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And in my mind I’m feeling that episodes should run in the 20-50 minute range, otherwise I should think about restructuring.
If you feel this way is the best for your project, do it.
The Clone Wars: Refocused [COMPLETE] — Page 14
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And in my mind I’m feeling that episodes should run in the 20-50 minute range, otherwise I should think about restructuring.
If you feel this way is the best for your project, do it.
I won’t make myself a slave to it obviously, but it’s where my mental alerts will kick in to rethink.
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I think the ordering you presented is brilliant, especially with the balancing of character development and the thought you’ve given to Ahsoka’s arcs and how each one shows different aspects of her character. I do think the idea that certain Domino Squad arcs could be used as flashbacks could work well, provided the pacing still works. Really excited about all the ordering and where things lie currently!
Sorry, I missed this earlier. Yeah, I’m still trying to work out what to do with Domino Squad. It could go later in the series and use ‘Near the beginning of the Clone Wars’ for Rookies, up to ‘Present Day’ in time for ARC Troopers. You’d lose that early suprise that the clones actually can have really interesting stories though, but you’d gain the benefit of having clone development be a bit more focused towards the end. And you could group it either as:
- All three arcs together, though time is implied to pass in these episodes so it doesn’t quite work.
- Rookies, then Clone Cadets/ARC Troopers
- Rookies / Clone Cadets, then ARC Troopers
- Rookies / Clone Cadets, then Grievous Intrigue / ARC Troopers (like Smudger did, making the kidnap of Eeth Koth be part of Grievous’ plan to pull Jedi from Kamino)
Right now I think having people realise ‘oh nice, that hit me harder than I expected a clone story to’ is more valuable than maintaining a familiar memory of the characters (since they don’t have huge or powerful character arcs so much as that they reoccur) and it’s more valuable to get that good set up and payoff of Rookies/ARC troopers as close together as possible. So I might go for that later pairing - Rookies/Clone Cadets then GI/ARC Troopers as a two part episode at the end of my ‘season one’.
(*Note: I’m not going to release it labelled as ‘season one’, the seasons I’m using in planning are definitely just for my internal pacing.)
Speaking of Grievous, my current ordering/selection has a side benefit of minimising uses of Dooku and Grievous where they come off as weak or cheap, which is cool, so we only really see them when they’re either coordinating things or giving themselves new levels of threat (sometimes above what we see in the movies, which adds value). I still like the idea of switching the owner of the Malevolence from Grievous into Trench, and the main threat of it being that he’s an escape pod killer rather than the goofy looking EMP weapon.
That just leaves the Jedi Younglings arc, which I’m not quite sure about. I think it’s cute and fun, but I don’t know if it works tonally in a show that’s trying to be a bit more focused on the tragedy of the Clone Wars. It’s another easy Grievous beat, and quite a cartoony one, plus it focuses heavily on a bunch of kids. The kids are pretty good for kids (they’re not really cringey), but still, it’s much more of a caper than an adventure or a moody escalation. We also cover Ahsoka’s ability to train and inspire in the Trandoshan arc and the Onderon arc. That said, it’d be nice to frame it as a recognition of her successes in the Trandoshan arc. I’ll watch this one again.
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The Younglings arc should be at least in Continuity because it explains what happened to Hondo’s base, shows the Slave One repaired and explains the lore around kyber crystals, which are a staple of the new canon. If included in Quality, maybe you could trim the arc a bit (much as you plan to do with Onderon) and move it as early as possible (before “Eminence”).
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Good shout on the eminence ordering!
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The Younglings arc should be at least in Continuity because it explains what happened to Hondo’s base, shows the Slave One repaired and explains the lore around kyber crystals, which are a staple of the new canon. If included in Quality, maybe you could trim the arc a bit (much as you plan to do with Onderon) and move it as early as possible (before “Eminence”).
I’m curious. Why would you say to move it before Eminence?
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A Clone-Wars cut like yours could make we watch the series. Give me a Star Wars story, not a kid-focus-and-toy-selling-first story. Something between quality and continuity, I suspect, is what I am really after. I mean, it is a war story so it may depict the war, even if some parts are not connected to some wider story arc.
If “quality” is meant to include the good parts of this too, then sign me up.
Here is the trick: I am actually mostly unbiased, I have only seen a few Season 1 and a little bit of the final season stuff, so if you guys need a guinea pig, it is me.
I won’t look into this thread in any detailed manner, so just add me one some list and PM me if there is something to review.
In case you take up my offer, I shall devise some universal rating system to better quantify your efforts.
Best of luck!
Stay safe everyone.
For seventeen years the renegade Pfhor scoutship jumped between the closely packed stars of the galactic core. And all over the ship, dancing through the wreckage of the Pfhor computer core, Durandal was laughing…
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That’s perfect buddy, unspoilt newbies will definitely be really valuable. Once I start releasing I intend to do one weekly- it’d be great to have your feedback as it airs “live”.
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The Younglings arc should be at least in Continuity because it explains what happened to Hondo’s base, shows the Slave One repaired and explains the lore around kyber crystals, which are a staple of the new canon. If included in Quality, maybe you could trim the arc a bit (much as you plan to do with Onderon) and move it as early as possible (before “Eminence”).
I’m curious. Why would you say to move it before Eminence?
I meant Revival, lol
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The Younglings arc should be at least in Continuity because it explains what happened to Hondo’s base, shows the Slave One repaired and explains the lore around kyber crystals, which are a staple of the new canon. If included in Quality, maybe you could trim the arc a bit (much as you plan to do with Onderon) and move it as early as possible (before “Eminence”).
I’m curious. Why would you say to move it before Eminence?
I meant Revival, lol
Gotcha lol. Still, why move the arc?
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A reference is made to Grievous ransacking Hondo’s base in the one episode, but seen in the other. I think it can be worked around.
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A reference is made to Grievous ransacking Hondo’s base in the one episode, but seen in the other. I think it can be worked around.
Yep.
And honestly I don’t think the Younglings arc depicts Grievous that badly. You’d only need to trim the bit where he goes all out villainous gloating after Ahsoka flees, when’s fired upon by Slave I, and maybe the space battle with Obi-Wan’s forces (this one mostly for pacing). The lightsaber duel with Ahsoka is decidedly balanced in Grievous’s favor.
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A reference is made to Grievous ransacking Hondo’s base in the one episode, but seen in the other. I think it can be worked around.
Yep.
And honestly I don’t think the Younglings arc depicts Grievous that badly. You’d only need to trim the bit where he goes all out villainous gloating after Ahsoka flees, when’s fired upon by Slave I, and maybe the space battle with Obi-Wan’s forces (this one mostly for pacing). The lightsaber duel with Ahsoka is decidedly balanced in Grievous’s favor.
I’ll check it again then. Maybe I’ll just skip the first episode, which, whilst cute, is about characters other than those we care about, and isn’t super necessary. I’ve also just realised all these kids probably got slaughtered not long after this episode.
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Onward to editing! I’ve got a good chunk of time now to get my teeth in, and about seven evenings in a row free followed by a few full days free, so it’s time to get going. I’ve set up my project workspace and am now going to spend some time working on the end-to-end pipeline and creating the universal elements like text and credits. Expect to see something within the next couple of days.
I have to say folks, thanks very much for giving me a better appreciation of The Clone Wars. Through doing my watchthrough and then sharing those thoughts with you and gathering feedback, I’ve found there’s far more quality in it than I originally thought. It’s a large show, and it starts so very poorly, that I never really took the time to focus on its good bits and appreciate its quality. Reading back over some of my earlier comments, I feel like I was much harsher than I needed to be in a lot of areas - and ignorant of the quality. I feel now that I’m far more focused on where the good is in this show, especially as it related to character development, and I’ll do my best to dig it out and highlight it for you all. So please don’t worry if you disagreed with a lot of my earlier harshness - it’s probably been replaced now with a respect and appreciation for the bits which are genuinely good.
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Also we got to thank you for this massive project. Be able to participate (via input upon your thoughts and our opinion) is great.
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Not at all buddy, it’s a team effort! I just hope I can do right by everyone.
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You could use ffmpeg for those things if you’re alright with a bit of command line. Getting audio would be “ffmpeg -i input.mkv -vn -c:a aac -ac 6 -b:a 640k output.m4a” and getting video would be “ffmpeg -i input.mkv -an -c:v copy output.mp4”, I think. I don’t know how Vegas would take those files, but they work well for me in Premiere.
Are you intending to only render it out in stereo rather than 5.1?
Sade, just resurrecting this to say thanks very much for this. I’ve now got to grips with ffmpeg, and am demuxing audio and video now with a single combined command, which is super easy now. I’ll also be editing and outputting in 5.1 surround. This was a really helpful direction, thank you.
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ELEMENT TEST AVAILABLE
I’ve had a very productive day - I’d call this me now being thoroughly over the hump, and almost ready to get cracking.
(Note: Actual video is only 3:30, there’s a dead 2 min at the end)
This is a test of all of the ‘elements’ that compose an episode of TCW: Refocused.
The actual ‘meat’ of the episode is only about 20 secs long, just as an example of lossless video and audio from the original source, and surrounding that is all of the opening titles, text, and closing credits.
I’m interested in feedback on two things:
- How does it feel? Obviously the actual episode itself doesn’t amount to much, but does the surrounding content tell you “this series is worthy of your time”, and position the episode within the wider tragedy of the clone wars? Are the production values high enough that it feels like it could have aired on TV? Does the opening draw you in and build anticipation? Does the closing let you mull over and digest the episode, and let you reflect on the creative process?
- How does it work technically? Any visual glitches? Any colours off? Any stuttering? Any bad transitions or fades? Is everything timed well, did you have enough time to take everything in without it dragging?
Feel free to absolutely savage this - it’s best it’s torn apart now rather than later!
Once I get this into a state where it’s worth taking forward, I’ll convert as much of this into universal assets and templates to make future episodes as repeatable as possible, then get to producing the first episodes!
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it felt Star Wars like, especially the feeling of the intro text, at least for me. The choice of music for the intro (text) definitely draws me in. Did it build anticipation? Hard to tell but this could be just me as I already know too much about the clone wars in general. A set of fresh eyes would be helpful here.
Production value was great. -
as to transitions: I think the change from the new Star Wars intro to the text didn’t work regarding the music. The slow soft music didn’t match the music from the new Star Wars intro. So my suggestion would be use another intro because I think the music for the text and feel for the series felt great. Or maybe there is some great fading in you could use?
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Ooooh I love this. Would probably go with a more traditional Star Wars crawl, but if you want to make it your own, this actually works really well. Haven’t noticed any technical issues.
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Awesome work! I’ve been refreshing this thread massive amounts the last week or so, and it’s great to see you’ve been up to a lot!
A few things:
(Refresher: I’m a Clone Wars noob, but longtime film cannon fan.)
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The hype train was for real watching the new Star Wars intro logo from Mando. Def psychs you up leading into the CW logo.
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That said, I agree partially with a previous commentor: the music just doesn’t quite fit over the CW logo and intro text. However, I’d advocate keeping the new SW intro (from Mando) and swap in new title/intro text music. Not sure if it’s tempo, arrangement, tone, etc — but it’s not quite what I anticipated musically coming into the show I’ve been reading from your deeply curated analyses. It’s 100% within reach, and I get what you’re trying to do from previous posts (and I’m all for it!), but the choice for intro/outro isn’t quite there yet. It’s almost too somber/sad, as opposed to contemplative.
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Totally agree that intro text is far superior to the narrator, but I’m not a huge fan of the Solo-style text. Not that I’m in favor of going full traditional SW crawl, but I do like that the crawl is forcibly concise, but allows bolding/all-caps for emphasis. I feel in an episodic series like this, that could be really useful creatively. I don’t have a constructive path forward in this point, but I’ll keep thinking on it.
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Back to the logo and chapter title: I’d love to see a cold open every episode prior to seeing both of these. Obv influenced by Mando, but I think they use it to great effect and could be super effective here. It’s more work finding the story beats for each episode to knock the cold open out of the park, but it would be icing on the cake if you could make it work!
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Lastly, font/font color could possibly be tweaked. I love thin fonts as a general rule, but the blue color made it slightly difficult to read, especially over the end credits. I’d advocate doing a font and font color exploration and see what works. Go wild; we can always pair you back. 😃 Maybe play with diff fonts or sizes for end credit role/name pairings.
I’m gonna watch this like 500 more times because I’m so ridiculously excited to start watching! Thank you! I’ll be sure to aggregate additional feedback as it comes to me.
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Time for some intense nitpicking:
- I feel like the blue scene-setting text could do with some antialiasing. The “W” in “…early days of the Clone Wars” is a good example of the aliasing. I generally get around issues like this by rendering simple stuff like crawls or text or credits out at 4K, or even 8K, and then letting Premiere resize it down to 1080p, but I don’t know if that’s possible with your Vegas workflow. Apologies if this is just a Vimeo thing.
- The dead-still Clone Wars logo feels like it could be doing something. Perhaps I’m just overly used to how it retreats in the series’ original intro. The Mandalorian’s logo zooms in slowly.
- Something seems odd to me about going set-up text -> show logo -> episode name, since the first and last will change for each episode but the logo won’t. The syncing of the text and the logo and the episode name to the music are great though, so sacrificing that would be a shame. (Maybe you could kill two birds with one stone here: if the logo was between the Star Wars intro and the first line of the setting text, you could use that time for some kind of musical bridge to alleviate CMMAP’s concern about that transition. Perhaps an additional line of text would then be needed to maintain the music sync.)
- Sometimes the credits text is difficult to read over the background. There’s already a shadow but perhaps some kind of dark glow might help. The Mandalorian manages because of a) being lighter text on often dark concept art, b) having the concept art be constantly in motion and c) having much thicker text, so some combination of those would probably help.
- Some of the ‘concept art’ is just images from the episode, and a few of them don’t fill the screen. I’m assuming this is placeholder though.
Now for the stuff I liked:
- The music choices are fantastic and add a real gravitas to the intro and especially the outro. (Edit - seems this is controversial; but my vote is to definitely keep the outro music).
- It feels very professional, and very artistic. It’s very tonally distant from the newsreel, but I think that works well - it has a similar tone to the final arc, which is my favourite bit of TCW.
- Your scene-setting text is smartly written and pleasant to read. You even picked my preferred spelling of neutralise. If I absolutely had to quibble I’d bring up the use of both “newly” and “new” in the fourth line, and I’d argue for “Jedi Council” rather than “Jedi council”.
- I’ve never bothered to look up any TCW concept art so I enjoyed seeing it and am looking forward to more.
- That Star Wars TV intro from Mando never fails to get me hyped. I’d disagree with CMMAP and argue to keep it even if the transition isn’t perfect.
- There was plenty of time to read everything.
Edit: I agree with McFibb that a cold open would be very cool. Perhaps after the intro text, though, otherwise there’s really absolutely no context for what’s going on. I’m also in favour of selective capitalisation of the set-up text. For all its other sins, I felt the intro text of Star Wars Theory’s Vader fanfilm actually had a quite effective use of capitalisation.
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I’d definitely keep the Star Wars TV intro (Mando style), yet you could experiment with other pieces of score accompanying it to blend better with the following new track. Maybe you could use a softer version of Ahsoka’s theme for the text instead of the synthwave one (I really like the first half of this one)? Or just wait a few second more to start the music, after the SW one has faded out.
I agree the main titles would feel more natural with some kind of motion, such as a zoom-in or zoom-out, added to them.
The outro music fits in a phenomenal way. I like how it starts with a melancholic rendition of the clones motif, then transitions into the militaristic Republic march. And the concept art idea works wonderfully.
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Wonderful and detailed feedback folks, thanks very much!
My main takeaways:
- Leave Lucasfilm and franchise logo as-is, but watch the transition into the following music.
- Experiment with other intro text music.
- Possibly rearrange text/TCW logo/episode title if necessary to suit music.
- Use a little capitalisation in intro text (I’ll use it to highlight where I want the viewer’s focus to be then, I reckon)
- Add a little life to TCW logo.
- Use a different/bolder font for closing credits (though I did pick the most teal episode for my demo)
I feel like convention “permits” us to create the intro text the way I have because each TV show (and some movies) seem to do their own thing. This isn’t a Skywalker saga movie so I don’t think scrolling yellow is suitable, but the teal in that font at least keeps the text “in the family”. I might split the same amount of text over two screens, depending on what the musical cues dictate.
I like the idea of cold opens but I doubt they’d be available for all episodes because the show simply isn’t made that way. I will keep an eye out as I go, though. I wonder if a cold open would clash with intro text though? We’re drawn in with the action, but then drawn back out by text talking about the state of the galaxy?
Sade:
- I’ll also check antialiasing
- The concept art is indeed placeholder, I’ll make sure future ones fill the screen. I will need some stills from the episode though, as I need eleven pieces of art per episode, and some of the shorter episodes don’t have that many. I picked a bad example though, since there’s no concept art for the movie.
- Glad you spotted ‘new’ and ‘newly’- I felt that too and was wondering if it was just me. I’ll avoid language like that in future.
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ELEMENT TEST AVAILABLE
I’ve had a very productive day - I’d call this me now being thoroughly over the hump, and almost ready to get cracking.
(Note: Actual video is only 3:30, there’s a dead 2 min at the end)
This is a test of all of the ‘elements’ that compose an episode of TCW: Refocused.
The actual ‘meat’ of the episode is only about 20 secs long, just as an example of lossless video and audio from the original source, and surrounding that is all of the opening titles, text, and closing credits.
I’m interested in feedback on two things:
- How does it feel? Obviously the actual episode itself doesn’t amount to much, but does the surrounding content tell you “this series is worthy of your time”, and position the episode within the wider tragedy of the clone wars? Are the production values high enough that it feels like it could have aired on TV? Does the opening draw you in and build anticipation? Does the closing let you mull over and digest the episode, and let you reflect on the creative process?
- How does it work technically? Any visual glitches? Any colours off? Any stuttering? Any bad transitions or fades? Is everything timed well, did you have enough time to take everything in without it dragging?
Feel free to absolutely savage this - it’s best it’s torn apart now rather than later!
Once I get this into a state where it’s worth taking forward, I’ll convert as much of this into universal assets and templates to make future episodes as repeatable as possible, then get to producing the first episodes!
I’m not massively keen on how verbose the text is, and being left aligned is odd. I think with that amount of words you want a scroll, if not, a few lines like the spin off films had.
Everything else looked good, I liked the new opening flashing heads thing, the TCW logo could do with being in motion a bit possibly, and the ending concept art works really well with the credits.