Have there ever been any attempts to replace the ANH Death Star explosion, to make it a little less of a “firecracker goes pop” affair and make it a bit larger and weightier?
And while we’re on it, something to ruin it down to looking more like the DS2 shell, for OT edits that want to go the ‘single death star’ route?
I think those are all good observations worth thinking about, though I disagree with one: I think having Kylo’s prayer early really works. It makes him appear weak and conflicted right off the bat, which I think is a great introduction to the character. This guy looks like a knockoff Vader, in a real-world context he stands in the shadow of Vader, and having his characterisation be that he’s trying to imitate Vader because it’s important to his identity to carry Vader’s legacy is really interesting. It focuses his storyline on the ‘easiness’ and ‘seductiveness’ of the Dark Side, and then all of the characters in his life challenge that - Rey, Snoke, Luke, Leia/Han - until he turns to the light. I think it works for the arc that’s emerged since the release of TROS.
That said, I love the inclusion of some of his prayer in the whispers Rey hears during the interrogation.
I’m a Starlight adherent, but I’d still agree that “cute boyfriend” is best removed in any version.
Oooh, nice! I missed Hal saying that. It’s a thought I’d had too, but didn’t want to mention because I thought it might be too much of an ask to have a fanedit by one editor directly reference one specific other edit. But I’ll take it please! Purgatorial washed-out Jakku, delicious!
These are two Cad Bane centric episodes combined to essentially make the hostage crisis in the senate building a distraction to help enable the holocron heist, using the idea that Smudger9 had for his movie.
This is the first of a two-parter, the second of which combines Holocron Heist’s follow-up episodes, split here mainly because the episode that follows this had a lot of plot happen in its narration, which I needed to preserve via a new opening crawl.
They’re a great set of episodes, and a fitting season finale - Cad Bane is an excellent new villain, we get absolutely all of our main characters going on a great high-stakes romp through Coruscant and space, and we get some great hints at Palpatine’s larger plans and a good chapter in Ahsoka’s growth (more on that in the detail for s01e10).
Compared to the prior version of this episode I’ve only really added polish, mainly including a slicker start (and introduction to Bane) and a cleaner ending. I also took out Ahsoka’s failiure at Felucia and subsequent discipline, since that scene’s now used earlier this season (as discipline for a similar failiure at Ryloth) to help justify why she’s offscreen for a couple of episodes so early.
Noteworthy changes:
Onwards now to Future of the Force, the second part of this duology which completes the first season! I’m away for a little while, but should have it out to you all mid-January.
Brilliant Meeko, thanks very much for this! I do allow myself a little leeway on audio transitions where I can’t quite make it work, since the original show did have similar issues, but I always re-check any raised issues so I’ll see what I can do with these again!
Oh, and for those wondering about the black bars in a couple of early episodes, those’re fixed now.
Good progress on s01e09 - A Strike at the Heart (our holocron heist episode).
I’ve removed the scene I’ve shifted to an earlier episode and got the main body all polished up, including some visual and audio transitions. I’ve also smoothed out the ending scene, which I was never quite happy with. I’m just going to see if I can add a little context to the new beginning of the episode, then I can wrap it up and release it.
Here’s the opening crawl:
I reference Bane’s ‘network of specialists’ in order to justify the fact that he has two apparent crews in this combined episode. I also specifically call out the difference between general ‘archive duty’ and the specific ‘library floor’ to smooth over Ahsoka’s assignment to the archive two episodes prior, but her being walked through the library (and holocron vault) in this episode. The archive can contain many different areas, and this is now a more senior post (for ‘humility’, which was the point of her discipline). I mentioned that it was Yoda who put her there as a way of tipping my hat to a cut scene of Yoda having a feeling that an attack on the vault might be coming. I also chose to emphasise the brief moment of peace the characters are currently enjoying, as it’ll be the last they get for a good while now, and I’m setting up this group of episodes as a brief lull in the war.
That’s a good shout. You could also maybe record an extra line during the officers’ panic as they realise what’s happening - perhaps a panicked “disable the hyperspace tracker!” or more overt “they’ve locked on to the hyperspace tracker!”
That’s a really nice idea, that the tracker itself is like a beacon in hyperspace. They are, after all, “caught on a string”, and a string can be traced back to its source.
One thing you’ll need to contend with if you take that approach though will be the green wireframe flythrough of Snoke’s ship, which they use to illustrate the plan, because that quite clearly zooms right into the centre of the ship.
Just watched this after TFA Starlight and TLJ Rekindled, and WOW. I can’t thank everyone here enough. It was clear, it was more straightforward, it was less of a torrent of ideas, and it demanded far less mental juggling. And, best of all, all of those gorgeous new CG additions and new scenes really, really landed. I can’t believe we finally have this movie in such competent shape. There were a handful of things I’d trim, which were beyond the scope of this project, but FINALLY it feels like the worthy successor to the sequel trilogy and the Skywalker saga that it should have always been. Two years later than I should have been, I’m finally at peace with this movie.
Hmm, well maybe we don’t cut to their reaction shots?
I think I’ve had a workable idea to help justify why the lightspeed ramming isn’t something that’s commonly done!
Why can’t it be done normally?
Why can it be done in TLJ?
We’d spoken before about adding a shot of a screen on Holdo’s bridge showing that they’re lined up, as a way of achieving something similar, but what if it shows the ‘there’s a slit’ graphic instead? The shot of the screen showing the slit is even onscreen twice when it’s first shown, slightly differently each time. Plus, the particular ‘slit’ which gets sliced by DJ (as seen in the graphic) is almost exactly the same distance down the wing of Snoke’s star destroyer as the exact line her ship slices through it when it does the ram - just on the other side, so you’d just need to flip the graphic. You’ve then got the officer on the Star Destroyer tapping the screen as if he doubts the visual error - which you could move to before Holdo triggers the attack, to remind the audience what’s up.
As for why the Holdo Maneuver can’t breach shields normally, well, I guess that’s up to the viewer’s imagination, but it certainly works just fine with the fact that every important military asset is shielded - the Second Death Star, most capital ships, Scarif, etc. (Scarif even has a mechanism where you can bypass just a PART of a shield while keeping the rest up, as ‘slicing a slit’ would have done.)
And I know what you’re thinking - in TFA they explicitly use hyperspace to come out UNDER Starkiller Base’s shields. BUT we already have the answer for that - in TFA, it’s said that that shield has a “fractional refresh rate”, which lets them inside.
Merry Christmas you beauties! My official Christmas day is going to be in a week’s time, so I’m just now settling in for a full sequel fanedit trilogy rewatch with a good buddy of mine. Woop woop!
Just out of curiosity I took a look through the old community survey I ran back a year and a half ago.
The vast majority of questions which got a very strong response in favour of a particular change match to changes in this edit - things like the Snoke vats and the timing of the Palpatine reveal, simplifying the Final Order, its fleet, and Palpatine’s motivations. There was also strong support to make Mustafar more obvious, to remove the lightspeed skipping, to change the mechanism for how the force dagger guided Rey, and to make some of the references to prior movies less jarring.
Notably different is that at the time the community really had an issue with Rey Palpatine as an idea, favouring Rey Nobody. There’s still an appetite for a Rey Nobody cut these days but it feels like many people have come around to it more in the last eighteen months, as various edits have been able to integrate the idea more smoothly across the entire sequel trilogy. I’ve certainly flip-flopped back to favouring Palpatine (for the sake of canon, really), so I’m glad we’ve been able to make such peace with it. Similarly there was some split on how Rey self-identifies at the end, but I think this edit does a great job of making the original ‘Rey Skywalker’ moment far more earned.
Thinking back to around that time, we’d just had jonh’s force ghosts scene released. I think that was a really crucial edit for this community, because it gave a lot of us the catharsis we wanted for that key moment, and you could feel the shift back to hope that the movie was salvageable via an edit, which redoubled peoples’ commitment.
There were a few more radical ideas back then which ultimately didn’t lift off - things like changing some of the planets to known ones from the rest of the saga, or making Rey’s force lightning gold. I’m sure there’s still room for them in other edits, but like TFA Restructured and TLJ Legendary, I think this edit has threaded the right balance in terms of adherence to canon. The big thing the survey missed (discussion had only just started on the idea at the time) was making the Skywalker saber cracked like Kylo’s, which I’m so glad got pulled off in the end.
Anyway, I found it interesting to think back to the time when TROS was still fresh and this edit was in the very early stages. It’s amazing how far it’s come and a lasting testament to all of the contributors here for their skill and persistence.
Oop, just caught a little audio glitch in s01e08 - Children of Night. I’ll fix and reupload that soon.
Edit: It’s fixed and rendered, and uploading now. Should be about two and a half hours from now until it’s uploaded.
Edit 2: Uploaded now as v2.1.
For me it’s TFA Starlight, TLJ Rekindled, and TROS Ascendant. All three were finalised after TROS’ release and have similar goals - of making the sequel trilogy as consistent as possible, and strengthening the core character arcs. The changes in TFA Starlight and TLJ Rekindled are respectful to the canon, whilst making changes for the better.
Oh hell yes! I’m really pleased to see this here! If you can share your links please, I’d love to watch these and feed back as you release them.
I’ll definitely be watching this from the perspective of the episode 1 and 2 content being ‘Clone Wars season zero’, to see how well that works.
Question: How are you cutting the end of ROTS? Would the Siege of Mandalore arc naturally interlace with it?
How about a community effort to distribute this, I remember last time drive limits were impacting people’s ability to access this.
Anyone should be able to get a Google drive and host. I propose that anyone who downloads it then reuploads it to a Google drive and makes clear in this thread that they can be PM’d for a link.
The Nightsisters arc is a popular arc with good reason. It focuses on the internal politicking of the Sith and the Nightsister/Nightbrother darkside cults, has some great development for Ventress and a little development for Dooku, and gets the ball rolling on the Maul plotline which is very important to the show. I placed it here in the chronology because the Maul(/Mandalore) content is so good that I wanted to make it the ‘spine’ of my show, an ever-present threat that throws the idea of the Clone Wars just being a predictable two-party conflict into doubt, that adds threats and characters that we don’t know the outcome of even if we’ve seen the movies.
Ahsoka is absent from this episode, but since our last episode put her on archive guard duty, that’s explained well enough (well, better than the original episode, which didn’t explain it at all, at least).
Noteworthy changes:
Onward now to the Holocron arc, the two parter which concludes this season, which shouldn’t take too long to polish.
Nearly done with Nightsisters too. I improved a lot of the audio transitions, and trimmed a couple of scenes. Hopefully get through that tomorrow. It feels right as the last episode before the two-part season finale, following the tradition of having a big escalation before the end of a season. And it gives a nice deep dive into the two least explored major villains of our show, so I think this whole season is going to feel very “right” when it’s done.
This is the episode originally called Duchess of Mandalore, where the Duchess is attacked on Coruscant by the Death Watch following her escape from them earlier in the season. It features a good amount of politics between the Republic, Separatists, and Mandalore’s two main factions, giving us some good interesting ‘third party’ content early in the series, as well as that valuable Mandalorian focus which I’m keeping present throughout my show.
The content from this episode is largely untouched. It’s split from the prior two episodes in the original ‘Mandalore trilogy’ mainly because they didn’t need to be back-to-back, and this way, we get two bites of the Mandalore apple this season, helping reinforce that Mandalore is going to be a running plot. We also get our first sight in TCW:R of Padmé without it being boring, and our first sight of Coruscant’s underworld. We also get some scenes set in locations originally designed by Ralph McQuarrie during the production of the Original Trilogy, back when Coruscant was known as ‘Had Abaddon’.
I’ve added a couple of scenes originally used during the holocron heist arc, where Ahsoka is disciplined by the Jedi council (originally for insubordination at Felucia, now in context for insubordination in our previous Ryloth episode). The Jedi assign her guard duty of the Jedi archives, which effectively explains to my audience why she’s not present in this or the next episode (Nightsisters arc), until she rejoins the plot during the following episode (Holocron Heist arc).
Noteworthy changes:
Onwards now to Nightsisters, which only requires basic polish, then the Holocron arc, where I’ll remove the scene I’ve moved to this episode.
Thanks for the feedback, djonesed. I’d agree with your critique of both episodes, but I think I’ve reached the limits of my options here (unless anyone else has an amazing idea). I think they’re my weakest two episodes, but they’re good enough, and at least (in my opinion) far better than what we were originally presented with.
I will rethink the Malevolence fades though, just in case.
I know that using opening text isn’t ideal, but as you’ve acknowledged, I think it’s the best option I have available for keeping the quality of the actual body of the episodes high.
Keep it coming!
Loud and clear, folks.
Technically, both are possible. The dialogue in the discipline scene will definitely work for both versions, and I’ve checked that I could remove the scenes from Holocron and still have it paced correctly.
Opinion time - what do you guys prefer?
-OR-