The Clone Wars: Refocused [COMPLETE] — Page 78

evansj1983 said:

I just looked and saw your first post was less than two years ago. This is one hell of an accomplishment in that time!

Haha, thank you very much! It is hard sometimes, it’s very full-on. But I want to get this out to you guys. I do look forward to enjoying my other hobbies, though! Once I’ve got season five complete, I’ll be polishing up 2&3 (and probably do a full end-to-end watchthrough/polish pass) and THEN I’ll consider the edit truly complete. But then I’ll still do the additional cuts, albeit at a more relaxed pace.

Right now I keep coming back to the Ahsoka vs Hondo arc, with the Younglings, because the second half of my edit is extremely light on Grievous, and it does show Ahsoka’s competence just before she leaves the order. So that might be the first ‘extra’ I do.

Thanks guys! Doing a whole season in the last two months feels pretty great.

That said, I acknowledge that all of the work on this has been paced very weirdly! So much more time is spent planning than executing, and a lot of editing time is taken up by the intros and outros for each episode. And even with the proper editing of the body content of each episode, a workprint can take no time at all, but then it’s the little explorations and transitions that can take forever. Far more time has been spent on the first two thirds of this series than the last three, though that was always going to be the case with this show. And I know I don’t go back and polish until quite a long time after release, but that’s just how I achieve momentum so I appreciate your patience with that one!

Don’t worry though - I won’t consider this truly complete until every nugget of feedback is processed, and I won’t slow down till then. I really hope at least a few people will give feedback on a full end-to-end viewing.

It’s really exciting to me that I’ll likely have this complete long before the release of the Ahsoka show.

I’m definitely planning on giving feedback on a full watchthrough.

Thanks! That wasn’t planned in advance but it totally feels right, especially for our season of conspiracy/mystery. I always get a nice kick each time I find a new title that I think highlights the theme better, I like to think it helps the viewer just squeeze that much more value out of the episode by slightly directing their attention.

I’ve broadly been very pleased with all the not-editing elements of this project. No goal runtime, opening text, different music for the intro and outro, concept art on the credits- I think they’ve all been additive in a small way. Increasing the show’s perceived “confidence” in itself was an unwritten goal, because I remember in my original watch-through not being able to trust whether or not a given episode was going to be good or terrible, which made it hard to properly engage and commit.

I watched the first 3 episodes and I generally like it.
The only thing I would personally change is switching episode 2 and 3. Simply because it would be nice to close off episode 1 with Obi-Wan leaving Christophsis in his star-fighter and open episode 2 with him arriving on madalore navigating the very same ship.

It’s a valid and sensible thought. I spent a while working on the ordering for season one, but I think in this case my current order wins out, because:

1. I wanted to tease out more of an arc to the first season than the original loose anthology feel. Christophsis mentions an emergency that isn’t delivered on in my episode itself (in the original, this was the Hutt baby being kidnapped), so I wanted to follow it up with something I’ve enhanced the emergency nature of - the Malevolence strikes on medical stations
2. It emphasises Ahsoka’s presence as part of the core of this show early, and gives her some nice development while we’re at it
3. It gets us through the worst two episodes quickest

Thank you for your feedback though, please do keep it coming!

(And while I’m posting, I’ll let y’all know I hope to start work on season five this week.)

Thank you so much, feedback like that makes it all worth it. I hope you enjoy the rest! ❤️

I’ve just conducted a review of the next episode, our s05e01, covering the Martez Sisters arc. It’s not amazing, but it has some good content regarding the role of the Jedi, and Ahsoka’s development into and beyond the finale. The core of the episode is Ahsoka finding herself, rather than Rafa and Trace Martez, so I’ll try to preserve all the scenes which show Ahsoka doing what a Jedi should. I don’t dislike the Martez sisters as much as some do, but like all things, they should be used here mainly to support the core plotline.

It’s an awkwardly paced quadrilogy, but I think I can do a lot about that.

From the first episode, we can lose a lot. We definitely don’t need the droid action scene - it’s enough to have Ahsoka notice it’s a dangerous droid then have Rafa sell it anyway, to establish the characters. But I might be able to trim more, just focusing on the main introduction to the setting.

The second episode is pretty necessary, as it’s where everything kicks off. It’s not super interesting but it’s almost all important. I would have liked to trim the scene where Trace dumps the spice into space, since it’s such a facepalm, but it’s necessary and I don’t think there’s a way to play it differently.

The third episode is almost all unnecessary. The intros with the torture and prison conversations are good, but then it’s almost entirely action which ends up with them back where they started, so we can skip the lot of it. I can still preserve the Mandalorian scenes, reworking them into other content.

The fourth is mostly necessary. I might trim a little, but the key will just be getting the prison transitions correct so it feels seamless.

I do have an option here to cut more of episode four - Trace and Rafa’s plan to save Ahsoka, and Ahsoka bombing the refinery (and learning a little unnecessary but decent Maul hint), but I think that part is key for Ahsoka’s ‘becoming a wandering Jedi’ storyline.

Should be quite straightforward to edit, either way.

Episode is close to completion, but it’s had an error in rendering and removed all my audio transitions, so I’ll need to render it again. Should be ready tomorrow morning.

Oooh, exciting! Man, it looks fantastic. The early part of TCW:R could really do with some Ahsoka training action, if nothing else! And the Dooku stuff looks fantastic.

RELEASED - S05E01 - A NEW DAWN (v2.0)

• RELEASE VERSION.
• Our first episode of season five (the final season).
• Comprising the original episodes Gone With a Trace, Deal No Deal, Dangerous Debt, and Together Again (the Martez Sisters arc).
• Running 62 minutes.
• DOWNLOAD LINK is in the tracker spreadsheet, PM me for access.
• Note: It’s recommended that you download this before watching, rather than streaming it directly from Google Drive.

This arc is the first one from the true ‘final’ season of the Clone Wars, released by Disney after the earlier cancellation. As such, it has far lovelier animation than before. The core of the story is fairly decent, focused as it is on Ahsoka finding herself after leaving the Jedi Order, but it’s marred by some pacing issues and filler which sap energy away from a viewing.

Some people have strong opinions on the Martez sisters - please keep them to yourself rather than sharing them in this thread. From an editing perspective, their most facepalm moment does need to stay as it drives the plot, though I have been able to tighten some of their behaviour (and a suprising amount of inconsistency which I noticed when putting their scenes back to back.) They’re now a little more consistent, and a little more believably competent survivors, though still ultimately the same characters.

As it stands, this is basically the same episode, just a lot tighter.

Noteworthy changes:

• The episode is titled ‘A New Dawn’, to really sell that this is Ahsoka’s story as she turns a new chapter, and since it feels Star Warsy. It’s also a little hint at Crimson Dawn, who raise their head here.
• The episode is placed here as this is the original chronological placing, and it works a little better here with Bad Batch padding the gap between this and the Siege of Mandalore. I’m running the whole arc as a single episode because it just naturally flows better that way.
• The crawl just focuses on Ahsoka’s current situation.
• The first episode plays out as it did originally, until we meet Rafa. We the cut the entirety of the droids plotline, as it was just unnecessary filler action that does little for the characters than their other appearances do. I retained Rafa talking about having a plan to get Bintu’s money, since-
• The second episode (which features another, now the only, Rafa job), plays out in full, with no edits whatsoever. That means we transition from episode one’s laundromat to episode two’s working on the ship scene.
• Bridging episodes two (which featured the gang getting captured on the Pyke landing platform) and three (which begins in Pyke prison), I used the later scene of the Mandalorians noticing them using binoculars, lightly trimmed so that the angle they’re spying from can be assumed to work.
• I trimmed almost everything else from episode three, which was almost exclusively an action scene escape, revealing nothing new about the characters and ending with them captured again.
• The prison scenes are now merged and trimmed into a single two-scene conversation, trimmed in a few places to avoid redundant dialogue and inconsistent group decisions (originally made just to punctuate each episode’s beginning and end). The Martez sisters begin with sadness and reflect on their parents, then we have a little re-establishing shot to allow time to pass, returning to them as Rafa is brainstorming but Trace asks Ahsoka for an idea, which Rafa objects to.
• The final episode plays out almost in full. I did explore cutting some of the sisters stealing the spice, but there wasn’t a clean option here. I did, however, trim a little of their decision to come back to help Ahsoka, making it more out of their shared goodness than Rafa’s pettiness.
• (The Martez sisters returning with spice effectively closes the now-still-open Bintu plotline, as far as I’m concerned.)

Onwards to the next episode, the Bad Batch, which is the only remaining one that actually needs any significant work done to it.

You raise some very good points there about both the story and the crawl. The crawl I can probably refine much more, so I’ll think more on that, and your input will be valuable there.

On Ventress I feel I’m more limited. In the original Christophsis episodes her appearance was pretty much as you see it here. She appears, she disappears, she’s no longer involved in the plot. At one point a traitor clone implies he’s been paid off by her, but that plotline doesn’t have any bearing on the wider Christophsis story either. So there you’re not seeing so much of a fan edit as me kind of permitting myself the original episode’s flaw.

I opted to keep her because it serves to introduce her to this show (having first appeared in the Tartakovsky miniseries) and because she’s relevant especially to the first half of the first season. If you were to watch them all in one season, or to watch these episodes merged as with Smudger’s first movie, it might land better.

I had hoped to use the opening crawl to imply that her purpose was to distract the Jedi from the fact that they’re landing an army. Maybe I should make that more explicit in my streamlining of the text. Interested in your thoughts here.

You may find the second episode similarly a little messy, as it’s the next weakest, but I hope you’ll get value out of the show from there! It gets massively better as it goes.

Very soon after the main finale, I won’t delay to complete it.

Fullmetaled said:

Does anyone have access to Respeecher so it can be used for the seasons where Tim curry is the voice of the emperor and replace his voice and Ian Abercrombie in those seasons with ian mcdiarmid’s voice?

You rang?

Alternatively if you could have Palatine exclusively sound like Nigel Thornberry that’d be smashing.