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I actually adjusted the scenes using your edit so that the order of each remains the same. I completely understand if you’re locked into what you have and wouldn’t expect you to make any changes. I’m really excited to see more of your work
Huzzah! It worked! I LOVE these!!! The main hope I had when I started doing the YouTube show was that folks would wanna try their own version of those scenes and in doing so get better at editing, so this is great! I really love the in-sequence kill of Darth Maul! “Brutality! Ben Wins!” HAHA! Fantastic Job! And you’ve got good instincts on all the other cuts, I actually tried out quite a few of them myself when I was cutting the sequence.
The reason from my point of view, that you need to keep the bit where Ben falls into the pit, is because George is creating a visual mirror between Duel of the Fates and the Bespin Duel from Empire Strikes Back. Luke loses a fight, falls into a cylindrical hole, and gains a father he doesn’t want VS Ben wins a fight by jumping up out of a cylindrical hole, and Anakin gains the wrong father in Ben, because Qui-Gon, the father he needed, didn’t make it. With that in mind I restructured the whole end of the duel to match the flow of the Bespin Duel in order to make the mirror shine better.
I personally wouldn’t make any of your other cuts for this reason: All of those cuts work in isolation and would work if the you’re not dealing with a sequence that’s intercutting 4 subsequences (Gungans, Padme, Duel of the Fates, and the Space Battle). This is what I was hinting at in my last post. You’re cutting a bunch of moments when the action is dragging (The Gungan Button, Qui-Gon talking to Annie, Panaka’s excessive force against a window, ect), and you’d want to cut those kind of drag points, if you were doing a straight scene with no intercuts. But! When you’ve got a 4-Way intercut, you actually need a few drag points just like rests in a fast piece of music. That’s why that starfighter takes forever to hit the ground, it’s creating a breath before we charge into the next section of the battle. The long shot where the battle droids unload from the MTT is another example of that kind of musical breath.
SO! If you were say cutting a version of Duel of the Fates, where you never cut away to the rest of the battle most of your cuts wouldn’t just work, they’d be exactly what you’d want to do, like how you trimmed down Obi-Wan’s falling all over the place. For example I used the exact sort of cutting techniques that you used on Duel of the Fates to recut the Duels at the end of Attack of the Clones, because those flow in a straight sequence without ever cutting away.
Here’s a link to my recut of the Attack of the Clones Duels. Pay close attention to how I reworked the beginning (similar to how you cut the extra Anakin lines), and How I recut Dooku’s kill shot on Anakin (Similar to your rework of Ben smoking Maul): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-GJ1VlEvPO5XlQALDODDeZdWrGEH_ZHP?usp=sharing
Bottom line! Great Work! And I’d love to see more! Keep it up!