STAR WARS: EP IV 2004 REVISITED ADYWAN *1080p HD VERSION NOW IN PRODUCTION — Page 308

corellian77 said:

as I was watching I actually had to stop and ask myself 'was that droid always there?' (and this from someone who's seen ANH well over 100 times).

It's just one of those movies, huh? :) I still see new things every time I watch too. It's fun!

On the topic of ANHR v2, let me begin by saying I love the current edit.  However, there are still a few things (minor though they may be) that may be worth a second look.  Below are a few ideas for your consideration ady:

Siliconmaster482 said:

And the tremors in the strings while Vader is choking Motti are absolutely perfect.

Love that bit too.

corellian77 said:

On the topic of ANHR v2, let me begin by saying I love the current edit.  However, there are still a few things (minor though they may be) that may be worth a second look.  Below are a few ideas for your consideration ady:

Darkening exterior to match time of day seen during binary sunset scene

I don't really know about the Tatooine scenes. Darkening it brings to much of the dreadful sepia tones back. I mean there isn't anything that states the time between the dinner scene and the binary sunset scene. Luke could have stood around and kicked around sand for hours. Or even checked the vaporators. It would be really important if we were shown what went on between those scenes. 

Speed up Ben's "twirl" during the duel so it's more convincing?

I agree, I don't need it but it wouldn't hurt it.

I don't mind the colour of the "starburst" effect on the DVD menu, but the typeface jumps out at me. Everything else is in Trajan, same as the official DVDs, but the instances of Times New Roman in the logo here and in the main menu screen are offputting. That said, complaining about the menu really raises us to a new level of nitpicking — how many faneditors make animated menus that are mostly indistinguishable from the professional ones?

RoccondilRinon said:

That said, complaining about the menu really raises us to a new level of nitpicking — how many faneditors make animated menus that are mostly indistinguishable from the professional ones?

Yeah, I feel kinda petty for mentioning it, but I only did so for consistency's sake.  Of course, assuming adywan does a similar custom menu for the rest of the trilogy, then it's a moot point.

EyeShotFirst said:

corellian77 said:

Speed up Ben's "twirl" during the duel so it's more convincing?

I agree, I don't need it but it wouldn't hurt it.

 

I'm not sure it can be made to look convincing. Speeding it up will just make it look like... well, footage in fast foward! I think that would be trading a badly choreographed move for a badly speeded up version of a badly choreographed move.

I would rather that shot be removed, than altered. It just. Looks. Bad.

Darth Venal said:

Well, it could just be speeded up a percentage. We're not talking Harold Lloyd here. If you increase the speed of the shot by a small percentage it's perfectly feasible to make it work better. In fact, you could speed up most of the action shots in the duel by up to 10% and most people wouldn't notice it had been tinkered with, and it would move faster, as required.

You would definitely notice if watching a PAL version ;)

Speeding up a human will always look unnatural, no matter how you do it because of the way our brain perceives things. If you sped up the twirl by about 4% it would probably be ok for the NTSC version but will play another 4% faster for the PAL version and that's where things begin to fall apart. Don't forget Alec Guinness was 62 when filming Star Wars.

Darth Venal said:

Well, 10% was a rather rounded up, I didn't want to sound really nerdish by quoting the speeds we use at work (oh, we have sodding guidelines even for this!). But actually, you'd be surprised how much time compression does go on. And believe me, it's more than 4%. Producer/director Sean Cunningham is a big believer in it (not that many of his movies are particularly good) and he actually speeds up his footage by 8-10%. Seriously, he does. You can hear that from the horses mouth, and also from the poor directors whose footage he's speeding up who don't want it done!

10% sounds a lot, and obviously not all footage will handle it, but I have no reason to believe just enhancing the speed of Ben's twirl a bit isn't feasible.

I just don't think the MOVEMENT of the spin is convincing enough. Sure, speed it up, but it still would look like an old man tip toeing in a circle, but faster, rather than an aged Jedi spinning around for no reason, as Jedi seem to like to do in duels (just kidding of course, but really.)

Since the PT came out, the Obi Wan duel has bothered me even more, not because of the choreography, but because we are to believe that Obi Wan as a character is in his late 50's when he is killed on the Death Star, yet Qui Gon Jinn is supposed to be around 60 years old in TPM, making them close to being the same age when they died, yet Qui Gon's dueling looks much more convincing. To make it even worse (for me anyway), Count Dooku is supposed to be in his 80's during AOTC and ROTS! I won't bother with Yoda, since he's an alien and his species is mysterious.

This isn't the fault of Lucas, Alec Guinness, Liam Neeson, or Christopher Lee. Just the way things turned out in making these movies, since Liam Neeson was obviously younger than his character during filming, and Dooku in the duels is mostly just Lee's head pasted on a stunt actor. Still, it bothers me to see Obi Wan as a character be so unlike Qui Gon and Dooku in how he appears while dueling. It just doesn't match. Though ANH:R did fix this up a lot.

BUT... the weak spin still pulls me out of it. If I ever get to do my own edit of ANH, I would be removing that spin!

In fairness, you can expect Obi-Wan is rather more out of practice than Qui-Gon or Dooku.

oh_riginal said:

Darth Venal said:

I have no reason to believe just enhancing the speed of Ben's twirl a bit isn't feasible.

I just don't think the MOVEMENT of the spin is convincing enough. Sure, speed it up, but it still would look like an old man tip toeing in a circle...

Since the PT came out, the Obi Wan duel has bothered me even more...

... the weak spin still pulls me out of it. If I ever get to do my own edit of ANH, I would be removing that spin!

Removing the twirl (2 seconds) can be done seemlessly, and frankly it's no big loss.

Jonno said:

oh_riginal said: 

Since the PT came out, the Obi Wan duel has bothered me even more, not because of the choreography, but because we are to believe that Obi Wan as a character is in his late 50's when he is killed on the Death Star, yet Qui Gon Jinn is supposed to be around 60 years old in TPM, making them close to being the same age when they died, yet Qui Gon's dueling looks much more convincing. To make it even worse (for me anyway), Count Dooku is supposed to be in his 80's during AOTC and ROTS! I won't bother with Yoda, since he's an alien and his species is mysterious.

 

 They're ALL aliens, as far as we're concerned. Granted, human-looking characters in the Star Wars universe are subject to most of the same physical limitations as the rest of us (making all the arguments about unnatural movement perfectly valid), but who's to say the same rules of longevity apply?

Anyway, their 'years' most definitely wouldn't be the same as our 'years'   ;-)

 

Well, the word "human" is used a lot in Star Wars.

Examples:

C-3PO: "He's quite clever you know... for a human being."

Han Solo: "Jabba, you're a wonderful human being."

Anakin: "I'm the only human that can do it." (podracing)

Padme: "To be angry is to be human."

C-3PO: "I am C-3PO, Human-Cyborg relations."

C-3PO: "I'm PROGRAMMED to understand human behavior!"

C-3PO: "Sometimes I just don't understand human behavior!"

So, "galaxy far, far away" aside, I think it is safe to say, the characters are basically an identical species to human, however you want to look at it. Jedi are special, since they can use the force to do super-high jumps and such. Han Solo, for example, can't do anything "superhuman." Yoda, however, does NOT qualify as human, in this galaxy or any other! His jumping around at an old age may be due to his master MASTER Jedi knowledge and skills, or maybe his species is supposed to be able to hop around. Who knows.

Then again, we're talking about fictional characters in a fictional galaxy, so... yeah.

But there is still no explanation why Obi Wan aged so badly compared to Qui Gon and Dooku (within character, I don't mean the actors).

BUT... Mark Hamill aged pretty badly didn't he? Imagine him playing Luke nowadays....

Luke: "Ben, why didn't you tell me?? ... Why didn't you tell me! Why didn't you tell me how to age better!"

Obi Wan's Ghost: "Hey don't look at me, my master, Qui Gon, didn't pass on that knowledge to me! That bastard!"

I had my dad over this weekend and we were looking through my DVD collection for something to watch.  We had it narrowed down to two movies and were about to make a choice when he noticed my stack of Star Wars DVDs.

"Why do you have so many Star Wars movies?"
"One of them is a fan edit, where a guy went through and fixed all of the mistakes and stuff."
"Can we watch that?!"

Now he hadn't seen the movie in a long time and maybe saw the 97SE once and never saw the DVD, but I think he really liked what he saw (he had to leave before it was over and didn't get to see the DS Attack).

It was nice to watch Star Wars with my dad again, because I remember when I was growing up he used to read the crawls to me even after I could read.  I wanted to thank Adywan again for giving us a version of Star Wars we can watch and it be new again.

BTW, my wife commented (it was her second time watching ANHR) that she liked the electric needle: "i liked it.  it made it NOT look like they glued a syringe to the bot."  I agree with her.  Maybe some tweaking (it looks like it appears a bit late in the shot since the needle is so small), but I still think you should keep it.

Also, I really watched the Kenobi Hut re-arrange this time, and I have to say that it makes so much sense in its scripted order that I don't think I can go back the way it was.