Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3: The Linear Cut (WIP)

I don’t know what everyone else’s thoughts on the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy were, but for me, I personally liked Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 the best. I liked the darker, more serious tone, and thought it balanced out the goofiness that was relied on way too much in the previous two. I thought Rocket’s character arc and tragic backstory was some of the best stuff in the entire trilogy. And as a send-off for James Gunn’s work on the franchise, it ended on a true high note.

However, there is one issue that I had with it, along with pretty much everyone else. The issue was in how the flashback scenes were scattered about in a back-and-forth kind of way. I felt like it muddied up the structure of the film. I have decided to create this edit to correct that mistake. Rather than throw the flashback scenes all over the film, I felt that it would be better to just send all of the flashbacks to the beginning of the film. This fixes a lot of the film’s structural issues, and it also places greater emphasis on Rocket’s importance to the film. It also allows us more time to get acquainted with the other Guardians in the second act. Particularly Quill, and his learning to accept that the new Gamora is not the old Gamora he loved.

The edit will be roughly the same running time as the original, as the only changes that have been made are in the rearrangement of certain scenes. But I believe this rearrangement solves the film’s biggest weakness and gives an already great entry in the MCU an even greater resonance than it did originally.

Changes list

/=Altered

/Moved Rocket’s surgery and first meeting with his animal friends to scene 3
/Moved Rocket’s playtime with his animal friends to scene 4
/Moved Rocket’s discussion with the High Evolutionary on perfection and imperfection to scene 5
/Moved Rocket and friends’ discussion on their names to scene 6
/Moved the High Evolutionary’s interrogation on Rocket’s intelligence to scene 7
/Moved the deaths of Rocket’s friends and his escape to scenes 8 and 9

I’ve run into a bit of an audio editing snag. The problem is with Rainbow’s “Since You Been Gone.” This song was placed in between the scene when Quill and friends begin their quest to save Rocket, and the flashback when little Rocket is playing with the other animals. I’m okay with it during the latter scene, but not the former, so I have to come up with a way to get rid of the first part of the song. I tried using AI to get rid of the song like I did to keep Strickland’s dialogue intact for my Paradox edit, but this time around, going AI wasn’t as helpful as I hoped it would be. When I selected vocals, I would still get to hear the voice of Graham Bonnet during the second half of audio. And if I selected instrumentals, well, you can figure out 2 and 2 on that one.

I did get some help from a fanedit.org user named ronin428, who referred me to an AI known as LyRuno. This did bring about a huge improvement. I finally got rid of Graham Bonnet, and I now have a good enough soundbyte for Starlord when he says “let’s go save our friend.” But there are still traces of the song playing in the SFX while the ship is warping its way to Orgocorp. I tried using another AI to see if I could get rid of the traces even further, but the results I got showed little to no improvement.

So now, I’m kind of in a rut. It seems like I may have to resort to throwing in my own sound effects in order to solve this problem, but it’s something I only want to do as a last resort because I don’t know if I have enough sounds in my library to compensate for the sound effects of the ship leaving for Orgocorp.

If anyone has any alternative ideas, I could use them.

After much trial and error, I decided to throw five of the six channels through AI to remove the music from the scene. The results were a dramatic improvement over my original troubles. So much so, that I decided to just upload an audio test to see how others feel about it.

Some things to note: First, most of the AI work is in the shots where the ship is leaving. The shots of Groot watching Rocket were mostly worked over by me. Second, the video I’ve uploaded is in stereo. The final edit will (hopefully) be in 5.1 surround unless certain elements come into play to mess things up.

https://youtu.be/_yvnEe7wAYo

Found another area where the music needed to be taken care of. Here’s a test of what I’ve done.

https://youtu.be/XoZq1HbLugU

Found another bit of music I wanted to remove as a result of my changes. My free trial with LyRuno expired, so I switched over to AudioStrip for this one. Here’s hoping it works well enough.

https://youtu.be/VLPozFgat0s