No PM necessary (although I answered it) - if I’m putting ideas out in the ether like this, then you don’t need an okay to use them! Take them, refine them, improve them, dustbin them - once they leave the keyboard, they’re basically anyone’s to do with as they will.
I’ve only really got the two shower ideas anyway, LOL - this duel-end reformat we both landed on (I think at least one other fan-editor also landed on a similar version of the concept), and the Episode II flashback/rescore being used to set up that redone duel (the flashback more or less becomes Anakin rewriting history as visualization to finally REALLY “beat” his Master)
I also just like the notion of Anakin’s Theme in a flashback finally resolving into the Imperial March full-stop as Vader gets suited up, LOL.
- The fade-in to the womprat shot is very un-Star-Warsy. It needs to be a hard cut to that, then you have to extend it by around 5 - 10 beats before the Womprats get in the frame so the audience starts to get invested and ease in better into the film.
This is the only real note I had for that intro too (everything else about that intro is spot on, I think) - maybe you don’t have to do any extending or anything, just bring up the sound effects of the womprat moving into its held position and then hard cut to it there from black. Or instead, replace the sound effects with just wind and sand? But I think you can just go from full black without a fade in by letting the sound effects come in first before the images follow.
Another sound editing idea (this is apparently mostly what I have to offer, haha) would be regarding the Muppet Man Leia smuggle across the hangar, which as it stands is ridiculous, and there’s no way it’s not ridiculous. I think at that point you have to almost lampshade the ridiculousness like would often happen in the OT, and the best way I can think of to do it is to maybe insert some close-up shot/reverse shot between Obi-Wan and Leia as he picks up the big coat to highlight that this is… a bad idea. And then cut to the idea in action, and it IS, in fact, a bad idea. But score it with the droid motif from Empire Strikes Back (there are some interesting variations on it in that score that should allow for transition from the beginning of the hangar to the cover being blown)
It doesn’t fit, textually of course, but I feel like the tone of that piece is the only way that scene gets sold as being intentional instead of accidental. Williams would often use pieces that didn’t make textual sense but the emotion of the cue would carry the scene (He did this a couple times in Empire, in fact!) and I think basically swapping out the music from serious/tense to acknowledging this is not going to work, and then transitioning to action music, would get a lot of the way towards selling that.