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Intro sequence to neon noir fan edit of the prequel trilogy

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p784ynn2WFY

This is the intro sequence to a re-cut and re-scored edit of the prequel trilogy into something akin to a Refn or Mann film.

If anyone is interested in watching the full cut, please shoot me a PM for the YouTube link.

I hope this is okay to post so soon after creating this account

Thanks,

OYF

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Wow...

My only suggestion is try and avoid shots of the actors lips moving (while the music plays) even more if you can.

It certainly has a Mann feel to it.

I would be interested in seeing more of this.

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^ Indeed.

FYI: The correct font for Drive is called "Mistral". It's free.

VIZ TOP TIPS! - PARENTS. Impress your children by showing them a floppy disk and telling them it’s a 3D model of a save icon.

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Just finished this. Definitely the best edit of the prequels I've ever seen. Even when I knew what was coming, the music ratcheted up the suspense. The dialogue is minimal and fast, communicating more with less. I love the Clone Wars montage - I have not seen another single one of these three-in-one movies that actually transitions between episodes 2 and 3 in any satisfactory way, or uses the good parts of the prequels (primarily visuals) to such amazing effect. I also compliment the use of footage from all three films without sticking to the original, rigid chronology.

My only criticism is some of the audio transitions between scenes are jarring, and in many scenes the original musical cues still poke up.

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I doubt if much can be done about that without re-foley work on the whole edit.

It is an amazing piece of work. Lots of really creative decisions that I've never seen used before and I've seen my share of PT edits.

I love the very subtle way it lets us know Anakin's full parental background without having to do too much work.

I've never liked the Clone mystery story and it still doesn't work here.

I would have dropped it and the senate pass emergency powers to Palpatine in his first scene and have the dart lead to the Dooku instead of the Clones.

Anakin in this edit almost works despite of Hayden.

You get the feeling of a man beaten down by repeatedly losing and desiring control over his fate. For the first time he is the centre of these films instead of a support character to Obi-Wan or Qui-Gon.

Great stuff and such an unexpected surprise.

If I were to suggest one more change I'd pinch an idea from the edit mentioned here.  That chap cut out the energy doors dividing Gui-Gon and Obi-Wan and made that sequence flow even more logically. It would add to this edit as would putting back more sound effects and dialogue to the sequences with long passages of music. It's almost a perfect edition of these films which is an achievement. It's certainly worth watching before any other versions of these films are attempted.

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Thank you all so much for watching it and for the kind words.

I tried to submit this to fanedit.org last week or so, but I had trouble with both posting anything as well as figuring out how to submit to the fanedit database. Is there some trick to that site, or was I being a bit unobservant?

Gah! I will be downloading the Mistral front. Better late than never.

We decided to use episode 2 as the main "base" of the edit due to the mystery subplot fitting more easily with the "neon noir" tone. This also gave us the opportunity to say "neon noir" a lot more.

I am so pleased that people are picking up on the implications of Anakin's parents.

We toyed around with doing more folley work, most of the Maul fight had to be folleyed, but in the end we decided that some of the longer scenes worked well enough without the sounds and it wasn't worth pulling ALL of our hair out!

If we end up doing any updates on this, we will definitely consider your recommendations.

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The general ideas behind some of the choices taken deserve to be seen outside the Mann pastiche context. So if you were to retool it into a plain Star Wars edit I'd shift the mystery plot so the dart leads to Geonosis (called Kamino if you like) and Obi-Wan is just inspecting the troops the chancellor has ordered after the death of Qui-Gon.

Nice to see my young Leia at the funeral idea in use even if you did come up with it independently.

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You can't post to the database because we have a quality control process for new editors.  If you join the forum, there are instructions on how to submit your edit for review.

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15 minutes into this fanedit, so I don't know if the whole thing is great or just good, but I had to stop and come here to say that I applaud you so far. Even Hayden looks an interesting and mysterious character... A little more work on the sounds could do wonders I think, but even as it is now I think it's very cool.

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I will be working on getting up and going with fanedit.org soon. I hope I can get this on the database, I made some posters a while back just for that.

http://imgur.com/a/jAssi

Bingowings: The fact that that shot exists and was never intended to be a young Leia blows my mind. Once we realized that we were going to have Padme live beyond childbirth, it seemed a bit odd that she would give up Luke and not Leia. So we came up with a bit of a justification in which it is tradition for Jedi to take their first born to be trained. So she hides Luke instead of Leia.

TMBTM: I am curious to hear your reaction to the full cut. One of the  primary goal of this cut was to make Anakin as "cool" of a character as we could.

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^ Nice poster art.

VIZ TOP TIPS! - PARENTS. Impress your children by showing them a floppy disk and telling them it’s a 3D model of a save icon.

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This is one of two fan edits I'm watching over this weekend - the second is The Blackened Mantle edit which I'm watching right now. 

First impressions for this edit - I enjoyed it very much. I liked the minimal dialogue and finally someone has made a decent attempt at making Anakin less of a whiner and more of the person alluded to in Episode IV. He's much more stronger in this version than any other edit I've seen (no offense to the other fan editors) and so it makes his move to the Dark Side less obvious. 

It's a little odd not hearing the John Williams score, but the music chosen for this edit works well. Was that a Thai song I heard late in the movie (at the very least a SE Asian pop song of some sort)

Overall, I enjoyed this a lot. The only thing that bothered me was the sound levels for when dialogue and sound effects were allowed through, but I'm guessing that's down to having to manipulate what's there already to kill the music soundtrack. 

Good work! 

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This is a really good edit with a lot of interesting ideas. My main criticism is that the audio overall is pretty rough with inconsistent levels and the original score popping in and out but there's only so much you can do with the elements that are available. I also think that someone who didn't watch the original movies might be a little lost since the narrative kind of jumps from place to place. Overall though I really dig the tone, minimalist style and efficiency of storytelling. If I ever take a stab at editing the prequels again I will surely keep this one in mind for inspiration.

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I enjoyed it a lot as well. It works very well as a fan edit. As mentioned, the minimum dialogue comes off as a strength but you also had to use a lot of action sequences instead which can be tedious. Those movies can already be tedious however so it’s not much of a criticism. I think I only lost myself a little in the action since the soundtrack is worked in so well.

I really enjoyed the intro from the maul fight to the bar and I thought including Qui Gon in Anakin’s dreams helped tie it in and make that fight relevant. From those dreams and the narrative you put together we see Anakin’s motivations simply as a need for control in his life.

I also enjoyed the clone wars montage and seeing Anakin and Obi Wan smile during their battles, giving them a little character. I personally like the idea from the clone wars animated series better as to why order 66 occurred, making the clones complex characters rather than obedient fighting machines… but for the purposes of this film, including the lines about the clones following any order and being genetically modified to be less independent does help explain their turning on the jedi later.

I would highly consider watching other edits made by you or your team, especially star wars films or films I know. It was very good.

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The YouTube versions are down are these available anywhere else?

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Forgive the Bumpage I was hoping to show this to someone by Monday.
++JEDIT++ YouTube’s now showing this again, not sure what happened but nice to be able to direct people to it again.
++REJEDIT++ what seems to have happened here is a partial take down. The Flash version is still up but the HTML5 version of the clip and the full edit are down… Weird.

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I just got the full edit from YouTube actually.

Just hunted down this thread in the hopes that the editors are still monitoring it. I avoided this edit for a long time because it seemed ridiculous, but even though some of the transitions were not natural or subtle enough to be up to pro standards, I was still blown away even five minutes into it.

Trufax, I’m a big Michael Mann fan, so a lot of what you were doing made sense to me immediately, but what is amazing is that it worked, and with Anakin/Hayden especially. Turns out when you cut out most of his dialogue and concentrate on mood through lighting and his physical actions, he actually works as a character that you become drawn into and curious about; he actually has mystery. Along with this, the Hayden poster was my favorite, I thought it represented the tone of your edit the best.

It was a stroke of brilliance to use epII for the base here. When watching epII for the first time, those bar scenes felt gratuitously out of place for a Star Wars film. But they work so damn well in a Michael Mann-style treatment.

I think there were quite a few places where you needed to find some way to linger on a character’s silent face/posture for a bit longer to sustain the effect, but maybe the original material wasn’t there.

I couldn’t have imagined this would work at all, but it does. That fact that it feels somehow like it can fit within the context of the SWU is amazing. The soundtrack is great too.

I hope you refine this just a little more over time. Until then, this is strange and wonderful enough.

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It would be interesting to see the same edit but with Star Wars music and title styles. I’ve been passing this one on as much as possible.
I hope that in the future this could be the first prequel that films like Rogue One can build upon to make the prequel trilogy I would prefer to have seen.

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Yeah the title styles I wasn’t sure about. I was really into the colors, but specifically the font, idk, the edit succeeded enough on it’s own that the font felt maybe/sort of like a mere gimmick. But I’m not sure what other font would fit.

I agree this arrangement of scenes would likely work as a more standard fanedit, using the normal music and titles, but the tone would change drastically and I don’t know if it would keep the gravity it has as it currently is. Also maybe I’m still in the dazzled stage and can’t be objective. I’ve watched it twice already.

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The prologue dream reminded me very much of Godfather 2 which opens with a piece of music that reminds me of Padme’s Ruminations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiops8V–2A
Changing the music would change the mood for sure but I think some of the tonal qualities could be kept.
The dreaming reminded me very much of the dream sequences in Lynch’s Dune which uses a similar musical motif.

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Well, the other thing is that this edit specifically works because of the absence of enormous amounts of dialogue, which can only be replaced with atmospheric sounds or music. Barring access to raw tracks, re-foleying the whole movie could be an effort dwarfing the primary aim of the edit.

The following thread might make the aforementioned task way easier though, if it ever bears fruit: http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Brashs-Star-Wars-Sound-Effects-Archive-A-collection-of-the-best-Star-Wars-sounds-for-use-in-Fan-Editing/id/12364 The thread is kind of a mess though and there isn’t a way to figure out who has what or wants to provide it or when things are being released or if they ever will be >_<

John Williams’ scores are magnificent punctuations. but I’m not sure they have the emotional complexity to carry several minutes at a time largely by themselves, while the actors just stand there emoting.

Confession: I’ve never sat around listening to Star Wars soundtracks. But the theme you linked does have a lot of gravity and darkness. If there was a more conventional edit using the same visual and plot structure as this one, I think it would basically require nothing but themes like Padme’s Ruminations. Are there enough themes like that in Williams’ Star Wars discography?

I’m also a fan of the type of music used in the Neon Noir edit, so I may have come out of the gate biased. I already listen to Kavinsky/The Chromatics/Daft Punk, for instance.

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If you haven’t already I suggest you watch TMBTM’s silent versions which just have Williams’ music and no sound effects or vocal work at all.
Also bare in mind that many of the films that Williams has scored have scenes which play out almost like silent movies (the ends of ET and CE3K almost dialogue free and carried purely by the music).

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Well, the silent version was another I avoided because it sounded ridiculous, but after this I should reconsider.

I don’t think that Williams’ work lacks emotion—! Just to be clear. It bursts with it, but in a fairly specific range.

There’s something that happens in Michael Mann’s films where a four second shot on an actor’s face, or even just their eyes seems to reveal an indescribable storm of pent up, jagged emotions, which really works with a character like Anakin. I’m not sure Williams has that kind of screwed up energy and pain in his palette (which was why

Are there enough themes like that in Williams’ Star Wars discography?

was meant as a non-rhetorical question).