Broom Kid

FreezingTNT2 said:

There’s a deepfake video of Tarkin.

What I like about it: It does flatten out the lighting, which makes him look more natural. ILM went all in on subsurface scattering (I think that’s what you call it) and half the time Tarkin looks like a faintly glowing bruise under a flashlight instead of a sallow-faced person.

What I don’t like is that when you deep-fake a CGI creation, the mouth still doesn’t work, because the base you’re working from is fundamentally wrong. So you have the images of a real person trying to match the incorrect mouth movements of a digital recreation of that person. The deep-fakes of Carrie Fisher over CGI Leia have the same problem. Leia may look a little more realistic (only a little) and then she mouths the word “Hope” and suddenly she’s an effect.

I think cutting around Tarkin is a step sideways, at best. It doesn’t really improve things, because the conspicuousness of not seeing him calls just as much attention and pulls you out of the film just as much as watching his mouth not work right. Either way you’re drawn to him not as an organic part of the scene, but this artificially introduced distraction. It’s just a different sort of distraction when you’re constantly cutting around him.

I think the Tarkin effect is much better than Leia’s, though. Leia shouldn’t have seen in Rogue One. It doesn’t make any sense from a story perspective, and the execution didn’t make up the balance.

I’ve always thought that not only was Leia’s digital recreation not ready for prime-time, but from a dramatic standpoint, it was a really poor decision. George Lucas spent almost all of the beginning of Star Wars hiding her for a reason, which is basically undone with its direct prequel showing a weirdly emoting digital version of her just before the movie starts. Plus, the sort of hope Leia had in Star Wars isn’t the kind that looks all moony eyed and gently smiling. She’s harried and pissed off basically the entire movie. She should be determined and serious on that bridge. Not quietly pleased.

Really, the most we should have seen is the back of her on the bridge. The doors closing on her should have been the iris out, and it should have been underscored with Leia’s theme, not the Force theme.

The only real problems with digital Tarkin are the lighting (he’s a little TOO translucent and starkly lit, he should be flatter) and the way his mouth moves unnaturally. I don’t understand why they didn’t just keep the original actor’s mouth so they didn’t have to worry about animating that part incorrectly. I don’t know if a fan-project could figure out a way to fix the mouth movements, but if someone does, that effect will be essentially flawless.

Apologies if I missed it, but I keep seeing references to low and high bitrate versions of this amazing (and exhaustive) project but no specifications as to what the bitrates are?

How ‘low’ is the “Low bitrate” version? Are the “low bitrate” versions in the 8-10 gigs per film range?

Something else to keep in mind: The Force Awakens had a lot of overnight screens in play for the opening weekend. I don’t remember that happening for the Last Jedi, and I’m not sure it’s going to happen for Rise of Skywalker, either. The Force Awakens was such an event that a large number of chain theaters went back to doing round-the-clock screenings for the first 3 nights, which basically almost never happens anymore, along with midnight screenings.

But if theaters decide they want to go for it, its possible that on top of the extra 500 screens Rise of Skywalker is getting, they could get a bunch of extra showtimes ON those screens if they just keep the doors open all weekend long. But that depends on how overwhelming Disney makes the buzz. If they market this right, it’ll seem like the smart thing for theater owners to do. But if the marketing isn’t on point, they’ll decide to stick with normal operating hours, and that extra boost won’t apply.

Mocata said:

I actually want her back in the TROS. Battle scarred and gnarly. And give her something to do beyond perfunctory action beats for crying out loud.

I don’t think she’s coming back but I absolutely agree it’d be awesome if she came back like some sort of Mad Max henchman

IIRC she said she wanted to be the mo-cap character? I remember her giving an interview before the movie came out where someone basically said the same thing to her and she was like “I wanted to try this type of acting, because it seemed like a rare opportunity, especially for something like Star Wars.” I might be misremembering that, but I do remember thinking something similar before I was told she really wanted to do it, and was surprised.

I guess the current rumors are that Maz helps in the big battle against the Emperor in the third act, shows up to help with a squad of pirate warships or something like that. I don’t know if that would really cheapen anything. Seems like a decent payoff to the First Order wrecking her castle.

She did. You can see her handing Leia the lightsaber in one of the TFA trailers.

Mocata said:

It also says the officer who tells Vader about the escape pod has the same voice, which when I think about it is true. Another case of weird dubbing like many of the British actors in the OT.

That’s crazy, isn’t it? All the times I’ve seen this movie and it never occurred to me that the “And no transmissions were made” Imperial at the very beginning has the same voice as the “You’re required to maneuver, straight down this trench” old guy at the very end.

I was watching “The Andromeda Strain” tonight, and there was a character in it by the name of General Sparks, played by an actor named Peter Hobbs. The entire time I was thinking “I swear to God I recognize this guy’s voice from somewhere” and after about 20 minutes, I thought I finally placed it: General Dodonna from Star Wars.

But Peter Hobbs was clean shaven, didn’t very much look like General Dodonna, and as it turns out, isn’t the guy who played Dodonna. That guy’s name was Alex McCrindle. So I thought “well, that’s weird, but maybe old officious dudes in the 70’s talked like that frequently, I don’t know. In the 30’s everyone sounded like Cary Grant, maybe it’s one of those types of things.”

But then I looked up a video of Alex McCrindle in a role that WASN’T General Dodonna (he ended up having a role in Richard Marquand’s Eye of the Needle, in fact) and Alex McCrindle sounds NOTHING like General Dodonna. And even if he wanted to pitch his voice down and make it crunchier or more officious, he very likely still wouldn’t sound like General Dodonna. So I started wondering if Peter Hobbs overdubbed Alex McCrindle, and started googling around. There’s no official recognition that I can see, no crediting on imdb, and I couldn’t find anything at the usual wiki places, but when I googled the phrase “Peter Hobbs Voice-Over Star Wars” I found this post from four years ago at filmboards.com

https://filmboards.com/board/p/2370744/

Relevant quote:

“My Dad was Peter Hobbs. Years ago I remember him pointing up to a Star Wars marquee, “I’ve only got one line in that, but it’s a doozy. ‘May the force be with you.’” Not sure if that’s what actually happened, but he definitely did some vo on SW. He died a couple of years ago so I can’t ask him for more details. You guys have incredible ears!”

That’d be a really random thing for someone to just make up, of all the things to make up… so I’m pretty sure Peter Hobbs was the voice of General Dodonna.

I understand why this question is asked so frequently, but I also think the best answer is to just let them discover it on their own, however it is they discover it - whether that’s hearing about it from a friend, picking it out of a home video library on their own, or stumbling across it on TV (or netflix, or youtube now, I guess? Twitch tv maybe?) I don’t think I missed out or lost anything by not having my dad set me down to watch Star Wars with him after having figured out the optimal viewing order. I became a fan of the original trilogy by myself, and that sense of discovery is a big part of why it stuck with me all this time. There’s a big difference between finding this very cool thing “on your own” vs. having it carefully curated and presented to you like a rite of passage. Kids can and do recognize this, even if they don’t have the words for those concepts yet.

Almost anything you hear on the soundtrack referring to Jabba the Hutt doesn’t exist in the movie. I do wonder if there’s a way to get all of that music back in the film - and there’s a lot of it - without it feeling cut-up and disrupted.

CHEWBAKAspelledwrong said:

I think they had to because Fox was not involved in digital distribution.

I understand why they initially pulled the logos - they wanted digital versions up very, very quickly, and hadn’t worked out a better deal with Fox - before buying them outright, that is - what I don’t understand, especially considering their strategy for The Force Awakens and every other movie that followed, is why they thought the Lucasfilm logo needed a fanfare at all, much less the chopped up “Finale” from Empire as that fanfare.

Everything about it just sounded like a thing decided upon, started, and finished in less than an hour before someone hit publish.

I don’t think Dash Rendar is ever getting resurrected. Shadows of the Empire as a story has aged so amazingly poorly, and Dash specifically is the butt of so many jokes… I just don’t see it happening.

DavidMDaut said:

EDIT: What I could see, though, is them getting McDiarmid to voice Palpatine for the upcoming final batch of Clone Wars episodes coming to Disney+. If they already got him in the booth for that, it’d be easy enough to have him read this one scene from Rebels.

That’s what I was referencing in my post.

Although honestly, if they were willing to pay him for 2 or 3 days of vocal work, they probably could have retrofitted him into the old Clone Wars episodes too. But I agree with you that such a scenario seems unlikely.

RE: the other examples of tinkering: That decision to re-do the fanfares is so weird, in retrospect. I don’t understand why they even tried it, or further, why they thought that edit was a good idea.

This is, I believe, the first time post-release tinkering has happened at Lucasfilm since the purchase. Up until now there’s been no “versions” of anything.

Of course the question now is if his voice work stops at this one scene for Rebels, or if they went ahead and put him in Clone Wars, too.

It seems to me like it’s a theatrical feature. I can’t imagine you’d team up Kennedy and Feige on a project and not have it go to theaters.

It’s also weird in that Disney seems to be otherwise forgoing homogeneity in their marketing, going out of their way to use the marketing logos from the time of release in a lot of material. The D23 announcements of material specifically had OT-style logos, PT-style logos, and ST-style logos representing each era. They didn’t “hamburger-logo-generator” every title like they’ve done for these blu-rays.

If only Bob Iger had gone through with buying Twitter, for no other reason than to have wiped every single tweet from existence, buried all the servers, and glassed the landfill. I would have loved for Twitter to just one day have become the comments section for D23 members and that’s it. That would have been GREAT.

semi-on-topic: This thread is really interesting as a time-capsule starting when trying to upscale and de-noise laserdisc rips was at the forefront of fan-preservation attempts, going all the way through to the “wait, we can scan our own film prints!” revelation that brings us to the here and now.

weird thing I just noticed - the titles between the Star Wars sandwich-style logo aren’t stretched to fit. The Last Jedi and A New Hope are the primary examples. It’s almost like they just typed the words into a “Star Wars logo creator” and printed it onto the image.

If the 4k/BD set next year had the actual Special Editions in them I’d buy them in a second. They look better than the DVD or BD cuts, and they otherwise haven’t been released at a resolution higher than laserdisc. Honestly the Special Editions are probably rarer than the originals are at this point.

I still think this one actually SOUNDS the best.

https://streamable.com/7ky47

All the further enhancements are increasingly highlighting the time-stretch and reverb processing, and instead of making the performance feel organic and connected, it’s making it stand out more. I don’t know that you even need to slow down ‘Your mother’ so much as you probably need to slightly pitch shift it down a few cents and maybe eq more carefully. As it is, it sounds a little extra-crispy with the time stretch and reverb effects being added to it.

of the variations posted, I honestly believe it’s this first one that sounds the most like James Earl Jones is saying the line as written in the ADR sessions. The others, in an effort to make it “time out” correctly, are calling attention to the fact it’s two takes stitched together. If time stretching has to be employed, I’d suggest only stretching the “err” syllable of your mother.

True, but this is some Ant-Man quantum-realm fiddling, haha. But it’s also not like I’m the one in the lab cutting the stuff together either, so my two cents aren’t even worth that, I understand. Just wanted to put it out there that as someone who is very tuned to this sort of thing through consuming untold number of fan-derived projects, the first example posted in here would read as “seamless.”

I think this is starting to become an exercise in splitting of the finest of hairs. The first one was more than good enough, and iterations on it have all been minutely incremental improvements at best, if that. The fact it works as well as it does at all is pretty damned cool.

I think anything that minimizes, neutralizes, and de-romanticizes the making of these movies is a good thing, ultimately. The mythmaking should stay in the movies, and not be equally applied to the making of them.

I don’t think they’re pushing the 3D set (3D was basically dead when they released that disc) they’re just trying to do the least to move the dead stock as attractively as they can. If these discs seem lacking, that’s fine - the contrast will be even more pronounced when they’re stacked against the upcoming 4K set.