis Episode)

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Thanks! I’m currently working on putting Hera in it, since the ghost ship is present during landos arrival. I found some additional pilot scenes that I can put in there. (Pilot scene from a rogue one Gillette commercial) If you know of any pilot/cockpit scenes from deleted scenes or extra footage, let me know, it’s a lot of footage to sift through. I’m trying to make an effort to not make it just people from the mandoverse showing up.

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Finally, here it is!

https://youtu.be/J017hH8LnQk?feature=shared

Please see the time stamps for the new scenes added. I was able to add some pilot shots. Cleaned up the ROTJ deleted footage and finally was able to age up Crix Madine to the point where I’m satisfied with it for a first pass.

Description of the edited scenes:

Newly made or added clips at
0:05 - Inserted FO TIE pilot inside cockpit prior to transitioning to scene shooting down Snap
0:49 - Rogue One Gillette commercial pilot
0:50 - Hera Syndulla inside Ghost ship rotoscoped onto passing New Republic Cruiser
0:52 - ROTJ Mon Cal pilot with scratches and dust removed, upscaled, color corrected, and to match with audio sync “Mon Calamari fleet standing by”
0:56 - Bo Katan cameo (footage from Mando S3), color corrected to exegol background. “This is the way”
0:57 - ROTJ Nien Nub pilot with scratches and dust removed, upscaled, color corrected
1:07 - Mandalorian inside N1 starfighter. Rotoscoped a shot of Mando inside N1 starfighter with galaxy fleet arrive in background
1:10 - ROTJ Crix Madine footage inserted. This footage is cleaned. Face was aged using FaceApp to generate key frames for ebsynth to age the clip. Pretty rough but pleased with this first pass
1:33 - Mandalorian inside N1 starfighter, performing a spinning maneuver in cockpit in response to Poe calling to take out the star destroyer cannons
1:37 - FO TIE fighter cockpit shot with rotoscoped out of focus exegol background
1:38 - Action FX millennium falcon shooting down FO TIE fighters upscaled, and color corrected to match Exegol background. This scene is a falcon action scene to match before the Wedge cameo saying “nice flying Lando”
1:50 - inserted amazing ILM deleted scene of ships flying to attack Star destroyers. Upscaled and color corrected to match movie original footage
1:56 - ROTJ deleted Mon Cal pilot with dust and scratches removed to match dialogue of “Take out that cannon”
2:07 - A sequence of shots in the order: Side cockpit view of Bo Katan piloting Gauntlet fighter approaching star destroyer cannon, Boba Fett cockpit view rogering that, Outside ship shot of Mandalorian fighters with Slave I with resistance ships blasting a star destroyer cannon, Switch to Bo Katan’s POV blasting star destroyer cannon, to two mandalorian gauntlet fighters flying off from the imminent blowing up destroyer. ~8 seconds long

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It could definitely use some work, mainly with sound mixing and certain graphics, but what you’ve got shows promise! I especially like the Mando cockpit scene, the TIE cockpits, and the repurposed Falcon scene. It definitely makes the scene more impactful, but I think giving each character maybe a second more, and maybe making it so they can be heard more clearly, would give it so much more.

There’s also the issue that most of the Mando characters could be dead or have different ships or armor by this point, but obviously that’s not something you can control lol.

I like you, let us burn things together.

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Thank you for the feedback. You’re absolutely right for the sound mixing. I’ve been solo on this, I’ve spent so much time with the visuals that the audio part is not my strong suit. I have an improved version of the audio. Can u tell me which graphics in particular? So I can do some touch up

Yes, we don’t know which ones may end die or not. But for now I’m safe, and if worst comes to worst, it’ll be my “personal elseworld legends” thingy

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Main one for graphics would be the Mandalorian ships attacking the cannon. The concept is really cool, but it doesn’t look quite polished enough. I’d start there.

I like you, let us burn things together.

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This is really cool! I don’t know that every pilot arriving needs a line of dialogue. It all gets a bit jumbled. Maybe take out a few of them or just show them flying their ships?

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Thanks! Hmm, I can try to remove some lines of pilots dialogue (like maybe boba fett or Nien nub) and see how that works. The audio is something I’m struggling on polishing it up

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This is very cool and with a little tweaking it could be great. One note I have, you have Mando saying “the Mandalorian, standing by”, but he wouldn’t refer to himself as the Mandalorian. He would most likely say “Din Djarin standing by.”