Star Wars A New Hope: DSG Special Edition (V1 NEARING COMPLETION) — Page 5

Hello there! I finally have the time to push forward with this edit with a potential V1 or workprint release sometime early next year.

This project was literally years in the making as it was mainly hindered by my inexperience in editing (I was literally in high school when I started this edit in 2019, lol) and lack of equipment (which I do now have)

However, work on this will be quire slow as I’m doing this in my free time as I’m currently studying in college as of the moment and can’t give too much time on this project.

Hopefully, if I’m lucky, I’ll probably do a V2 of this edit and lean towards more “fixing” changing Revisited-style than doing a normal SE fan edit, but thats in the future.

Overall, this project taught me alot about waiting for the right time, and it took alot of patience to get where I am. So I’d like to thank all of you guys for sticking through this edit that’s clearly 5 years too late!

Another thing, I’m thinking of revamping the cut list by alot to incorporate more visual changes than “making it fit canon-wise” like other ANH edits.

(still torn apart between using the original crawl or the 81 crawl)

However, I’ve been thinking about reinstating Biggs’ scenes from the SE (and the “Biggs, Biggs!” radio part) as I do wonder if George’s reinstatement of the scene was really effective helping the audience sympathize with the Rebels alot more, and thus care for their deaths when they do die during the Battle of Yavin. Thoughts?

Hello guys! I think it’s time for another update/addition:

I recently got into contact with RyanGoldenVO, a voice actor who sounds EXACTLY like James Earl Jones’ Darth Vader (watch his AMAZING voice over to repalce JEJ’s old voice in Rogue One: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmRRzpJDDv4) and I asked him if he could provide one line to fix a continuity error in A New Hope that, until now, could only be fixed by doing heavy VFX compositing and rotoscoping.

After the scene where Han and Luke destroy TIE fighters using the Falcon’s turrents, we see a cut-away of Vader and Tarkin aboard the Death Star, in which Vader mentions to Tarkin that “they had just made the jump into hyperspace” although the next scene clearly doesn’t show them in a Hyperspace Tunnel.

For years, the solution was always to just heavily re-composite the scene of Han and Leia’s conversation on the Falcon to add a blue tint and add a spinning Hyperdrive tunnel outside the cockpit, which has been done in Hal9000’s Custom SE and Adywan’s SW Revisited, but I always felt like it looked off and didn’t really match the visual aesthetic of a movie that was shot and filmed in 1976.

So I thought the easiest solution to avoid the unneccesary VFX work is to just swap Darth Vader’s line to instead imply that they had been intercepted, and shot down their fighters, removing any unnneccesary mention of them “jumping into hyperspace” to escape.

Thanks to RyanGoldenVO for doing the lines, and helping in distorting the audio to match the theatrical mix (which unfortunately severely degraded JEJ’s vocal quality), here’s the clip below!

I also have similar variants of this line, which instead he says “They had just escaped from our fighters” but I felt that there was too much dead air between Vader and Tarkin.

https://streamable.com/ly0w0v

Fascinating, it really does sound like him!

I’d be interested in hearing the variants you came up with. It’s also gotten me thinking about other lines for that scene. The trouble with it is that if the Falcon isn’t in Hyperspace in the next scene, there’s really no place that it could be that feels right. It can’t be still escaping from the Death Star because the tone of the scene is very much that they have already escaped and can breathe easy, nor can it be that they have already traveled to the Yavin system because they are talking like the escape was only moments or at most minutes ago.

But here’s an idea: What if the Falcon went into Hyperspace immediately after escaping the Death Star, only to quickly drop back out of Hyperspace and calculate a new course to Yavin? That would make sense because in ESB it is established that a ship can be tracked to its destination based on its course entering Hyperspace, so a multi-legged journey would be implied here. It also would explain why Han seems so cocky about his escape and his conviction that the Empire can’t track his ship, since it’s making multiple jumps to get to its destination.

Vader’s line could be:
“They’ve made their first jump through Hyperspace”
or
“They’ve completed their first jump through Hyperspace”.

Now we can have the next scene happen moments after escaping the Death Star while Han waits for the navicomputer to give him new coordinates. In fact, with this concept, Vader’s line doesn’t even need to change, but the change would at least hint that this multi-hop technique is being used.

I feel like adding the implication of hyperspace jumps would needlessly over complicate the flow of the scenes of Death Star Escape -> TIE Fighter Shootout -> Heroes rest (and talk about important character-driven exposition)

I feel like tying in hyperspace jumps feels like an addition to add in lore that shouldn’t be there at the point in what the audience is fed, because as mentioned the progression is pretty linear and easy to understand, and adding that hyperspace jumping line would probably make them confused as to the mechanics of how that would work, whereas they should rather be focused on the scene immediately following it, where we see dialogue that is integral to Han’s character development.

I want my edit to be as vanilla as possible in terms of changes. In fact, this might be the most revisionist change I’m adding (similar to Adywan’s “There’ll be no escape this time” line for Threepio) as I’m completely changing a character’s line and context whereas the other changes I usually add visual changes and fixes that tidy up the movie to a better looking version of the Special Edition thats my own perfect blend of the Theatrical and CGI additions.

I’d also like to mention that the voice actor basically did this for free and I feel too embarrassed to pester him even more or use his generosity too much.

Also I’ll cobble together the other alternate take later today where he says “They had just escaped from our fighters” and you guys can vote to see which one sounds better.

Feel free to pester me!

I had a lot of fun doing one of these edits, to be honest.

I’ve also never made a laserdisc-esque filter before, so that was really fun!

Feel free to hit me up via email for any other questions/concerns.

Oh, I didn’t expect to see you here! I graciously thank you for your kindness and generousity in volunteering for my edit!

Here is the other take, where Vader says “they had just escaped our fighters” instead. I think I’m starting to grow on this take since it’s short and simple, whereas the other one was kinda lengthy, and the dead air kind of works because your eyes then gravitate towards Tarkin’s reaction afterwards.

https://streamable.com/zuoraq

I believe Adywan’s done that with the HD version of ANH Revisited. I’ll probably add that in the future, but as of the moment I wanna make Mos Eisley a bit empty, similar to the theatrical version.

I think it’s really cool that this edit is making visual changes whilst still attempting to look like something made in 1977. Recently I’ve come to believe that maintaining that authenticity is really important, rather then shoving 90s CG (or more modern CG) into a 70s movie. It just doesn’t look right.

Thank you for your appreciation towards my edit! Although I’d clarify that this edit still contains a fair bit of the 90s Special Edition CGI material (Battle of Yavin, Mos Eisley but without the annoying and distracting bits, Corridor hall extension) but my goal is to make everything as visually consistent as possible.

The one thing that always griped me about the SE was how everything was “tacked on” without care or nuance to the visual aesthetic of the film, like someone would put a 3D Model of a UFO abducting people over archival WW2 16mm footage.

However, upon discovering the 35mm prints of the 1997 SE online and skimming through it, I always thought that the CGI actually meshes well because of the natural film grain, color grading, etc. which was basically the inspiration behind this edit, that it was still possible to integrate the SE but less intrusively.

While I do greatly enjoy the other edits on here (especially Adywan’s Revisited) a constructive critique I always have is that his edits push the movie to look more “modern” and while that isn’t really a problem to the majority, I feel like they still stick out in its own way, which is still WAY less intrusive than the SE.

I want to be the bridge between the overly intrusive Special Edition, the Theatrical version and Adywan’s Revisited in terms of drastically fixing continuity changes and errors, keeping the film’s feel as “old” but not “dated” if you get what I’m trying to convey here, haha.

Think of movies like Independence Day, Jurassic Park and Terminator 2, their CGI isn’t as modern as today, but it doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb either like the SE version of Star Wars. There’s actual care and competence put in it and the 35mm film elements mesh well with the 90s CGI and VFX.

So overall, this edit sort of pushes Star Wars to look like it was shot in the early 90s with all the analog film goodness, but still keep a level of competent CGI and VFX that a rushed and overworked LFL, Lowry and ILM weren’t able to do in 1996.

First post updated with more changes added as this edit is close to being finished, after almost 5 years in limbo! (To be fair, I was a teenager when I first made this project and had alot of growing up to do) Expect a V1 in very early 2024 (either January or Febuary)

All looks pretty cool. Will look forward to congratulating you on its completion!

Thank you Hal!

Another change I’m going to add is a new “enhanced” matte of the interior shot of the Rebel hangar base, as I find the original theatrical version to be too grainy and soft, while the SE version is shorter by about 50% as it makes room for the new additional scene of Luke reuniting with Biggs.

The process of doing this was time-consuming as I first had to stitch the SE matte to fit the original matte in Photoshop (the SE version of this is stretched as the roof is way lower than the theatrical version, I had to zoom in to compensate), after which I did a weird combination of blurring the matte to match the already blurry shot, then stabilized the gate weave and aggresively DNR’ed the shot which made it more soft and painterly, then sharpened and added grain onto it.

I may definitely have to redo this shot tommorow to tone down the obnoxious DNR, but here’s a proof of concept of this matte:

https://streamable.com/2mer0t

And another one!

Here’s the reworked Death Star explosion to match the new Alderaan explosion VFX element to match closer to its color and “intensity” than the last one, I’ve decided to keep the praxis ring on the explosion as I figured it would make way more sense as the Death Star is a very different beast than a regular planet, as it is a literal space station full of chemicals that would hypothetically make it’s destruction look like a nuclear bomb explosion. I also find the praxis ring impactful in selling the narrative climax of the film, giving a visual indication of accomplishment to the audience.

Rosy wording aside, heres the clip in question! I’d like to know your thoughts about it, as I mainly did some grading work in Resolve to shift the colors to a yellowish hue, similar to the Alderaan explosion element, then added extra explosions, and zoomed in the shot a bit to tighten the frame composition.

(Note that the audio is not final and will add extra explosion SFX to visually sync with the ones on here)

https://streamable.com/2stju2