Dat_SW_Guy

I wonder if you can re-do Adywan’s Emperor scene to deepfake/EBSynth ROTJ Palpatine onto an actor.

I attempted to hand-animate the shadow on the bottom of the landspeeder but it turns out more difficult than I thought and it doesnt look like the shadow actually “moves”, rather it looks like it slowly pans, similar to how the TIE Fighters in the trench run were shot. I really need help on this, so any VFX help is appreciated!

https://streamable.com/x1phd3

I feel like the neck is a bit too low into the body, and the darkest parts of the head do not match the darkest parts of the robe. But otherwise it looks great!

sherlockpotter said:

Yeah, I think Streamable just uses some pretty hefty compression. It’s great for showing off tests and mockups, but less so for sharing something in high quality. (I’ve been uploading my finished clips to Google Drive instead.)

Ooh, hmm, I don’t know! My gut was telling me that the lightning should be fairly big and bold and dramatic at this point - and I adore how it looks right now - but I’d definitely be interested in seeing a slightly more subtle approach that Rey would barely notice.

Seriously loving it though, Dat_SW_Guy. Thanks so much for helping out with this shot!

(Depending on what sort of sound effect people want, I can certainly add mine to the finished VFX shot. I can also try a version with Snoke’s sound effect, just so we have a fair comparison and can all decide what works best!)

Yea, are you able to re-do the effects to add a more subtler sound? I’m afraid I’m not that good with audio design haha

Yeah, I watched the theatrical cut of this duel and noticed that Rey didnt care that she literally Force-pushed the shit out of Finn there, how much more if she straight up electrocuted him in this cut? LOL

I can see how Rey barely reacts to it, I’ll probably make the scene similar to the removed lightning sparks on Palpatine’s hand in the beginning of the movie, it’s visible to the audience but not to Rey.

Hello, thank you all for your suggestions. Firstly, The shot of Finn recieving the blast wasnt created there. However, I just whipped up a quick “proof-of-concept” of Finn a actually getting hit with the lightning, albeit it looks alot more deadly, overkill and less “subtle”.
The sound effect was from YouTube and I just did a right-left pan to sonically flow with the visuals a bit more. I completely cut out the wide shot of him flying back and left the last shot unfinished (since I’m too lazy to edit it now, but I’ll finish this shot sometime tommorrow) but also since I’m not so sure as to how to structure the shot.

I don’t really know how to make it subtler, so any help is appreciated! https://streamable.com/gyj6k2

SIDENOTE: I edited the shot with 16-bit colorspace, but the one being uploaded to streamable seems to have completely clipped the highlights and shadows so I don’t know what’s up with that.

Heres a test VFX shot of Rey shooting out Force Lightning instead of the Force Push to signify her instability, the compression makes it look slightly weird but it’s okay: https://streamable.com/cqtffo

Heres the finalized explosion for Alderaan’s destruction scene, although I still can’t figure out how to add in the laser and make it smooth enough to fit in the rest of the sequence. It’s a bit overkill but it still lines up pretty well.
https://streamable.com/mfldg5

The scene is great, but I think the pause between “You will kill” and “Palpatine” should be a tiny bit longer, as it felt slightly jarring for me.

Another update: I’ve been toying around with an online tool called Comixify AI to remove the hand-drawn landspeeder shadow in the 139-frame shot of the speeder passing through the street heading to Mos Eisley and it seems to work quite well, albeit there are artefacts. But that can be fixed through masking and tracking anyway.

https://streamable.com/ei7wzm

EBSynth is pretty much a “style” transfer deepfake, wherein it animates a scene using the style of another artist, or using a scene thats been repainted to match a different style. See the video below for further clarification:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fILG1J6gMBs

Using this concept, we can pretty much transfer the “style” (which in this case is the single frame still image of ROTJ Jabba edited into ANH CGI Jabba) to the entire video and animate it using AI. Sorry if it’s a bit convoluted but after you watch the video, you’ll see what I mean.

Technically, you can do that with EBSynth.
Just rigorously photoshop ROTJ Jabba into a still frame of ANH Jabba (do this a couple times) after which you use it as a reference frame for EBSynth to slap the face on and you’ll get a passable result (after masking everything else out to maintain quality), however you may need to do those in sections, as there may be moments wherein it wouldn’t track and it would look inconsistent, but morphing and masking can do the trick (most of the time, anyway)

https://youtu.be/iXqLTJFTUGc

Heres a new breakthrough in Deepfake technology: Lip-sync and vocal synthesis and stitching done in less than a minute.

I presume this can be really useful in a lot of cases, letting the actors say what we want them to say through the use of AI.

Yeah I can definitely do that, I just need to do a lot of tracking since the shot has some camera shake.

One thing I just realized: The shot here shows the cantina from a distance with the added buildings but when they reach there, it turns out to be barren with no buildings in sight which directly contradicts this scene here. (which was probably why the ronto was added in the first place to cover up the obvious discrepancy)
Do I remove it for continuity sake?

ANOTHER CHANGE: here is a new matte of the Mos Eisley wide shot, showing the SE buildings without the comical and stupid Ronto/Jawa antics.

https://streamable.com/cnowdi

Here is the somwhat-finished shot, but I’ll probably replace this with the SE Dewback for more dynamic-ness of the scene. The moving puppet Ronto is animated digitally similar to how Harmy did it in his 2.5 of Despecialized.

EDIT: I forgot to add, I found Adywan’s ANHR:HD sample reel on YouTube and seeing he did a similar change to mine, I used some of his footage to improve the circular landspeeder quality so credit to him on that.

https://vimeo.com/545378766

I might help with some of the editing work for the Vader Castle shots needed, but I havent backread far enough to know in what context it will be used for? (I assume its going to recontextualize the opening scene wherein Kylo grabs the wayfinder)

Here is the completed version of the Mos Eisley cantina exterior matte that has been corrected to fix continunity over to the next shot, although the entire sequence is inconsistent to begin with.

You can use these for your edits, just make sure to credit both me and Aggelw on Deviantart for the original image I upscaled and used here.

Here is a new matte (still WIP) depicting the Mos Eisley cantina exterior in the correct time of day to match the rest of the shots. I did this through manually painting in elements from frame-by-frame screenshots of the film, as well as using Aggelw’s version (albeit very low quality, so I had to upscale it through AI) to fill in the patches such as the ground elements and the circular spaceship to the right. (I might tweak it to not make it look noticeable and change the ground to better blend in the rest.)

(EDIT: Post removed, the completed matte is in the next post by me)

(Note: I didn’t want to use the SE Ronto as I felt it would be extremely difficult to track it in the shot once I composited it in, so I resorted to using the theatrical puppet.)

After a while, I managed to tackle the first VFX shot: The Alderaan explosion. Although I did this a year ago, it felt too weird and not dynamic enough, so I completely redid it from the ground up.

I wanted it to not look too modern, but rather make it look similar to what ILM did back in 1997 for the Special Edition which was using digitally composited explosion elements but without the praxis ring that obviously looks dated now. I also somewhat did the shot similarly to how Adywan did it with the moving starfield and slightly offset planet. For now, it is still a WIP since the large green laser beam isnt present in the footage but I will get around to adding it once I figure out how to extract it from the original scene.

https://streamable.com/89lksf

I just finished watching the edit, and I am greatly pleased with all of it. Since I forgot what the movie was since I only watched it once 2 years ago, I pretty much thought it was seamless until I checked the change list and was shocked to see how many were added/removed/switched around.

The only thing that bugged me was the last shot of when the Falcon flew away from the sunset, as I felt that it looked too slow and not in-line with the visual effects of the film. However, I give a huge thanks to those who worked on the edit and still appreciate it nonetheless. I might be getting around to learning Blender just to fix that scene in the future but it was amazing overall.

May I ask a link for this?

Here’s a preliminary color regrade of the Speeder drive-by shot that was recomposited by SkyDude for his SkyMaster edition of 4K77.

Unfortunately, I tried doing a color match using Dr. Dre’s Color Matching Tool but it left some grainy artifacts on the sky. Is there anyway I can fix them?

https://streamable.com/69at6a

I’m wondering if this would still work on the ANH Revisited version, as I might need to use a sequence for my fan-edit. However, I know of the way Topaz removes stars and makes them flicker on scenes, so that might not help.