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The Rise of Skywalker: Ascendant (Released) — Page 614

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Will Rey still be taking the Skywalker name at the end of the movie, or will she remain a Nobody throughout?

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The ending will not be altered from the regular version of Ascendant. It’s the same ol’ Ascendant, just that Rey is never established to be descended from Palpatine, and that her parents presumably are as TLJ describes them and don’t factor into this story.

My stance on revising fan edits.

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Hal 9000 said:

The ending will not be altered from the regular version of Ascendant. It’s the same ol’ Ascendant, just that Rey is never established to be descended from Palpatine, and that her parents presumably are as TLJ describes them and don’t factor into this story.

I can’t wait to see how the parents angle will play here if their still drunkards.

The name’s Lawson. Noah Lawson.

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Rendering out a workprint for the Rey Nobody alternate version of Ascendant, thanks largely to Spence.

It’ll just be a low quality, non-color graded video to be able to see how the pieces fit together. Once it’s finalized, I’ll proceed to reapply the LUTs manually to the entire film and sort out the jigsaw puzzle of all the subtitle files that’ll need to be synced up again.

Here’s the change list:

  • Thanks to Sir Ridley, a different version of the same crawl is used in order for the title font to match TLJ (hugely important)
  • The hint about Palpatine’s ability to possess (certain?) people is moved back out of the opening sequence and where it originally belonged, for clarity’s sake given that Kylo no longer has an ace in the hole of knowing Rey’s parentage
  • Removed Rey sensing her parents during her first Force vision where she sees the Sith throne (could perhaps use a bit more, but it’s serviceable)
  • During Kylo and Rey’s Forcetime conversation right after Rey meets the village girl on Pasana, removed a line or two that are moved to the duel in Kylo’s quarters
  • Removed Rey saying she’s sees Ochi’s ship before
  • Yellow lightning, to add a little distance from what was intended (in-universe logic aside) to tie her into Palpatine (using work by skenera two years ago)
  • Used Spence’s version of the duel in Kylo’s quarters, and restructured the lead-in from Poe and Finn similarly (used Spence’s literal audio from the sequence as he provided it)
  • Used Spence’s version of the hangar revelation scene (again used lifted audio from Spence)
  • Removed Rey’s lines, “He killed my father… and my mother” (last instance of using audio right from Spence)
  • Restructured one scene around the Ach-To sequence, also removing Finn sharing his inference that Palpatine was seeking Rey as a child
  • On Ach-To, removed dialogue about Rey’s Palpatine heritage
  • Removed several lines of dialogue as Rey and Palpatine converse, following Spence, though also removing line, “She will take her revenge.”

My stance on revising fan edits.

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Just want to point our that RogueLeader should get the props for the Hanger scene. That’s 99% their work!

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Thanks for the shoutout Spence even though you definitely deserve most of the credit for this Rey Nobody edit!

Kind of crazy to think how long this has been in the making.

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Anyone who has the current link to my SW stuff now has access to the workprint. It’s at the root level of the Star Wars folder.

Looking to make sure it’s coherent and nothing was missed. Not really looking for big ideas, but the implementation and content of affected scenes. It’s not a V3, just an alternate version. Thanks in advance.

My stance on revising fan edits.

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 (Edited)

Notes after skimming through to look at the changed scenes:

  • I noticed Rey’s first vision during her training scene still has her shooting blue lightning out of her hands. Is that left deliberately (artistically or due to technical limitations) or is that something that will be changed in the final release?
  • When Rey sees Ochi’s ship in the desert, where the “I’ve seen that ship before” line has been cut, I wonder if her reaction shot could be tightened up just a bit more? It works without the line, but it still lingers on her staring inquisitively long enough that a new viewer might wonder what she’s thinking. Again, it still works as is, but since the ship is purely a macguffin in this cut of the movie and not a payoff to TFA, it might be best to minimize any hint of a larger picture.
  • I don’t know if this was in previous versions of the movie and I just somehow didn’t notice before, or if it was discussed before and I don’t remember, but at timestamp 1:25:42, when Luke is sitting down next to Rey, I can clearly see Rey’s lips moving despite not having any dialog. I wonder if the scene could be restructured at all to avoid that. Luke saying “Rey, confronting fear is the destiny of the Jedi” is about 6 seconds long (a tad shorter if you reduce the pause after “Rey…”), so if he starts talking around 1:25:36, during the close-up of Rey’s face before he sits down, it would go fast enough for you to cut to the next shot right as Luke is in position before Rey’s mouth begins to move. But maybe we’ve already gone over this and decided the scene would be too rushed that way or something.
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Thanks!

The blue lightning I would just chalk up to artistic choice and palantir-ish misdirection.

I could see about tightening Rey’s reaction shot as you describe and see how it plays.

And I’ll see about Rey’s lips during that moment. Could probably just use less of that shot and more of another, but hard to say until I can sit down to look.

My stance on revising fan edits.

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Some vfx wizard should be able to easily close her mouth during that moment, I did it roughly myself once but I don’t have the skills some people do.

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Howdy! I’ve been watching the new workprint and I noticed that after the scene of Zorri and Poe on the rooftop Rey talks to Finn about having seen Ochi’s ship the day her parents left. Just wanted to let you know ^_^

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Had a look through the Rey Nobody changelist:

Having not seen Spence’s scenes before, in terms of the effects on the story I thought it was great! Kylo’s dialogue in the duel and hangar work well for changing the stakes of the story, ups Rey’s inner conflict and defines her journey really nicely. The reduced scenes like Luke & Rey’s convo and the trimmed exchanges with Palpatine maybe don’t help the film’s already blistering pace but they do flow nicely overall. The yellow lightning is also a great addition; I read the difference between the blue vision lightning and the yellow real lightning as the vision showing her fears of becoming a Sith, but the yellow being more of a part-Light Side lightning, she’s not gone to the Dark yet.

In terms of their implemenation I had two main thoughts:

I do feel Rey’s vision is a bit brief. Maybe some similar elements to Kylo’s vision could be included, like Kylo reaching out to her (either in TLJ or the later scene in the hangar), to juxtapose how they both feel about that moment, and especially given her later line about wanting to take Ben’s hand? I also thought it would be interesting to see if Luke’s TLJ line “You went straight to the Dark” could be included, kicking off her struggle with the Dark Side throughout the film (Kylo also hears a line from Luke so it might be fun if they both do). Though since it’s meant to be more of a premonition than Kylo’s which seems more of a meditation I’m not sure if those work for what you intend.

Though Kylo’s new lines fit, they don’t sound entirely natural, though that’s totally understandable. I’m impressed by how good they do sound! Are these final, or can more work be done on them?

Excited to see the completed version! Though I think there could have been a way to make Rey Palpatine work if it was the plan from the beginning, this just makes the story and themes cleaner

“I don’t believe it.”

“That is why you Yoda.”
Master Fail

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Yeah I think a vision that implements bits from the past two films could work (her looking angry during the duel in TFA, her going to the cave in TLJ).

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DominicCobb said:

Yeah I think a vision that implements bits from the past two films could work (her looking angry during the duel in TFA, her going to the cave in TLJ).

I did want to suggest her with the Sith eyes from TFA but then I remembered that’s from Starlight, that’s how much these edits have replaced the trilogy for me!

“I don’t believe it.”

“That is why you Yoda.”
Master Fail

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Would you mind sending me the most current version of that, Nev? I’ll play around with adding an extra like 5 seconds to that vision and see what I can come up with.

My stance on revising fan edits.

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I had also thought to suggest showing the TFA duel in the vision, reframing it to imply she unknowingly used the dark side to defeat Kylo. I do think using the Sith eyes would be a bit too on the nose, unless this was a follow-up to Starlight. I think it’d work to just show Rey striking Kylo down paired with Luke’s “You went straight to the dark”, then followed by a shot of Rey falling down the dark side hole and/or inside the cave.

Other ideas:

Use Finn’s “Noooo!” from Chewie’s ‘death’ to begin the vision, similarly to the way baby Rey’s worked originally, or Finn yelling “Rey!”, though that’s become a bit of a meme.

Incorporate Obi-Wan’s line “you will be tempted by the dark side of the Force” which could be faintly heard in Rey’s TFA vision (maybe keep it equally faint and echoey).

Use Kylo’s line “You’re still holding on! Let go!” as we see the lightning blast from Rey’s hand (it’d probably be better to leave “join me” instead, to keep the parallel to Kylo’s vision and set up all the talk about holding hands, but maybe both could fit?).

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I’ve only done a quick skim through the workprint so far, but I did think it was a little jarring that the “General/General” scene gets cut off so abruptly. I think it might flow better if the memory restoration scene was placed directly after Ahch-To again, and then “General/General” hard-cuts to them plugging in D-O for the weather report. It might feel like a quick cut within the same scene then, as opposed to one-and-a-half scenes awkwardly broken apart.

There was one other concern I had here - going the whole movie without knowing anything about Exegol, and then just haphazardly revealing that “Oh yeah, D-O knows all this stuff! It was right under our noses the whole time!” feels kinda… stupid. Yes, there’s an awkward throwaway line that D-O still doesn’t know how to get there; but am I the only one who finds this whole setup really awkward and contrived?

This was definitely a problem in the theatrical version too, but it feels clunkier and more obvious now without being obfuscated behind that “EPIC twist reveal” that Palpatine was retroactively responsible for shaping Rey’s entire life (*sigh*). Not the biggest issue, but I was curious if anyone else feels the same way.

The Rise of Skywalker: Untold - A “Rey Nobody” edit of Ep. IX | Looking for voices and VFX - Please reach out if interested!

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I mean, yeah, it is dumb. But I think the idea is that the bad guys are defeated by the people they’ve used and abused. Rey healing the serpent inspired BB-8 to give some of his energy to D-O, and that act of kindness gave the heroes an unexpected advantage.

Honestly, I’d love to see someone replace D-O’s human (JJ Abrams) voice with some glitchy beeps and boops like a normal astromech droid would make. Especially when the droid just says stuff like, “sad” and “happy”. It’s not endearing.

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There’re lots of good online tutorials to make ‘Star Wars Droid Sounds’. Generally you get a human voice first, then apply whatever modifiers distort it. If you had someone doing simple “yayyy” or “awww” sounds that they think fit D-O, then you could play with a few distortion options until we found the voice.

The Clone Wars: Refocused | Andor: Movie Omnibus

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Good idea! It could be fun to create our own. Something like BD-1 from Jedi: Fallen Order would fit really well with him.

https://youtu.be/XTU_jQipee0

I think it would be cool to get a female voice to distort for D-0.
Anyway, might be off-topic for Ascendant.

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You have to remove three Finn NOOOOs or REEEEEEYs to add one.

heil Palpatine!