Info Wanted: On the Conveyor Belt scene edit

Hey all,

I think we’re all pretty familiar with the scene in Episode II called “On the Conveyor Belt.”

Well, I’ve been trying to figure out the story behind this.

I know that the scene was a very late in the game addition, something that was sparked by the concept art for the droid factory and in a way, is almost similar to a scene in Minority Report (better done in Minority Report I might add)…

We all know what good friends SS and GL are… it makes me wonder if maybe GL saw an eary cut of the film, or maybe even just heard about the scene in talking to SS about it and maybe even SS suggested he use it, decided to have a scene like it in Episode II (seeing as they both came out around the same time in 2002). I mean the Geonosians even have those sonic guns lol…

Anyways!

I was curious because I know originally Ben Burtt “composed” this auditory piece to accompany the scene based on sfx and drums (seeing as he’s trying to be a composer now or some shit) but Lucas decided he wanted to have music in the scene and had JW score the scene (doing a trade off and letting Burtt use his percussive sfx in ‘The Arena’ instead.)

So Williams comes in and scores that scene quite late as well… Its pretty safe to say that Williams almost NEVER composes music without some sort of visual to accompany it and so the same goes for this cue. I know that it was all completely blank blue screen but what he saw were still probably some rough but near finalized shots…

But the question then becomes, what were these visuals?

I tried layering the music over the video (without attempting any edits yet) and found that it actually fit quite well. There was a small omission in the beginning to get the rest of the music to match up, but once I did that, it fit rather well.

The only problem is it’s only about half the length of the scene.

I thought "well, that must be because they added stuff and extended the sequence, but it doesn’t seem to me they did too much of that. The music, as I layered it, seemed to work perfectly so it makes me wonder what could have been changed…

It makes me wonder if more music was written for the scene too. We know that the end of the scene uses unreleased music and most of the sequence is heavily edited musically so it makes me wonder how long that cue at the end was and if it was meant to cover more.

Anyways, I wonder if anyone knows any of the story behind this cue or behind the usage in the film. I made a video edit that you can all watch on youtube.

I originally had the unedited version, but I have since tried editing it to the music to try and see how it would go…

I was curious what your all thoughts have been.

On the Conveyor Belt on YouTube