Akwat Kbrana

Arkanian said:

Yes, I was expecting to be told to go away and do my own edit using Adawan's :b, but unfortunatly I do not know how :(, it would help if I could get some pointers on how it's done or influence someone knows how to do it. Nevertheless, I would like to mention I am an avid and quite conservative SW fan, and now I am a fan of Adywan :D, and would be very greatful if I would be one of those with the suggestians he would consider for his future projects namely ROTJ for which I have very much to delve into eagerly. So far ESB looks like its being handled quite nicely, all fixes listed are those I happily can agree with, it looks nice and clean and its looking like it could be his best edit so far :).

 

Welcome to the boards. For a well-rounded yet easy-to-follow guide on fanediting, I refer you to ADigitalMan's guide, found here: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/ADigitalMans-Guide-to-MPEG2-AC3-Editing/topic/3444/

Good luck!

Brilliant work, Adywan! As always, your improvements are breathtakingly awesome. Bravo, sir.

I don't have a great deal to add to what's already been said, so let me just echo the accolades thus far presented. Great job, Ady! The new shot (or rather, shots) is a tremendous improvement over the original. Enhances believability as well as aethetic appeal. The more screenshots you release, the more my interest in this project skyrockets. :)

Why don't we just stick to the radio drama then.

That's a strawman argument, and you know it. No one's saying "close your eyes and listen," only that over-explanation is something to be avoided, and something that positively plagued the PT. The necessary information is sufficiently and effectively communicated in this shot simply from seeing Han & Leia look down at a viewscreen and dialogue about it. Showing flashy holograms is just a change "for the hell of it," and doesn't really even enhance communication at all since the text would be in aurebesh. It's just distracting. It draws attention to a superfluous element and away from the performance of the actors.

I have a hunch that, prior to the issue being raised here, you never watched ESB and thought to yourself, "I wish they'd show a hologram or viewscreen of what Han & Leia are looking at." Am I wrong?

I'm definitely interested in those RapidShare links, ChainsawAsh, if you don't mind. :)

Aye. If this goes up, I'll snag a copy just for preservation and distribution purposes...

Indeed, which is kinda kewl, though I prefer to think of it as just another YT-1300 rather than the Millennium Falcon proper. We've already seen baby Ani, baby Boba, Chewbacca, R-2 & 3p0, Tatooine over and over and over and over again, and we narrowly avoided baby Greedo & baby Han. How small is this galaxy supposed to be?? Seems you can't walk into the nearest intergalactic Wal-Mart without seeing some identifiable main character from another SW film.

Except that the way Hayden delivered it, it seemed more like a four year old throwing a temper tantrum after being put in time out rather than a turncoat possessed by unquenchable rage.

For his portrayal of what George wanted (a creepy, leery, whiny, bratty, self-absorbed sociopath), I'd give him a 4.5. Mediocre job. He did manage to be plenty creepy, whiny, bratty, and self-absorbed, but the woodenness with which he delivers virtually all of his lines makes him adequate and forgettable at best.

For his portral of Anakin Skywalker as described in the OT and Darth Vader as depicted in the OT, I'm with C3PX and SkyJedi: -10, maybe even -11. Deplorable representation totally untrue to the character previously developed. I can live with a few minor continuity errors, but I hate how they butcher Anakin's character in this trainwreck of a trilogy. Better to forget the PT ever existed than to watch the OT and try to reconcile the two Anakins, as well as the two Vaders.

I confess that Davnes' hologram mockup was very aesthetically pleasing and well done, but it still remains a totally unnecessary change that doesn't really add anything to the scene so much as it distracts perception away from what is being said and done in the scene. A cut-away viewscreen is even worse in this regard.

I don't remember ever watching ESB and thinking, "Boy, this scene suffers from not showing us what Han and Leia are looking at. Why don't they add a hologram or something?" It's over-explanation. Perhaps instead of adding superfluous holograms to the OT, we can try to come up with a way to remove the superfluous holograms from the PT. It might be nice to credit the audience with a modicum of intelligence, rather than implying "If we don't explicitly spell out everything, they're never going to understand what's going on." Not everyone who watches Star Wars is incapable of rational thought, y'know.

I'm sure it'd be appreciated by nigh-innumerable hungry fans over in PAL-land; trying to find the PAL DVD9 online is a little like searching for a needle in a haystack.

Very frustrating to hear about so-called fans who promise to upload and then disappear once they get the goods. It's those kind of people who give online communities like this a bad name.

EDITED: Misunderstanding on my part. Disregard...

<grin> Yeah, I'm just kidding. :)

I say, significantly raise the pitch of Obi-Wan's voice and have some fun with the "mini-Obi" idea. He could sound a little like "Alvin & the Chipmunks."

Or he could shake his fist, and say, "Next time, Solo! NEXT TIME!!"

Nahh, just one that looks mildly intimidating and/or imposing. The NEW & IMPROVED Vader Helmet is neither. The faceplate is too small and the dome is too large. This makes it look less like it belongs to the actual villain Darth Vader, and more like a little kid's Halloween Darth Vader costume.

Plus, there's the insuperable psychological connection between the symetrical Vader and the incongruous sounds of James Earl Jones uttering the lines, "Where is Pame? Is she...allright?" and, of course, the infamous, "NOOOOOOOOOO!!" I shudder to think of it, and any reminder of that travesty of a scene makes me want to vomit. Give me the mysterious, imposing, frightening OT Vader over the shiny, scrawny, too-short, temper-tantrum-throwing Vader of ROTS any day.

IIRC, the reason for the slugs is that yellow lights were mounted on the sides of Palpy's hood that shone onto his eyes, thus making them "glow." Unfortunately, the lights themselves (clipped onto the hood fabric) were visible in the footage, so ILM rather crudely painted them out, thus producing the black globules often referred as "the Emperor's slugs."

Perhaps so that there'll be demand for a to-be-released "colour corrected" version in the future? (Kinda like building bugs into source code so that users will be forced to upgrade...)

I'll second the request. I know it kinda "defeats the purpose" of the project to downconvert it to SD, but it would nonetheless be nice to have a good, colour-corrected, non-2004-Emperor version of ESB to watch until ESB:R comes out. (I speak, of course, as one without an HD TV or blue-ray player; obviously, this exercise would be pointless otherwise.)

I know negative1 mentioned he'd managed to do it using a program called AlltoAVI. I tried it out and made a little headway, but my efforts were ultimately fruitless. So if anyone has any suggestions on how to downconvert this puppy, it'd certainly be appreciated by some of us HD-deprived sods. :)

Vaderisnothayden said:

 

C3PX said:

I am through with this discussion. Reading some of your hair brained bullcrap is really beginning to insult my intelligence, and I really don't care that much about the subject at hand to go around in circles about it anyway.

Oh I see, thinking differently from C3PX = "hair brained bullcrap." Nice to know that. So you see a different way of looking at things and thinking about things that doesn't give in and back down and go "Sorry, I realize I should be thinking like C3PX" and your reaction is to decide that means the thinking must be crap. Because your mind doesn't work like mine then my mind must be full of shit. I'm glad to find out you're so open to other ways of thinking.

Btw, it's "hare-brained", not "hair-brained".

The issue is not so much that you had a differing point of view than C3PX, but that you openly and intentionally abandoned reason and logic because of some vague "implication" that everyone is somehow supposed to pick up on. Allegedly, this is because ROTJ is meant to be a kid's story instead of an adult's story (which is borderline equivovation on your part, BTW, since you've said elsewhere, "Not true at all. ROTJ is mich more adult-friendly than TPM and a very different animal.") Well, I can't dispute your "viewer response" inference, but I personally never picked up an any "implication" that the entirety of the conflict was over after the battle of Endor...not even when I first watched it as a small child. The very idea is absurdly ludicrous to adults and children alike...thus, the "hair brained bullcrap" analysis isn't so far off.

(BTW, needling someone on the basis of a typo is pretty immature. You've made quite a few typos yourself, but I don't see anyone rubbing your nose in them. This is an internet message board; being anal about typographical precision is just ridiculous.)

You are still refusing to understand the principle that just because logic dictates something should happen in the story doesn't mean it happens, because logic doesn't rule in this story. Just because it's a kids' fairytale doesn't mean we should toss out every inch of reason, true. Neither I nor Kasdan nor Lucas tossed out every inch of reason. But where logic gets in the way of where the story needs to go then reason IS tossed out.

This is very silly. What it ends up meaning is "logic doesn't count when I don't like the implications of logical thought." It's particularly odd coming from someone who proposed the notion of three seperate clone templates in AOTC based on the fact that there were three seperate actors used to depict them, and that Boba isn't really Jango's clone since the two actors don't look 100% identical. Looks like you're pretty selective about when "where the story needs to go" counts, and when it doesn't.

Consistency, thou art a gem.

Very, very nicely done, Adywan. It looks absolutely fantastic. There's actually a sense of peril reintroduced to the battle now that was tragically missing from many of Luke's "I think we're alone now" scenes.

Note to George: put Steven Spielburg, Timothy Zahn, and Michael Stackpole in charge of everything prequel-related. Then, keep your hands off!

Bah; some people are never satisfied. I, for one, think the new shot looks terrific. The lighting, colour, composition, and clarity are all vast improvements over the original. Nicely done, Ady. :)

Vaderisnothayden said:

You guys are trying to read ROTJ as a realistic adult film that makes a priority out of logic. It wasn't that. It was a kids' fairytale with a happily ever after ending that implied the conflict was over. I think you want ROTJ to be that realistic adult film, so you can't accept that it wasn't and thus won't let yourself see the message the fairytale ending gave.

And it's irrelavant that the novelization can be considered EU. It was the most important companion to the film. They wouldn't have put in that "The empire was dead" unless that as Lucasfilm's view. The novelization was the thing that everybody read along with the film and it was spelling out what was seen on the screen. And yes that line was poetic, but I see nothing to imply that it didn't also mean what it said. Star Wars back then was the sort of thing that gave you what it said on the can. It was straight up. If they said the empire was dead they meant the empire was dead.

I think zombie84 (the writer of The Secret History of Star Wars) says it well in his post on the subject:

zombie84 said:

I agree--logically, the ROTJ ending makes no sense; yet emotionally, it was always quite obvious to me that the message conveyed was that the Empire was defeated, and good guys won. I mean you practically could have had

"And they lived happily ever after"

when the iris closes on the final shot. Thats the point--thats the message you get. They can't live happily ever after if ROTJ just amounts to a strategic victory, the message throughout the entire movie, emotionally, is that "this is the final battle--it gets decided tonight", which is why all the sacrifice and basically putting your eggs in one basket approach (ie send the entire Alliance in a last-ditch battle to destroy the death star). 

Personally, i never considered that there was the Empire out there, and I never knew anyone that did either--the film says "the good guys won, the Empire is defeated." Certainly that is what Lucas was trying to convey, and I think it largely worked, even if it doesn't work in a real-life setting, but then Star Wars has always been full of logical holes like this. While we are contemplating why the Rebels are celebrating what is only a strategic victory, we might also be contemplating how they can be celebrating on a planet that should be having nuclear winter.

 

Let me get this straight: you're arguing that since ROTJ wasn't intended "as a realistic adult film that makes a priority out of logic," therefore we should be illogical when watching it?! I guess you're welcome to check your brain at the door if you wish, but I still put a big premium on suspension of disbelief, so I'd prefer to keep mine functioning whilst watching, "fairy tale ending implied" or not. (If there was some explicit mention of everyone in the Empire simultaneously deciding to just give up and lay down their arms en masse, then I wouldn't have any ground to stand on, granted. But it seems to me that you're making a pretty big leap in logic based on something that is allegedly implied in the film's composition.)

What?? What's that supposed to mean? Implied? All I saw was the destruction of a major threat to the alliance's continued existence, the death of the empire's two principle commanders, and the redemption of Anakin Skywalker. How exactly is that supposed to result in the wholesale defusing of conflict? You've got an allegedly galaxy-wide political/military entity bent on conquest and despotism. Are you seriously suggesting that the deaths of the Emperor and Vader and the destruction of the Death Star would result in the pacifying of every other Imperial V.I.P.? They're all just going to lay down their arms and sing "kumbaya, my lord" and allow the Alliance to fill the power vacum uncontested? That's just asinine.

Quoting an obviously poetic closing line from the novelization does nothing to make the notion any more plausible. And saying that ROTJ's ending implied the end of the conflict is just absurd. Are you suggesting that the rebels wouldn't have a victory party after a major watershed success in the campaign against the Empire unless and until the conflict was 100% resolved and over?

steamboy said:

Please add this.
That is all.

That is truly hilarious. Did you make it yourself? :)