Some of the latest Cassini photos would be a great inspiration for visualising Endor (the planet not the moon) :
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Out-of-This-World.html
Much better but I thought in this take Luke had returned to Dagobah pretty much straight after ESB so perhaps "As Luke Skywalker completes his training on Dagobah" (which trims the final paragraph too).
That would necessitate a slight re-jig of the line about the Alliance (too many 'as's).
The dunes in Dune looked more like an ocean of sand.
The sky was the wrong colour for Tatooine but maybe some of Jedi could be Lynch.
Sorry DT, I'm on the laptop at the moment (only one track button) so I don't know what the mouse action currently looks like but the images open for me when I do ctrl click.
I think the thing that looks a bit crap about that trap is the little headless chicken left behind (it seems a bit odd after such a big bang that the legs are still there bouncing up and down and it makes the vehicle look like what it is, a very small model).
DuTwan I'm enjoying your mockups but could you scale them down a bit please (unless you are doing something really epic) they take up a lot of space at their current size when you could make the same points with less space.
If people want to see the full sized versions they can still open them in a seperate tab/window.
I know it's meant to be the Dune Sea but it doesn't look much like a sea of sand and Arizona can look very exotic but they seemed to have found the most boring bit of desert they could :
Presumably there are combustable mechanisms and electronics in there it could have ruptured a fuel tank.
What do those things run on anyway?
If doable it might be nice to have a OT.COM twitter page feeding forum updates and general news.
Not sure if this is posted to the right area it seems to fall between two stools.
TheBoost said:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YAzkR-VZ6g
This is to a youtube video of pro wrestler Curt Henning's entrance song. The song is a pretty blatant mash-up/rip-off/homage of Queen's "We Are the Champions" and "We Will Rock You." Blatant copies of songs are pretty common in pro wrestling themes.
What's driving me nuts is the opening musical bit, the first few seconds of melody. I'm POSITIVE it is also a rip off of something, maybe ever of a classiscal piece, but can't place it. Can anyone recognize the tune?
Arrrrrgh! It's horrible.
I don't know if it helps but I detect a bit of "He's Misstra Know It All" by Stevie Wonder in the melody (what a bizarre mix of great tunes resulting in one hellish piece of rubbish).
G E Predator said:
Before I render the video, I want to you show you some re-working on the crawl:
The rebellion stands on the verge
of destruction. The GALACTIC
EMPIRE is secretly constructing
a new armored space station
even more powerful than the first
dreaded Death Star.As the alliance regroups in preparation
for the ultimate offensive against
the evil Empire, Han Solo remains a
prisoner of the vile gangster, Jabba the Hutt.While Luke Skywalker remains
on Dagobah to complete his
Jedi training, a desperate Princess
Leia rallies together an impetuous
plan to save the man that
she loves. . . .All of the changes that I made are in bold. I felt that the third paragraph need some work since it should update the audience on what is going one right now.
Let me know what you think. If it's acceptable, I'll go ahead and render the video.
I'd remove one of the "remains", and "plan to save the man she loves" (which reads more like an advert for chocolate or diamonds than a Star Wars crawl) and change "prisoner" to "captive" (Han isn't in prison but he has been captured).
Part of the problem with Jedi is they went to the wrong desert.
Yuma just doesn't look as exotic as Lean's Jordan (or even Tunisia Lucas' favorite sandpit).
Most of the time we see Tatooine in ANH it's a real location shot, most of the time we see it in ROTJ it's a matte painting or a rather dull background plate with actors and models against blue screen and it shows.
Seeing as much of the location shoot was blocked in by sets and actors they should have gone out of their way to get more exotic background plates to frame both the models and studio footage.
Those elements don't really match the location shots anyway so they might as well have pushed the boat out.
Background plates don't have actors or vehicles so it wouldn't have cost that much to film and even some library footage would have looked better than some of the elements they used.
They were up against some bad weather but nothing compared to what Lucas had to face with ANH or TPM.
The real bad weather seems to have been in Lucas' private life which took away much of his love for Star Wars (not to mention the cost of Kersh taking the time to get things looking right the previous time around).
ROTJ was badly written, badly structured, directed in an anodyne way and at times it's painfully cartoonish (Henson style puppets around that time were very much the equivalent to the CGI creatures of today. ESB Yoda = LOTR Gollum, ROTJ Jabba's court = TPM Jar-Jar and most of the Pod Racers including Anakin).
While some of the special effects were amazing achievements those that were were undermined by some really sloppy work mixed in.
If it wasn't for the original cast (some of which are not doing their best) and Ian (who does a lot more work in the film than people give him credit for) it would be just as bad as the PT.
No major characters were killed in ESB but there is a palpable feeling of danger throughout.
Almost every loose end character is dispatched in ROTJ but at no point (even when I was 13) did I feel that our heroes were in serious danger.
The way Yoda is removed from the picture is almost comical in it's current form.
After a few weeks training Luke in the previous film and waiting for him to save Han, Yoda hangs on just long enough to die after a few sentences..."Hi Luke, nice to see you back, I've got a bit of a cough, I'm a bit old, actually I'm going to die right now, oh yeah Vader's your dad...Ben will explain the rest byeee!".
The whole film just feels like a giant post-it note floating in space saying, "Contractual Obligation Finale" in big amber letters.
George Lucas doesn't get Star Wars (he hates the "I know" line).
It's the heavy weight champion of paradoxes.
He gave us all this amazing toy and then charges us cash once in while to watch him smash it in front of us and we still come back for more.
Luke appears to be played by David McCallum in that strip. I had the UK monochrome version of this one. Oh for the days when the Tagge family were almost as messed up as the Carringtons, Vader had a very long helmet (fnah, fnah) and Jabba the Hut (one T intensional) looked like this :
I think Dave lit it so it could be seen with more ease and as a joke (his video mockups usually have at least one hidden gag in there somewhere).
It's straight out of Ric Olie's scrapbook (Ric you should turn your thread into a scrapbook it's such an obvious idea I'm surprised you haven't mentioned it yet).
DarthBo said:
cap said:
EMPEROR: Then you must go to the centurion moon and wait for him.
It's the sanctuary moon, Roman soldiers have nothing to do with it ;-)
"By Your Command!"
On Palpatine being free with his inability to sense Luke, my take is that Palpatine and Vader are in a sense a couple (no not in that sense, though I can imagine they are on some tentacle wrapped website, possibly in the Far East) their lives are so closely intertwined they are married in the true sense of the word (joined together) but it's not a happy marriage it more a dance of death.
Palpatine is acting like a suspicious spouse, he isn't fully sure what Vader is up to (in the same way that the Jedi aren't in the PT) to some degree Luke is right that Vader himself doesn't know what he is up to.
Palpatine's strength in the Force as Luke says makes him over confident, he has got so far by being one step ahead of everyone but there is still a lot about Vader that even Palpatine doesn't quite get.
Vader has freely shared the knowledge about Luke being in the task force and in jealous spouse mode he is vocalising his suspicions that Vader is up to something to put Vader in his place, though I'm not sure how much Vader is actually aware he is being out of place, beyond the obvious Sith ambition to kill his master and take his place at some point down the line.
The dialogue itself however is ripe with unfortunate double entendres.
I don't know how Ian kept a straight face while saying some of those lines and James must have been laughing his drawers off in his sound booth.
Though not a mini-rig this little number would be right at home within a Star Wars film (the hover vehicles in the Rebel base on Hoth looked rather similar) in fact, I'm surprised something like this wasn't introduced in ANH:SE.
This is why I was saying that total elimination of Fett from ROTJ may be seen by a large cross section of potential viewers as a step too far and giving him something to actually do is a better (if possible) approach.
A good point can be made for removing him and Dave's video mockup proves he isn't really missed when deleted but he is so entrenched in the collective consciousness of fandom that doing so almost seems like sending a child to bed without it's supper.
Jar-Jar in TPM is infinitely more important to the plot of that film and I'm not a betting man but I imagine there would be far more gut resistance to a Fett free ROTJ than a Jar-Jar free TPM or even a ROTJ with a tragic end for Lando.
So while it may make perfect sense on paper (or computer screen) it may have an unfortunate retromingent effect if put into practice.
Where I am in Scotland (not far from Grangemouth and perpetually raining) it's much more like Kamino.
Nice structure (which fits well with the Fan-o-matic variations therefore potentially reusable for other editors too) but some of the language lacks that Star Wars crawl hyperbole ("cobbled together" for example).
The way I pictured it was the largest details would be projected from the points around the frame and the smaller details would be projected from points on the table. The rising frame being the focal point.
This would match in a bit with Angel's earlier mockup of the room as a command centre where the room becomes bathed in an amber light because it's mostly showing the Death Star and some of the capital ships too :
Slightly off topic but reading that article ("Your patience has paid off") I wondered what would happen if Matrix denizens took both red and blue pills?
I was born in Brighton Lord V.
Too right, to quote one of my favorite films, "I think the dead should shut up, unless there's something to say".
The repositioning works perfectly but while the recolouring makes sense (I assume they would have treated his skin before locking him into the cage) it does look less painfully unpleasent, which takes away some of the dramatic effect.
Thanks for investigating the problem Jay.
I have gone through all the wonky images and switched off styles so they now sit without overlapping, I've asked if anyone spots any I missed to bring them to my attention.
Obviously I will not be making the same mistake again.
The improvements are great, there still seems to be a few problems with some users images but not being those users I have no idea what the cause or causes may be.