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Clone Wars 2008 Redux - working title - CANCELLED

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 (Edited)

***CANCELLED***

For the following reasons:

1.) Still never managed to split the audio tracks sufficiently

2.) The Clone Wars TV Episodes have been much more stellar (pardon the pun) to this and have proved to me that this "mega-episode" should NEVER have been released in the theatre.  Story arcs like the "Malevolence" and singles like "Rookies" show that what we got in the theatre was sub-par even as the prequels go.  As a great philosopher once said, "You can spray perfume on a turd - but it's still a turd."


*****Original Post follows *****

This will be worked on once it hits DVD, but I welcome your suggestions now.

I’ve puttered around with some home edits, and am going to take the ambitious step of editing “The Clone Wars” (2008 theatrical).  I may be getting in way over my head, but Lucasfilms pushed me to it.  Let me also say that while I plan to pour tons of time and effort into this I do not have the experience of Adywan or ADigitalMan… so we’ll see what comes of my attempt.  This will be my first 'public' edit (if all goes well) 

I know this “film” was targeted at kids, but I’d like to make a more mature viewing experience for folks who grew up on Star Wars.

 

Here are some changes I am considering (and will update this list as I go):

- No more “Space Ghost” newsreel voiceover.  I almost left the theatre at this point.  I’ll be creating a crawl and then dropping into the Battle.

- Ahsoka lines:  No more “Sky guy” or “Artooie” crap.  Chopping out as many “stinky” references as possible.  I felt the Ahsoka character, while headstrong/precocious simply talked too much and observed too little.  She won’t be quite as chatty in this edit. The lip movements throughout the film are bad enough that replacing these should not be too tough.  (famous last words, eh?) Some of this might also be achieved by discrete cuts.  Since it is animated and has a rather choppy (or wooden) feel to it, I may be able to get away with some of the dialog changes and keep it fairly unnoticeable.

- Ziro's dialogue – change all of it and add subtitles (I'll be recording myself speaking Huttese and adding room ambience/ subtle reverb)

- music at Ziro's (something otherworldly - not that awful Film Noir jazz.)

- taking out Battle droid inane dialog throughout (and /or modulating it lower a la ADM's Episode III).  No more “outnumbered? What?  One, two, three…”  I like them more menacing than slapstick.

- same with IG droids.

 

More to come as I think about it.  Feel free to post other suggestions.

 

Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness - Chinese proverb

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 (Edited)

I already had some ideas.

Create a crawl.  Add the Fox Fanfare and Logos and the real star wars music by John Williams.

And beyond that as far as edits and cuts go i would watch the gout to see the oot for reference, fuck the prequels.  USe oot music not prequel etc.

“Always loved Vader’s wordless self sacrifice. Another shitty, clueless, revision like Greedo and young Anakin’s ghost. What a fucking shame.” -Simon Pegg.

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sounds awesome. if it works, you could work the entire series perhaps?

 

please dont use the clone wars logo though, use the STAR WARS one, but perhaps enstead of "EPISODE" it could be "CLONE WARS I" or something, or perhaps EPISODE II.I, then EPISODE II.II etc?

 

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ben_danger said:

sounds awesome. if it works, you could work the entire series perhaps?

 

please dont use the clone wars logo though, use the STAR WARS one, but perhaps enstead of "EPISODE" it could be "CLONE WARS I" or something, or perhaps EPISODE II.I, then EPISODE II.II etc?

 

LOL - the entire series may take quite a bit more time than I'd like

I plan to remove the CW logo and go with the STAR WARS logo and then.... I'm not quite sure...  I'm leaning towards just "THE CLONE WARS" without episode numbers.  I'm looking at this as part of the SW theatrical releases... as a stand alone.

 

thanks for the ideas

 

Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness - Chinese proverb

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 (Edited)

I will mostly be keeping the soundtrack (with the above stated exception).  I know many people dislike it - but since this wasn't live action, I had no problem with it.  The wooden, marionette, Thunderbird style already takes me out of the SW universe enough to warrant a stylistic music change.

anyway - I think I found a song that will work great for the Ziro scene.  

http://soundclick.com/share?songid=1699861

It has overtones to Jabba's palace, is unique enough and fits my 'otherworldly' criteria.

Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness - Chinese proverb

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Here's an idea - Cut the movie length pilot down to a 22 minute pilot? [If you don't then i might...;)] You could trim a lot of fat during padded out battle sequences where nothing really feels at stake and no one is gaining the upper hand.

Add the Fox fanfare and logos, Skyjedi? - Overall I think that's a terrible idea - as much as fans might enjoy it. I'd think that sort of thing to be misleading and insulting. This is not a fox release - people just need to deal with that, Does anyone really care outside of hearing the fanfare? - Makes people seem kinda shallow.

However, An opening crawl and JW main theme might work, I support your dialogue changes, if it all works out well. The droids are far too slapstick.

It might be interesting down the track to mix a few episodes into a fresh movie, But I guess we'll have to wait and see how things play out...

What really annoys me most about the film is the boring plotline. everything else is minor, I don't really mind a lot of things that a lot of people seem to be up in arms about.

 

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 (Edited)

ARRRGH!  I'm having a heck of a time with trying to rip vobs / demux audio / split the surround channels on this one.  I've spent about 4 hours in the "Technical How-To's" section and still can't break this one.  I'm on a Mac using Final Cut Express  and have MactheRipper2.6.6, Handbrake, MPEGstreamclip, BBDemux and mAC3dec and all to no avail.  Actually I can do handbrake to MP4, but the quality is not there and am left with only stereo sound - which is no good for editing.

Any help or ideas from Mac folks would be great.  

Here's a very quick, rough working draft of what I'd like to do with the scene at Ziro's.  This took me about 10 minutes (using iMovie and someone else's Youtube upload).  I stress it is a draft, or sketch if you will and not meant to be any sort of final quality or audio mix.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcJ9sPR3f80

Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness - Chinese proverb

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IMPRESSIVE!

 

and very seamless,

thats great, and it will be interesting to see

what else you do in this edit..

 

later

-1

[no GOUT in CED?-> GOUT CED]

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thanks.  if only I could get the bloody rips (video and audio streams) to work

Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness - Chinese proverb

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Okay, some constructive crit- obviously, this is a rough draft, and I'll try to reflect that in my critique.

Ziro's voice - an odd echo compared to the rest of the video.  Could this be fixed, or perhaps add the echo to everything else?


The band - In order to match the song, it seems you slowed down the band.  While this works in theory, now they seem to move all clunky and un realistically.

Just my thoughts.

A Goon in a Gaggle of 'em

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thanks for the feedback.  I do appreciate it.

 

the room reverb is way off - you're right and that will be fixed.

The video speed was not altered... so some of that may just be the awful Youtube quality... but honestly most of the CW movie felt clunky to me (especially the dancers at the Hutt locales).

Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness - Chinese proverb

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If you want alternate music, let me know what you're looking for and I'll upload some good pieces I have over 10 gbs of very usuable instrumental music (which I mostly have for trailers and Renascent)

Star Wars Renascent

Inspired by the Godfather Part II and a revamp of Star Wars: Reborn

View the discussion thread

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You know, maybe cutting the shots of the band alltogether and instead putting in Cantina music from KOTOR would be a good idea.  The lower cantina music from Taris was pretty awesome, and might fit a Hutt's club.

A Goon in a Gaggle of 'em

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Johnny Ringo said:

Here's an idea - Cut the movie length pilot down to a 22 minute pilot? [If you don't then i might...;)] You could trim a lot of fat during padded out battle sequences where nothing really feels at stake and no one is gaining the upper hand.

Add the Fox fanfare and logos, Skyjedi? - Overall I think that's a terrible idea - as much as fans might enjoy it. I'd think that sort of thing to be misleading and insulting. This is not a fox release - people just need to deal with that, Does anyone really care outside of hearing the fanfare? - Makes people seem kinda shallow.

However, An opening crawl and JW main theme might work, I support your dialogue changes, if it all works out well. The droids are far too slapstick.

It might be interesting down the track to mix a few episodes into a fresh movie, But I guess we'll have to wait and see how things play out...

What really annoys me most about the film is the boring plotline. everything else is minor, I don't really mind a lot of things that a lot of people seem to be up in arms about.

 

I agree totally, the idea was to make it known that it is not an actual film in the series persae, I'd keep the clone wars logo, just make the intro longer if you want a crawl, but you'd have to be pretty seamless, or whilst in the crawl have flashes of the original introduction every few seconds of the battle around the galaxy, once again it'd be alot of work but just throwing out some ideas.

 

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Isn't this whole film detro-cannocail? I pray it's not cannoical

 

Never scene CLONE WARS film... lord willing...i'll only watch your edit.  I can't stand bad CGI characters.  i don't know the whole movie sounded so terrible!

 

(I was Thinking about doing something similiar to the Cartoon Network Series and intergrating it into the series.  Just thinking about it)

 

I actually thought that was what you were doing but if you can get this *film* to work more power to you.

 

 

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does anyone know how many episodes are going to be in the first season?

 

im holding off edit plans until all source material is available.:)

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22.

 

Any Mac user out there able to tell me what you use to decode an AC3 to 6 wav files?  BBdemux does nothing - literally - it just says "done"

Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness - Chinese proverb

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Hye I like the rought draft on youtube, nice job

Remember, Highlander, you’ve both still got your full measure of life. Use it well, and your future will be glorious.

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 (Edited)

I saw the clip on Youtube as well and while i thought the voice over was an improvement the music is all wrong, and even though Ziro now no longer sounds gay he still looks gay.

I mean there is no way you can make him a green looking hutt that is older than Jabba and a scarred killer and thug while he is all purple and looks like he has make up on.

Are you going to redub the roger roger robot voices i find those extermely annoying.

And watching the tv show is hlarious as every week Grievous  is incompetant and loses more  ships and droids and escapes like a coward.  And he is supposed to be this terrifying Jedi Killer.  No wonder Anakin and Obi Wan did not take him seriously in Revenge of the Sith he is a walking talking tin heep joke.

“Always loved Vader’s wordless self sacrifice. Another shitty, clueless, revision like Greedo and young Anakin’s ghost. What a fucking shame.” -Simon Pegg.

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 (Edited)

thanks for the compliments on the very rough draft.

 

A lot of this edit still depends on me being able to decode AC3 to WAV.  If that doesn't happen it will be much tougher to do a decent job.

 

Yes, I intend to cut a lot of the droid idiocy.  Thank God there was no Jar Jar.

 

I think Adywan has raised the bar extremely high for us uber novices.  I do not have the skills or know how to recolor, or repaint Ziro.  So his look will stay.

 

As far as the new music... what's there now is a temp track, though I am growing fond of it.  I always appreciated that John Williams had a very unique sound for the Mos Eisely band.  It was sort of big band jazz, but used steel drum and Moog synth - giving it an "otherworldy" feel.  The music used in the theatrical release has got to go.  Film Noir music just doesn't fit, nor the music used after the IG droid is removed.  So I'm still looking for other music, but at this point I the temp track reminds me somewhat of Jabba's palace (circa 1983) when we first enter the scene, NOT Lapti Nek.

 

Again for me, editing this is more about making it less painful to watch.  I do not consider this "film" to be any part of the Star Wars cannon... more like a "What If?" or part of he Infinities line.

Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness - Chinese proverb

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cancelled - see first post

Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness - Chinese proverb