Community Focus Thread 1: The Phantom Menace — Page 20

I agree it’s good on paper but there are a few points, most prominent being going to the Gunguns being marched around in surrender.

Hal 9000 said:

I agree it’s good on paper but there are a few points, most prominent being going to the Gunguns being marched around in surrender.

Apologies, I can’t quite parse what you’re saying here- can you clarify?

Ooh, one other thought: I don’t like the brief cutaway to the Neimoidians coming so early, since there are a few cutaways in that section (one other brief one where the droid control ship is seen before activating the droids to fight the Gungans), so it adds yet another bit of cognitive load.

But what if they’re looking at something else before demanding droidekas? What if the viewscreen could be modified to show them watching one of the otherwise-cut shots of Padmé making her way through the palace? That way it’s part of her plot without us having to linger on her party’s travel, and it leads nicely into her capture as it’s not so much earlier than those scenes.

I meant that, at least in your test clip from a year ago, some of the music in bordering sequences jumps all over. The one that stood out to me most was jumping from the space battle to the bit where Jar Jar and Tarpals are arrested.

Ah yes, for certain. Haven’t thought about that in the slightest yet.

Oh gotcha then! Maybe soon we will have a music generator trained on John Williams’ corpus.

To be honest, I’ve done very little music editing. I don’t know if this is the right approach, but I’d assume that it’s best to get the scene order working, then see where the music needs to fit, then tweak the whole to ‘feel’.

I think we shouldn’t cut after Qui-Gon’s death, this plotline is problematic because it has two consecutive low points, but if we go from Qui-Gon’s death directly to Obi-Wan falling in the pit, we end up with one big low point that we can pair up with Anakin stranding inside the control ship and Padmé being captured.
It also adds a bit of dramatic effect, because had Qui-Gon lasted only for a few seconds longer, Obi-Wan would have joined him against Maul. With this order we can also place Obi-Wan bisecting Maul before the destruction of the control ship and Gunray’s capture, thus placing the moment of triumph last, followed by Obi-Wan attending to Qui-Gon.

However we would lose Anakin restoring hope through his destruction of the control ship, in its place we would gain a cool cut connecting the scenes stylistically, if we go from Obi-Wan killing Maul with a green saber to the green lights in Anakin’s cockpit replacing the red.

All in all it should play out like this:

1.-10. the same as Eddie proposed, that works really nicely, I think
11. Continue the Lightsaber fight into the force field room (maybe the most jarring cut, because the fight essentially jumps from one level to another with only a short establishing shot between them)
12. Anakin joins the space battle (same as Eddies point 11)
13. Lightsaber fight continues, Qui-Gon is killed, Obi-Wan screams and just as Maul turns around to face him, the force field opens. Obi-Wan fights aggressively, but is thrown down into the pit by Maul.
14. Padmé and her team are captured and brought before Gunray (I think we would need another shot bridging the two scenes)
15. Anakin enters the droid control ship but is stranded
16. Maul taunts Obi-Wan, the later grabs Qui-Gon’s saber through the force, jumps out of the pit and bisects his opponent
17. Anakin restarts his ship and destroys the control ship
18. The Gungans are freed and we see how the droid army collapses.
19. Add a shot or two of collapsing droids to the throneroom scene, the Naboo pick up their weapons and the Viceroy is captured. Our heroes were victorious,
20. but Qui-Gon fell in the struggle, Obi-Wan knees besides his dying Master and promises to train Anakin.

Yeah, good shout Peter Pan, especially on the lightsaber fight reordering. It’d feel a lot more punchy if we took out that moment of downtime where Obi-Wan’s just waiting behind the gates - it should be that they drop while he’s at his most emotional, prompting him to fight in a way that Maul then exploits to quickly send him down the pit.

And regarding the Padmé capture, I do have a shot available which bridges those two scenes. By zooming (aggressively) on Gunray turning toward the door (originally after it opens) and playing the door opening sound effect, we can then transition to Padmé walking in, then continue from the next part of the zoomed shot (but unzoomed this time).

By zooming (aggressively)

I’m picturing a snap zoom. Probably not what you meant but I find it funny. There’s already some in the Battle of Geonosis too.

Well, now that restructuring the final battle is a major goal again, I figure I might as well throw in my two cents on how the climax should play out.

I remember suggesting, way back when this thread was new, that I would like to cut out the Gungan portion of the final battle completely. That idea was almost immediately shot down, though, because the entire battle hinges on them using the Gungan diversion to sneak into the palace with minimal resistance. However, I still really dislike the Gungan battle, and would prefer to have as much of it cut out as possible. So, here’s my suggestion: have the majority of the battle take place offscreen.

I know that doesn’t sound like a good idea at first, but I think it could potentially work. We don’t really need to see any of the Gungan subplot between the droids advancing into the shields and the defeated Gungans surrendering. It’s clearly shown that the Gungan forces are woefully unprepared for the power of the droid army, so is it really essential to see them defeated on-screen in order for the audience to accept that they lost? That way, we get to focus on the plotlines that are actually pretty cool (Space battle, Duel of the Fates, palace infiltration), as well as bypass cutting around Jar-Jar’s obnoxiousness almost entirely.

vranir said:

What role does that leave for the Gungans in the entire film though? I agree that their help isn’t great, but it is kind of the “let’s all work together” message, which would be lost if their battle were removed.

You’re right, of course. But in my opinion, a half-assed message that allows for a cool final battle is better than a message that’s conveyed through lame slapstick on a Windows XP background.

Also, I’m not advocating for cutting the battle completely: just leaving most of it offscreen. That way, you can imagine that the Gungans’ not-so-great help was a little bit more competent.

Just looking at work commitments for the next short while, it looks like I won’t have the time to create an Episode 2 focus thread in the short term. If anyone wants to put something together please be my guest!

EddieDean said:

Just looking at work commitments for the next short while, it looks like I won’t have the time to create an Episode 2 focus thread in the short term. If anyone wants to put something together please be my guest!

I volunteer as tribute! I’ve become almost obsessed with creating an ideal AOTC edit recently, so this would be a perfect way to lay out my personal goals with the movie.

A montage like that would have to go right after Qui-Gon’s death, to match the emotions. And ideally we could add in some shots of Padmé’s team and the pilots failing their respective quests as well.

Edit: The question is whether you would want to cut away from this moment though.

I’m going to get on board this Phantom Menace train eventually, I have some stuff I worked on in the past for it. Definitely agree with a lot here. I was planning on dubbing over all of the Neimoidians to help present them as more villainous and assertive. I pulled all the audio voice lines out of the Star Wars: The Old Republic video game which fully voiced the alien Neimoidian language in the studio. It sounds more authentic than some of the other “foreign language” dubs I’ve seen used on them, and it fits into the Legends lore as a bonus! I have over 600 lines with all sorts of varying emotions to sort through in order to build their new dialogue.

Wow, nice find! That’ll be interesting to hear.

Interesting! I have some time coming up at the start of May which I intend to spend editing, probably focusing on this. I’d really like to crack the ending, I think I have a vision for it. I might play a bit more with Jar Jar’s voice too.

In a wider effort to reorient Anakin’s turn to Vader to being more about power then attachment (something I’m trying to accomplish with my “Vader Edition” prequel trilogy), what if part of the reason the Council rejects Anakin is because he secretly craves revenge on his master? I’d be 100% understandable, he was a slave. I don’t think there was ever a slave that didn’t want to give their master what they deserved.

The part of him missing his mother would still be incorporated, but I think it’d go a long way to show that Anakin had power-hungry tendencies from the beginning which ties into his past as a slave.

Gandalf the Cyan said:

It’s a good idea, but I think that would work much better if we actually SAW Anakin being treated badly. In the actual movie, his slave life doesn’t seem all that bad. This is a minor issue in TPM, but having Anakin’s vengefulness being a plot point without seeing his abuse would make the issue much more obvious.

One of the changes I was planning on making was taking advantage of the alien language dialogue and making Watto verbally abusive and alluding to worse stuff happening off-screen.