ATMachine

RRS-1980 said:

ray_afraid said:
I’m pretty impressed by the Tarkin in R1. […] I bought it! Not as Peter Cushing, but as the character of Tarkin.

It’s apparently true that most men are focused mainly on visuals and technical details. That’s what we read all over the net, “CGI this, CGI that”. For me the biggest deparature from original Tarkin/Cushing was the voice… oh, how I missed his rrr’s 😉 …a distinct accent from a person born 100 years ago.

This is a very good point. It’s also why I think a lot of people were thrown by the Old Indy bookends in the TV versions of the Young Indy Chronicles: the actor who played Old Indy was a Canadian born during WWI, which resulted in an extremely different accent from Harrison Ford’s much more modern-American delivery.

Such a voice wasn’t wrong for someone born in Indy’s era, but it was different enough to break the immersion for people who expected Indiana Jones to sound like Harrison Ford. Something to consider when contemplating future CGI zombies in SW.

No. AFAIK the only home video release of SW to have the 1977 opening crawl was the GOUT - and that was spliced in specifically because Lucasfilm marketing promised the original opening crawl in its ad copy.

That was typical of LFL marketing during the 2000s. Promise just enough to make fans expect a decent product, then deliver only on what was promised in writing. I seriously wonder if the legal department had Satan on call.

The shot of Jyn in front of the lights was pretty obviously a glamour shot. However, majestic cape shot shows Krennic walking from Point A to Point B - probably in the original version of the film where the Scarif complex had two different buildings. It totally could’ve been used in the pre-reshoot movie.

TL:DR; if an alternate cut is released, I’m still hopeful we’ll see majestic cape shot.

Yeah, the New Republic and the First Order apparently have a public cease-fire which involves recognition of each other’s galactic borders.

But the NR maintains the Resistance as a black-ops espionage/sabotage militia in enemy (First Order) territory, but publicly disavows its support. And judging by Leia’s griping a lot of the Republic politicians don’t like funding such covert ops.

Alderaan: No worries. 😃

In the 1975 second draft, the Emperor is definitely a figurehead There are several references to the real power behind the throne: a “Sith Master” named Prince Espaa Valorum, who’s also Vader’s boss and lives in the Imperial base on the Cloud City of Alderaan.

In the third draft, this character seems to have been dropped entirely: the crawl refers to Vader as “the right hand of the Emperor” instead of Prince Valorum, whose name is never mentioned at all.

At this point I imagine Lucas saw Vader’s relationship with the Emperor as a fraught partnership, with each of them working to undermine the other. As I said above, it’s likely this dynamic was Zahn’s model for Thrawn & C’Baoth.

The idea of the Emperor being a Sith sorcerer - and thus unquestionably Vader’s superior - only came about during the writing of ESB.

I’m not sure why it’s considered odd to discuss how dialogue in the OT reflects the development of the story over time. If we didn’t, we’d all still be swallowing the TFN Kool-Aid about Vader being Anakin Skywalker back in 1975.

True. I suspect the original idea was an uneasy alliance between the two of them - like the way Thrawn partnered with Joruus C’Baoth in the Zahn trilogy.

The 1975 second draft refers to “Aquillian rangers” who protect the Rebel ship from the stormtroopers. Perhaps this was their official name at one point. (“Aquillian” comes from “Aquilae,” Leia’s home planet in the 1974 rough draft.)

Neither did George Lucas, at the time.

How can you tell?

If it’s the hair, there was specifically a stage of the CGI which used Henry’s head but without any hair. Possibly the second picture in my previous post is actually of an intermediate stage where they put Peter Cushing’s hair onto Henry’s head.

EDIT: This is in fact the case. Further scrutiny of the video reveals some odd artifacting of Tarkin’s hair in that particular shot. Meanwhile, Henry’s performance, both on set and in mo-cap, had him wearing a graying dark-brown wig.

Recreating Tarkin was undoubtedly rather like how the CGI skeleton pirates were handled in the first Pirates of the Caribbean.

First the director would shoot a “practice take” with the actors playing skeletons on set with other actors, to get a reference for the lighting & choreography. Then they’d do a second take on set, using only the actors whose roles didn’t require CGI. The undead pirates would also be filmed separately, so the actors could be digitally transformed into skeletons and overlaid into the scene.

But in this case, as a byproduct of the footage shot for reference, an entire alternate version of the Tarkin scenes exists without the need for any CGI whatsoever. I’m sure Disney is smart enough to make use of that.

Well, the shot of Mendelsohn and Henry on set (sans rig) has the video turned on:

Those aren’t screens in the second pic, they’re windows. They’d insert a starfield behind him in post.

The shot of Henry wearing the CGI camera rig is definitely from early tests, but as far as I can tell the rig didn’t change much - they just added a few extra dots on the uniform tunic, and it still used bluescreen backing.

And we know from other photos that Henry was definitely on set with Ben Mendelsohn - without the camera rig.

Thanks!

The video offers yet more proof that Disney/LFL approached Tarkin two ways. One, by having Guy Henry stand in front of a blue-screen wearing a headcam rig, to produce a CGI Peter Cushing; the other, by having Henry on set in full costume and makeup, to play the role without worrying about CGI at all.

Here’s Henry as Tarkin in the CGI motion-capture rig:

And here’s Guy Henry on set, playing Tarkin via simple recasting:

Here’s hoping we get to see that latter version of the film at some point.

Seriously, though, Tobar explained the idea in two sentences. Surely it can’t be that hard for the writers to do likewise?

^ Interesting analysis! Now I want to see Luke’s adventures alongside Space Exorcist Archaeologist Lor San Tekka.

Hoth being tinted blue strikes me as a half-assed attempt by Lucas to replicate the blue tint of Ralph McQuarrie’s production paintings of Echo Base. As much as I love me some McQuarrie art, it’s just not right to tamper with the color timing in that way.

Interesting. Why are these pictures from deleted scenes being released now? Is someone trying to drum up interest in an alternate cut of the film?

oops, double post

^ I hadn’t even thought of that. Here’s hoping they do though (and put it back in).

According to his Twitter feed, Gary Whitta actually did write a crawl, but it wasn’t used in the theatrical cut. And naturally, he’s not going to just tell us what it said.

CPY: Creepy Puppet Yoda, the Yoda puppet used in TPM. Later erased from the TPM Blu-Ray special edition.

It’s very simple. Luke Skywalker is the MacGuffin of the movie and so there is a map to him.

That’s very much how I feel. It makes more sense considering that SOTME was originally planned as an outline for a low-budget TV movie sequel to SW in case it did only middling box-office business.

In fact, Lucas’ specification to Alan Dean Foster was that this was Luke and Vader’s big climactic duel, so Luke actually killed Vader in the original pitch. That obviously got changed because of the massive success of SW on film, but it makes nonsense of the story in Foster’s book.

^…^ said:

timdiggerm said:
I’m intrigued by the two jedi statues, but worry that it’s just flipped shots?

This is what I thought first, but if you watch them carefully (in particular the cape); also, the lightsaber placement in relation with the statue itself; you can note that they “seem” different. To me, at least.

Two Jedi statues would also be consistent with the particular design inspiration here: there were two huge Jedi statues guarding the Valley of the Jedi in LucasArts’ 1997 Jedi Knight.