We aaaaaarrreeeeee LIIIIIIIIIVE!

Book 3 is ready to go. Sorry for the poor changelog formatting below. I’m on mobile and can’t make the necessary edits but I’ll clean it up tomorrow (EDIT: Fixed). I wanted to make sure I got this out ASAP though. This log isn’t even complete or 100% accurate as this film kept growing and growing as I edited (EDIT: Yes, it is complete now), so there will be some fun surprises throughout. Book 4 is making great progress too, should have a much shorter turnaround time!

Book 3: The Tribes

Added new Mandalorian Disney “Star Wars” intro
The film now opens again on the Carnita Arena scene. This will take place in the Outer Rim and not on Tatooine as in my previous version due to the new story order. The Way of Mandalore takes place within the OneCanon theory, meaning it is ~12 years after RotJ instead of Disney’s proposed ~5 years after. The state of the Empire is as we see it not due to the immediate collapse post-RotJ, but due to the events of the Legends novels. As such:

Mando Season 1: 9ABY, +7 years = 16ABY OneCanon (Black Fleet Crisis begins at the end of the year)
Mando Season 2: 10ABY, +7 years = 17ABY OneCanon (Black Fleet Crisis ends close to the start of the year)
BOBF Season 1: 11ABY, +7 years = 18ABY OneCanon (Corellian Crisis happens sometime during this year, but other than Luke’s cameo in BOBF these stories don’t seem to intertwine)
Mando Season 3: 12ABY, +7 years =19ABY OneCanon (Right after the Hand of Thrawn duology. Mando Chapter 23 provides the perfect context we need about Thrawn’s current whereabouts, and I am moving a scene from there into this Book 3.)
Ahsoka Season 1?: 12ABY, +7 years =19ABY

We can be certain that Thrawn is in the Ahsoka show, and that lines up with his established “wait ten years and I’ll be back” line that he tells Pellaeon. HoT doesn’t have specific dates attached to its events, but the plot does occur over a few months. Luke and Mara marry maybe a month after those books end. That leaves plenty of space for Mando S3 & Ahsoka S1 leading to the inevitable return of our boy in blue himself.

New color grading on the Arena world.
Cut the shot of the Gamorrean duelist unconscious in the ring as it’s up and fighting again 2 shots later.
Re-ordered the shots of the Gamorean getting shot so he doesn’t hold his axe up in the air for 10 seconds of reaction shots in the meantime.
Cut Crime Lord demanding Din take his armor off “or I’ll kill you”. Din now acts with a more immediate agency before starting the combat.
Cut all the ridiculous bare-handed punches to Din’s helmet in the combat, and cut some other shots that looked choreographed instead of realistic. Din is much more deadly.
Cut Din saying “I promise”. Unneeded and sounded a little childish.
New transitions from crime lord death to flying, to a new Grogu nap sequence to the X-wings waking them up.
Rescored the X-wing tension scene and from here on out have removed ALL of Frog Lady.
New color grading on Maldo Kreis (Ice World)
Moved around the X-wing pilot dialogue across the chase to make more sense.
Added some manual rotation to the chase scene shots to increase the appearance of the intensity of the Razorcrests motions.
Masked out the egg basket in a number of shots
After the ship sinks, Din’s first concern is now finding Grogu.
Rescored Grogu’s little cave snack adventure.
Countless edits on the spider chase scenes to preserve story continuity.
Replaced VFX from Frog Lady’s blaster with Din’s blaster. Din now saves Grogu from the baby spider.
Edited the X-wing pilot discussion to have story consistency with my previous films.
New planet departure scene order.
After Din and Grogu jump, we cut to Boba continuing to search for his armor, which, coincedentally, Din will soon begin doing too. I love the back and forth storyline carrying on from the last film.
As the Razorcrest is in terrible shape right now, we will now cut back to Din and Grogu’s red wire scene about trying to fix their ship mid-journey.
Replaced Din’s line to say Tatooine instead of Trask to fit my new story order. Now they go to Nevarro before Tatooine in order to get the needed repairs.
This is more of a coincidence than anything, but Din directly references his run-in with the New Republic as the cause for needed repairs rather than the Trask fiasco when he talks to Greef. Since my “episode order” is 10, 12, 9, then 11, it’s just funny how the dialogue works out even better than in the original…
Restored the “Nevarro overview” brief from Cara since I’m no longer using this content as a cold open, and also since I’ve been building up the Imperial presence, hearing more about their operations helps this narrative.
Removed an ungodly amount of crappy wipe transitions on Nevarro.
New color grading and source quality upgrade on Nevarro.
Fixed a Disney bug where Cara raises her blaster in back-to-back scenes when the crew runs into the science techs wiping the drive.
Hearing Dr. Pershing talk about the cloning program in the same film as The Shadow Council scene (which is ahead) is awesome. It unifies so much of what the “Empire” is doing.
Restored the scout bikers sequence.
Cut some shots of the scouts where the speeders look like they are moving way too slowly.
Cut some cheering reaction shots.
Fixed a disgusting Disney bug… Come on now: https://streamable.com/plzr9b
WAY sped up the scout biker with a grenade kill shot.
Fixed another Disney visual bug of Din in the cockpit. Again he does the same action twice. Lots of little post-production errors in this episode.
Had to totally re-edit the scene order of the last TIE dogfight. SO many inconsistent distances between shots.
After Nevarro, we now slide into the Gideon and the Shadow Council discussion. This new placement helps continue to build Gideon as the villain from my last film, expands upon the Imperial conflict we have been focusing more on, ties up the cloning program on Nevarro, gives us our first clues on Thrawn instead of Ahsoka dropping his name out of nowhere, and is a great back and forth since we just were introduced to the New Republic for the first time. You can begin to see that Din is getting leashed into something much bigger than himself. The scene is edited so the dialogue makes chronological sense for this new placement, as well as hair darkening masks placed on Gideon to hide some of the gray.
New Tatooine color grading.
Cut a couple of crazy Tatooine mechanic lines. She should be weird but not insane…
When Din speeders to Mos Pelgo, I cut the nighttime talks with the Tuskens. It seems like he’s asking for directions, even though he just got directions, and it is set at night so it makes it seem like he travels for 20+ hours which makes no sense at all.
Cut the Krayt Dragon “swimming” directly through the town. I don’t understand the physics behind how those buildings still stand with the size of the dragon. This scene also makes the dragon appear super skinny to navigate through the streets when in the later shots it is WAY more massive in its width.
As Din rides back from the Krayt battle, we now see Boba on his tail as Boba fires his cycler rifle at Din to initiate the ambush.
Cut some slow reaction shots and some more people punching Din’s helmet without reacting in the mercenary fight.
Cut Din and Grogu shrugging at each other after the jetpack kill. It’s a Marvel-esque shot and also Grogu’s head placement doesn’t at all match the next scene.
New color grade and soundtrack on Din’s walk back to town.
Changed how Din learns of the nearby Mandalorians. The whole Mechanic knows a Bug who knows a Frog who has a husband who saw a mandalorian is terrible storytelling. I can’t do a ton to fix this all, but I at least cut out the bug middle man so it appears like Mechanic just heard from her contact.
Cut some more mechanic nonsense. Her saying she likes her steak “medium rare” is way too earthy for me.
Heavily reduced the “taxi” conversation & plot.
No egg chamber drama from the Frog Lady.
We now learn that the Empire placed the tracker on the Razorcrest on Tatooine instead. I removed Gideon’s mustache in all “tracker placed” shots for visual consistency with the shadow council scene.
Using bits and pieces from the great Smudger9 and my own changes, we now have a travel and landing on Trask that doesn’t display the massive damage on the Razorcrest.
A new cut from landing straight to the cantina. We don’t need to watch frogs make out.
New quality upgrade and color grading on Trask.
Increased the speed at which Din jumps after Grogu in the water.
Built a whole new sequence for Din being trapped under the gate. Ominous Mandalorian funeral chants play while he is helpless to escape. The end looks nigh.
Just as Din begins to sink to his doom, once more, he looks up and sees his brothers and sisters in arms come to rescue him. Cue Vode An intermixed with Bo-Katan’s theme.
Cut some more bad wipe transitions on this world.
Cut Din saying “mIsSiOn??”
Cut out Din giving instructions to Grogu on how to behave with the Frogs when he drops him off for babysitting.
Cut out some stormtroopers flopping around and jumping off the railing when they are barely punched
Cut out the Mando squad taking forever to take cover under fire while blasters fly all around them.
Re-edited Din and Bo-Katan’s argument about the deal changing to maintain tension and not have it so Din goes along with her idea. I have left it so we don’t know if Din is going to oppose her, but then the ship nosedives.
Re-edited Gideon and Imperial Officer’s conversation to make it appear as though Gideon intended to have this ship get raided in an effort to kill Din and Bo. As we’ve seen before, he has no problem sacrificing his troops to accomplish this goal, so now it feels like it’s not a last-ditch effort, but perhaps even Gideon’s plan all along. As we had earlier established that Gideon is already tracking the Razorcrest, this appears to have been in the works for a while. (We even get the Long Live the Empire phrase reinforcement here from the Show Council scene!)
Completely re-edited the sequence where Bo and the crew are pinned down. I have removed Din from all scenes here as we left him earlier not knowing what he was going to do. We cut back and forth between the crew pinned down and the vessel nosediving until at the last second, Din comes charging in out of nowhere to repay his debt to his Mandalorian family.
Din now throws the detonators in one fluid motion as he falls from the hail of blaster fire.
Fixed all the timing of the explosion and fire to actually make sense instead of waiting for a reaction shot from EVERY character while the fireball slowly plumes down the hallway.
Cut Din saying “Come on follow me”. It’s a better vibe when we just see the Mandalorians work in unison without bay-talking each other.
Removed some dialogue between Din and Bo-Katan so it remains more confrontational before she thanks him.
We end with a quick take-off into space followed by a brief scene of Grogu using the force on his own to spin the ball on the stick. At the end of my first film, Din had to give it to him manually, and this now shows the evolution and agency that Grogu is developing through their adventures together as well as hits home the main theme that Grogu is on the path to being a Jedi… and Mandalorian? (Rescored this scene with a track from Star Wars Visions: Ninth Jedi)
Unified credits based on new story order.

Darth Sadifous said:

Have you thought of potentially digitally adding Pedro Pascal’s head onto Din in the closing shot of season three? I do not know how hard this would be from a technological perspective, but from a character perspective and a story arc I think it could be a nice little payoff. From the end of season two, the show seemed to present conflict for Din in regards to his choice to take off his helmet to look at his child with “his own eyes” (it is like poetry). Then we found he had to atone for this by bathing in the water of Mandalore, kickstarting the quest in season three.

That is a great idea. I’m not sure how realistic I could get it to look… But ya know, when I get there I’m going to try. I’m a fan of it storywise I think.

Gala, if you meant to send something with your message there it didn’t go through right. If you see this, try writing it again so I know what’s going on.

Thanks everyone, hope you enjoy this third film! Crossing my fingers there are no massive bugs, this one went through the ringer a few times before it felt right. Have fun!