'The Mandalorian' Season 3 - "Groguless Edit" V2

A fairly big project from September-November ‘23 that unfortunately got cut in half due to me hitting a brick wall with it, and had me picking it back up February-March ’24 in a mercifully easier and more straightforward second half.

To specify the structure of the season this time around, it’s still 5 episodes and the story is almost identical to the way it appears in V1: “The Droids”, “The Expedition”, “The Survivors”, “The Warriors” and “The Reclamation”. Story specifics of how the 8 release episodes became 5 edited ones are here if you’ve not read it before/recently: https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/The-Mandalorian-season-3-Groguless-Edit/id/107124. The minor story changes are below*
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This whole new take on the project came down to me discovering a tool in the editing software I use, allowing me to take the shots of scenes from V1 I’d carefully zoomed in on to excise the little green guy, but have more manual control over what was on the screen.

By using these keyframes I can assign in the footage at will, I could redo a lot of my previous work to a better standard – especially the movement shots and distance shots. Also I could recreate the zoom part of the ‘zoom and fade’ effect with each episode’s show and title cards like the released episodes – and that doesn’t hurt.
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To give specific examples of my new approach to the movement shots: in V1, when the zooms were solid and fixed, I had to zoom in to accommodate the smallest amount of ‘clean’ footage available. As in: if Grogu was absent for just 1 second at the end of that cut of that scene, that’s what I had to accommodate for all of it just to cover that 1 little shot, as I had no other choice at the time. This led to a lot of that footage being cut off by default just to accommodate the most extreme detail at the smallest point, which was a shame - because I accomplished what I wanted to, but a lot of the episodes were “lost” in the process in a sense.
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Good examples are when Din arrives on Nevarro for the first time, a few instances in the Mandalorian tunnels, when Din/Bo are meeting up with the fleet on Plazir-15 and when Din is sneaking through the Imperial Mandalorian bunker. With all of these, now it’s easier to see the whole thing because you can ‘stay with’ the characters the whole time.
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These new methods either have the camera stay with them so they stay fixed in frame despite the movement – or more like the shot starts completely zoomed out like the release. Or as soon as the character I want to keep appears, it immediately zooms in on them and stays there (so it’s following them like the former despite starting differently), or continuing to zoom in further, staying with them that way.
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All of it depends how the specific characters move in that specific shot of that specific scene.
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With how I fixed the distance shots: in V1, I had to cut out a lot which was a big shame. Even though GG did very little to move the plot forward this time, a lot of the shots with him there had him slap-bang in centre-frame the whole time, so cutting him out without cutting out a large chunk of that shot of that scene by proxy was just simply not possible.
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I worked around that this time by creating nearly two-dozen colour PNG’s to overlay the 5 respective episodes in the scenes where appropriate – in the same method as the annotative PNGs for locations in this show, Andor and Boba Fett. The colours would be identical to the background behind GG and/or his hover-pram and I could use the keyframe tool to keep them obscuring what I wanted to as much as possible – so if the camera moved, even a little, I could compensate for that. The scenes in the Mines where GG’s hoverpram has its own light source emanating from that was trickier to get right, especially with a character moving in front of the bulb in a lot of shots, but I did what I could.
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Some were simpler than others, because obviously almost all of the backgrounds of shots were unique and varied a lot by colour, lighting and complexity. Specifically: some were like rocks in the dark like the covert’s meeting while Gorian Shard attacks Nevarro, so they were very easy to get the colour of and apply the overlay – others were like the entrance to the Mines of Mandalore and much more complex with lighting and background detail factors. In fact, the complexity of the Mines entrance is why I got burned out and hit the brick wall in the first place.
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When it comes to having something to obscure the shadow GG/his hover-pram leaves in the scene, I didn’t really bother that much to be honest. Best case scenario, it felt like an afterthought when I’d already done the complex work on that scene shot so I just wanted to move on already. Conversely, in the worst case, it was like the kept characters were walking through the shadow itself, so if I wanted to obscure it every step (pun not intended) of the way – I would have to create a bespoke PNG the colour of the background, taking in the exact shape around everyone’s feet and legs for literally every 24th-of-a-second frame. Way too much work to do even once.
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*The changes to the story are all in ‘Chapter 2: The Expedition’, and they’re just intended to clean up certain elements of the new plot rather than radically reshape anything.
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The first change is admittedly not my favourite, but this was one of those times where I was boxed into a really tight corner with the footage in front of me, and the reality of what I could feasibly do with it. I wanted to clarify the scene where Din and R5 arrive at Mandalore and Din talks to the astromech, expositing for the audience while passively showing his growing tolerance for droids. Unfortunately though, there is literally not a single shot in the season where R5 is clearly shown with a space background, so I had to make my own. I took freeze-frames from the scene on Mandalore’s surface with Din and R5 both clearly visible, replaced the original background with a starry background I animated with keyframes like the rest of the colour PNGs in the other scenes. It’s really not perfect and I’d like to do it a different way if I could – but, again, what can I do?
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The second change in the story is where Din gets captures by the Kazdan Paratus-like creature in the spider tank in Mandalore’s underground. Now, he communicates with R5 and tells him to get to Bo Katan, right as the tracker on Din that R5 was monitoring from the N1 cuts out, and R5 flies away in a panic. It’s clearer now, reframed in a way that makes it a little more dramatic and hopefully just better overall.
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Lastly, when Bo encounters the Alamites, her dialogue when they’re discovered is very slightly different, and her line about wondering what else survived down there is re-inserted. I found a way to make the latter work well, and reinstating it makes the mechanical creature a bit more well-fitting in that bank of scenes, as well as the menacing implication of whether or not it’s alone down there.
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I put it in the same place as my Version 1 of the project – so if you already have that, you should also get this easily too.

Footnote: I’m merely a self-taught video editor or VFX artist, so some areas are visibly mostly good as I have to be realistic with the footage in front of me and what I can do with it. If you do have any particular notes and feedback, feel free to give me your thoughts, but please be constructive and don’t be an ass about it.