EddieDean

You mentioned having characters only show up when it’s relevant to the plot - I had a similar thought. I wasn’t necessarily looking to cut much, but I felt like the season would have been better paced if it didn’t do as much darting around between plotlines, which caused some episodes to feel as if they were just spinning their wheels. Perhaps they’re running parallel until they intersect rather than true chronological order, which I don’t think is problematic.

I considered pacing it as follows:

Arc/Movie 1:

• Focus on the Galadriel/Numenor plotline from episodes 1-5.
• End on Numenorians sailing to Middle-Earth
• Halbrand, Isildur, etc all in focus.
• No dwarves or harfoots
• This arc’s fairly strong, at least for introducing charaters, though gives little payoff.

Arc/Movie 2:

• Focus on Arondir/Southlands plotline from episodes 1-6, and some of the Elrond/Durin plotline
• End on the eruption of Mount Doom
• No Numenor (until they show up at the end) or harfoots
• The weaker parts of the early Southlands plot could balance nicely with the stronger Khazad-Dum B-plot.

Arc/Movie 3:

• Focus on harfoots/Stranger plotline from the whole show, and the remaining other content
• Start with the harfoots, balanced by the stronger wrap-up of other plotlines, until handing over to the original conclusion to the season

Interested in your thoughts!

I can’t speak to the feasibility of some of your more radical ideas, but I really like opening on invasion, the droid/neimoidian hologram scene on the planet, and into the Jedi. That’s probably our most bombastic and interesting opening for this movie and saga.

Droid and neimoidian dialogue is editable enough, so we could likely do something with that scene to flow naturally into the Jedis’ appearance.

I think the holy grail for me would be a transition shot from space down to the planet (or from space to neimoidian base ships launching landing craft), to give editors that alternative opening to build around.

We don’t, but you seem passionate about this to pick it up yourself. We all got started with no skill and we learned as we went. You’ve got this.

The end is near!

On review of the Bad Batch arc, I’ve made a decision - I’m not going to include it. For a few reasons:

1. The penultimate episode of a TV show is not the time for a backdoor pilot of another show.
2. It’s not good enough on its own, or as a focus on our main characters, to really warrant a place.
3. It slows down the important momentum rush toward the finale we should be feeling at this point.

Ultimately, in the story of Ahsoka (/Anakin) and Mauldalore (that the Clone Wars is at its best, and which is the core of TCW:R,) it doesn’t belong. And yeah, the moment of Anakin killing Trench is good, but it’s not worth an episode, and it’s nothing new for Anakin, and Trench is barely a villain in my edit.

However:

1. I will include the Anakin/Padmé scene in my Siege of Mandalore episode, right at the very start. It fits just fine there.
2. I will turn this arc’s content into episode zero of the Bad Batch, using all of that show’s visual conventions. It’s a pilot for that show, that’s where it belongs. Chronology is less important than causology, so call this a light flashback. It’s about the Bad Batch, not Anakin (or any other TCW:R main characters).

The knock-on effect of this is that it reaffirms my decision not to incorporate the Citadel arc, which I was always on the fence about, especially since Echo’s death was so throwaway there.

Anyway, that all leaves me with just four edits to go, all of which will be very light touch.

You’ve got a lot of range of colours available for it still to look natural.

Grok said:

Could I get a link please?

Fire me a PM buddy 👍

Sorry Eyepainter, I really mean this constructively and respectfully, but I personally feel like these new grades are too radical - both these examples and your Ep1 movie which I recently watched. I think they’re super saturated and quite flat, and the grain is too strong. For me, it feels like we’re really deviating from the usual look of SW, as best exemplified by the OT/ST/Mandalorian/Andor. Definitely not trying to be rude there as I really appreciate your efforts, but if it were me I’d focus on your lovely VFX changes and dial down a lot of the grading changes.

arabian said:

Vladius said:

Wouldn’t you want to wait for the season to finish first?

Editors here did the same thing with Obi-Wan. I will never understand editing a project before it’s even done. You simply don’t know what is going to happen with a show until the season is over and “fixing” something before it’s even done? It just personally saddens me that people are so quick to correct the hard work that people have put into these shows, assume this or that doesn’t matter that they can’t even wait until the show is over. But that’s just me, I suppose.

I’m totally with you on this, buddy. What some people think of as padding, I just think of as fabric and texture. I’ve never had a problem with downtime spent in the Star Wars universe without necessarily pushing the plot forward. And I do wish we’d see more ideas/collaborative threads producing a small number of community edits rather than a lot of individual edits (as we saw with Kenobi).

But, hey, WitchDR, you do you!

Looking at the other official crawls, they do like their exciting language. So you could maybe have the Queen’s request be “urgent” and/or the Jedi being dispatched “swiftly” or “urgently”. You could also do something to imply the Trade Federation have arrived in a “stunning” or “bold” fashion. So here’s an example adding a bit more fruit to the language. (I’m also not quite sold on painting the Republic’s history as a golden age, so trying something I feel is a little tighter and more exciting.)

The Galactic Republic is failing.
As corruption spreads, Queen
Amidala of Naboo stands as a
vocal champion of democracy.

Sensing an opportunity to sieze
profit and power, the greedy
Trade Federation has boldly
surrounded her wealthy home
planet with a fleet of deadly
warships.

At the Queen’s urgent request,
the mystical Jedi Knights have
swiftly dispatched Qui-Gon Jinn
and his apprentice to the planet,
seeking to protect the peace
and ensure the safety of her
people…

I really like Nev’s second paragraph (in his first version) and RogueLeader’s third. Having Padmé call on the Jedi streamlines things. I still think she should be mentioned as part of the solution to the Republic’s complacency though, tying her back to the idea that she’s this movie’s Death Star plans, which gives the plot a very clear macguffin.

A golden age is ending.
As corruption spreads in the
Galactic Republic, Queen Amidala
of Naboo stands as a vocal
champion of democracy.

Sensing an opportunity for
profit and power, the greedy
Trade Federation has surrounded
her prosperous homeworld with
a blockade of deadly warships.

At the Queen’s request, the
mystical Jedi Knights have
dispatched Qui-Gon Jinn and his
apprentice to the planet,
seeking to preserve the peace
and ensure the safety of her
people…

I feel like these are key points worth achieving in the crawl:

• Setting: A galaxy, whose dominant power is a Galactic Republic and which features ‘mystical’ peace-preserving Jedi. (‘Legendary’ is good but for an introduction to the franchise I think we need to make it clear that the Jedi are magical.)
• Context for setting / broad stakes: Galactic golden age is ending, because democracy is declining, and corruption is growing.
• Macguffin: Queen Amidala resists this decline. (This cements her as of interest to all parties.)
• Triggering events: Trade Federation presence, Queen’s request for aid. (Gives Queen more agency and character. Valorum and the structure of the Republic aren’t important enough to the actual plot we see onscreen to be mentioned. The pace we’re fed this information in the movie is more comfortable.)
• Tangible threat: Blockade/warships. (Which will be defeated at the end to resolve the plot.)
• Humanised stakes / motivation for goodies: Safety of Naboo’s people. (Also serves to emphasise a key element otherwise only lightly touched on.)
• Protagonist / agent of change: Qui-Gon Jinn. (Named because he isn’t named early in the movie, whereas Obi-Wan should not be named so as to not draw attention from Qui-Gon, and because he is far more passive in this movie.)

As for the Trade Federation’s motivations, which were never super clear, you at least have Naboo’s prosperity matched to the Trade Federation seeking profit, which is more explicit, and then more implicitly you can link them seeking power to the fact that the Queen has been linked to anti-corruption. But they’re at least all interesting words this way. Mentioning their opportunism also goes some way to implying that they’re possibly overreaching, which can serve to explain some of their worries about whether or not they’re going to get away with this, and why it escalates.

I’ve no idea why I came back to this today, but I’ve been mulling over TPM again recently and decided to take another crack at the crawl.

The earlier version had a little too much exposition, and a bit too much complex language. It also hinged on a few experiments for changes I had wanted to try which ultimately didn’t work out - so this version could now serve as an alternative for an unedited movie. I wanted this to work as your very first (chronological) Star Wars crawl, your introduction to the franchise, and set up the galaxy for some of the plot points which will happen in later movies. I also tried to emphasise the elements which pay off in this movie, and cut out a few things which were covered by dialogue in the first few scenes.

The galaxy is growing unstable. As the
Galactic Republic’s protection of its
planets diminishes, QUEEN AMIDALA of
Naboo stands as a vocal champion against
corruption.

Sensing an opportunity, the greedy TRADE
FEDERATION have sent a mighty warship
to her home world, in an attempt to
make her appear weak.

The Jedi Order, mystical defenders of
the Republic, have dispatched Jedi Knight
QUI-GON JINN and his apprentice to
maintain the peace and protect the Queen.

I feel like planetary protection should be ‘diminishing’ which is neither too hot nor too cold, and I also don’t want to overtly call the Republic corrupt, but I’d still like to show that both of those things are happening (because it’s the best reason for the Trade Federation wanting to silence her), while also avoiding the words ‘bureaucracy’ or ‘complacency’ because they are boring.

The weakest part of this is “in an attempt to make her appear weak”. I’m trying to convey that they’re wanting to silence her voice or reduce her political power, but I don’t want to use the word ‘voice’ as I think the phrase ‘vocal champion’ carries a lot of weight, and I think mentioning the word ‘politics’ is only going to remind people that they don’t like all the politics in the prequel trilogy. Perhaps “in a direct challenge to her growing power”, or “to challenge her growing popularity”, or “in a direct challenge to the threat she poses”? But we also need to contend with the idea that keeps coming up in the plot, that somehow they can get her to “sign a treaty” which makes this all OK? Perhaps “in an attempt to force her submission”? “In an attempt to force her to sign a treaty of submission” feels too fanedity.

We need more exciting action words!

Alternatively if you could have Palatine exclusively sound like Nigel Thornberry that’d be smashing.

I’ve been following this over on fanedit.org for a while, and watched a lot of the episodes. Soundwave is a very competent editor, so these are very slick, and IMO they work incredibly well. The slow build of season one really works, and causological order definitely feels far more sensible to me than chronological. If you ever fancied a version of Lost like this, this is the one.

Very soon after the main finale, I won’t delay to complete it.

You raise some very good points there about both the story and the crawl. The crawl I can probably refine much more, so I’ll think more on that, and your input will be valuable there.

On Ventress I feel I’m more limited. In the original Christophsis episodes her appearance was pretty much as you see it here. She appears, she disappears, she’s no longer involved in the plot. At one point a traitor clone implies he’s been paid off by her, but that plotline doesn’t have any bearing on the wider Christophsis story either. So there you’re not seeing so much of a fan edit as me kind of permitting myself the original episode’s flaw.

I opted to keep her because it serves to introduce her to this show (having first appeared in the Tartakovsky miniseries) and because she’s relevant especially to the first half of the first season. If you were to watch them all in one season, or to watch these episodes merged as with Smudger’s first movie, it might land better.

I had hoped to use the opening crawl to imply that her purpose was to distract the Jedi from the fact that they’re landing an army. Maybe I should make that more explicit in my streamlining of the text. Interested in your thoughts here.

You may find the second episode similarly a little messy, as it’s the next weakest, but I hope you’ll get value out of the show from there! It gets massively better as it goes.

+1 for really hoping to see all five episodes completed!

RELEASED - S05E01 - A NEW DAWN (v2.0)

• RELEASE VERSION.
• Our first episode of season five (the final season).
• Comprising the original episodes Gone With a Trace, Deal No Deal, Dangerous Debt, and Together Again (the Martez Sisters arc).
• Running 62 minutes.
• DOWNLOAD LINK is in the tracker spreadsheet, PM me for access.
• Note: It’s recommended that you download this before watching, rather than streaming it directly from Google Drive.

This arc is the first one from the true ‘final’ season of the Clone Wars, released by Disney after the earlier cancellation. As such, it has far lovelier animation than before. The core of the story is fairly decent, focused as it is on Ahsoka finding herself after leaving the Jedi Order, but it’s marred by some pacing issues and filler which sap energy away from a viewing.

Some people have strong opinions on the Martez sisters - please keep them to yourself rather than sharing them in this thread. From an editing perspective, their most facepalm moment does need to stay as it drives the plot, though I have been able to tighten some of their behaviour (and a suprising amount of inconsistency which I noticed when putting their scenes back to back.) They’re now a little more consistent, and a little more believably competent survivors, though still ultimately the same characters.

As it stands, this is basically the same episode, just a lot tighter.

Noteworthy changes:

• The episode is titled ‘A New Dawn’, to really sell that this is Ahsoka’s story as she turns a new chapter, and since it feels Star Warsy. It’s also a little hint at Crimson Dawn, who raise their head here.
• The episode is placed here as this is the original chronological placing, and it works a little better here with Bad Batch padding the gap between this and the Siege of Mandalore. I’m running the whole arc as a single episode because it just naturally flows better that way.
• The crawl just focuses on Ahsoka’s current situation.
• The first episode plays out as it did originally, until we meet Rafa. We the cut the entirety of the droids plotline, as it was just unnecessary filler action that does little for the characters than their other appearances do. I retained Rafa talking about having a plan to get Bintu’s money, since-
• The second episode (which features another, now the only, Rafa job), plays out in full, with no edits whatsoever. That means we transition from episode one’s laundromat to episode two’s working on the ship scene.
• Bridging episodes two (which featured the gang getting captured on the Pyke landing platform) and three (which begins in Pyke prison), I used the later scene of the Mandalorians noticing them using binoculars, lightly trimmed so that the angle they’re spying from can be assumed to work.
• I trimmed almost everything else from episode three, which was almost exclusively an action scene escape, revealing nothing new about the characters and ending with them captured again.
• The prison scenes are now merged and trimmed into a single two-scene conversation, trimmed in a few places to avoid redundant dialogue and inconsistent group decisions (originally made just to punctuate each episode’s beginning and end). The Martez sisters begin with sadness and reflect on their parents, then we have a little re-establishing shot to allow time to pass, returning to them as Rafa is brainstorming but Trace asks Ahsoka for an idea, which Rafa objects to.
• The final episode plays out almost in full. I did explore cutting some of the sisters stealing the spice, but there wasn’t a clean option here. I did, however, trim a little of their decision to come back to help Ahsoka, making it more out of their shared goodness than Rafa’s pettiness.
• (The Martez sisters returning with spice effectively closes the now-still-open Bintu plotline, as far as I’m concerned.)

Onwards to the next episode, the Bad Batch, which is the only remaining one that actually needs any significant work done to it.

Oooh, exciting! Man, it looks fantastic. The early part of TCW:R could really do with some Ahsoka training action, if nothing else! And the Dooku stuff looks fantastic.

Episode is close to completion, but it’s had an error in rendering and removed all my audio transitions, so I’ll need to render it again. Should be ready tomorrow morning.

Thank you so much, feedback like that makes it all worth it. I hope you enjoy the rest! ❤️

I’ve just conducted a review of the next episode, our s05e01, covering the Martez Sisters arc. It’s not amazing, but it has some good content regarding the role of the Jedi, and Ahsoka’s development into and beyond the finale. The core of the episode is Ahsoka finding herself, rather than Rafa and Trace Martez, so I’ll try to preserve all the scenes which show Ahsoka doing what a Jedi should. I don’t dislike the Martez sisters as much as some do, but like all things, they should be used here mainly to support the core plotline.

It’s an awkwardly paced quadrilogy, but I think I can do a lot about that.

From the first episode, we can lose a lot. We definitely don’t need the droid action scene - it’s enough to have Ahsoka notice it’s a dangerous droid then have Rafa sell it anyway, to establish the characters. But I might be able to trim more, just focusing on the main introduction to the setting.

The second episode is pretty necessary, as it’s where everything kicks off. It’s not super interesting but it’s almost all important. I would have liked to trim the scene where Trace dumps the spice into space, since it’s such a facepalm, but it’s necessary and I don’t think there’s a way to play it differently.

The third episode is almost all unnecessary. The intros with the torture and prison conversations are good, but then it’s almost entirely action which ends up with them back where they started, so we can skip the lot of it. I can still preserve the Mandalorian scenes, reworking them into other content.

The fourth is mostly necessary. I might trim a little, but the key will just be getting the prison transitions correct so it feels seamless.

I do have an option here to cut more of episode four - Trace and Rafa’s plan to save Ahsoka, and Ahsoka bombing the refinery (and learning a little unnecessary but decent Maul hint), but I think that part is key for Ahsoka’s ‘becoming a wandering Jedi’ storyline.

Should be quite straightforward to edit, either way.

It’s a valid and sensible thought. I spent a while working on the ordering for season one, but I think in this case my current order wins out, because:

1. I wanted to tease out more of an arc to the first season than the original loose anthology feel. Christophsis mentions an emergency that isn’t delivered on in my episode itself (in the original, this was the Hutt baby being kidnapped), so I wanted to follow it up with something I’ve enhanced the emergency nature of - the Malevolence strikes on medical stations
2. It emphasises Ahsoka’s presence as part of the core of this show early, and gives her some nice development while we’re at it
3. It gets us through the worst two episodes quickest

Thank you for your feedback though, please do keep it coming!

(And while I’m posting, I’ll let y’all know I hope to start work on season five this week.)

Thanks! That wasn’t planned in advance but it totally feels right, especially for our season of conspiracy/mystery. I always get a nice kick each time I find a new title that I think highlights the theme better, I like to think it helps the viewer just squeeze that much more value out of the episode by slightly directing their attention.

I’ve broadly been very pleased with all the not-editing elements of this project. No goal runtime, opening text, different music for the intro and outro, concept art on the credits- I think they’ve all been additive in a small way. Increasing the show’s perceived “confidence” in itself was an unwritten goal, because I remember in my original watch-through not being able to trust whether or not a given episode was going to be good or terrible, which made it hard to properly engage and commit.

I love both of these ideas, they feel very legendary/starlight. I see now what you meant about the last shot in Luke’s vision being striking the camera, that does work better for Luke’s shock. And flicking in and out of a fire-enhanced scene works nicely too.

Thanks guys! Doing a whole season in the last two months feels pretty great.

That said, I acknowledge that all of the work on this has been paced very weirdly! So much more time is spent planning than executing, and a lot of editing time is taken up by the intros and outros for each episode. And even with the proper editing of the body content of each episode, a workprint can take no time at all, but then it’s the little explorations and transitions that can take forever. Far more time has been spent on the first two thirds of this series than the last three, though that was always going to be the case with this show. And I know I don’t go back and polish until quite a long time after release, but that’s just how I achieve momentum so I appreciate your patience with that one!

Don’t worry though - I won’t consider this truly complete until every nugget of feedback is processed, and I won’t slow down till then. I really hope at least a few people will give feedback on a full end-to-end viewing.

It’s really exciting to me that I’ll likely have this complete long before the release of the Ahsoka show.

Aha! It’s an interesting concept for sure, and there’re a lot of ways it could be brought to life. I like the idea of the last shot being Kylo stabbing Han, since that wouldn’t be a spoiler in TLJ, and would add a little weight to ‘Luke has a moment’. But there’s definitely a lot of possible content.