EddieDean said:

So, more thoughts on the Holocron arc. This episode I think is a good example of why aggregation of episodes isn’t always a net gain, because it’s weirdly paced. It’s a good episode, but there are a lot of variables here to think about, so I’m not settled on my approach yet.

• A few trims for cringe/silliness throughout, and to make the episodes flow better.
• The first episode, Holocron Heist, is well structured and good fun throughout. I might trim a bit of TODO-360’s dialogue where it gets a bit too silly, and I might trim some of the breaking in sequence which isn’t so interesting.
• The second episode, Cargo of Doom, covers LOADS of plot in the opening narration, which is a challenge. I might need to end up cutting there just so I can put in my own intro text alternative, if I can’t find a clean way to bridge them. Smudger had an idea for this I might check in case it makes sense to steal it.
• Also, there’s this weird thing where Bane needs both the Holocron AND the “Kyber Crystal”. Firstly, in the canon now, Kyber crystals are more explicitly lightsaber crystals and/or Death Star laser things, not data storage devices. And secondly, having the Holocron and the Kyber crystal just makes it a bit overcomplicated, especially since Bane gets the crystal offscreen. I’d like to remove all references to that as smoothly as possible.
• The first episode ends on “find master RuPaul who has the Kyber Crystal”, then the second begins on “Bane’s got the Kyber Crystal from RuPaul and is torturing RuPaul to open the combination Holocron/Kyber crystal”, which is too complex. I think I’d rather that they’re just chasing Bane in order to get the Holocron back, which is the only thing with the Children’s names on it.
• The second episode has some good moments, especially a cool zero-G climax and some good scenes with Ahsoka (points in favour), though it’s very slow and action heavy, so even after finding a good transition into it, it would need some heavy trimming.
• The third episode, Children of the Force, really whips by, in contrast to the prior episodes, and a lot of plot happens. You could probably skip Rodia entirely, and just have the visions of the kidnapping be Naboo, and have Anakin and Ahsoka ready to capture Bane there more quickly, before moving onto Bane’s base and then the Mustafar finale.
• I’d trim Sidious’ motives to make them less explicitly about making ‘force spies’ and more implicitly whatever he’s now been seen doing in Rebels and the Mandalorian.

None of this stuff is egregious, though, so if I can’t achieve it all that’s fine.

A breakthrough! I took a look over how Smudger handled these and actually stealing his ideas (thanks Smudger ❤️) gives us the best of both worlds. He merged Hostage Crisis (from the horrible Ziro arc, which I’m discarding) with Holocron Heist, to make the hostage story in the senate building essentially a massive distraction to enable the heist of the Jedi Temple. Using this actually achieves us a whole bunch:

• Firstly, it means I can split this now-quadrilogy down the middle, to have one ~30 minute episode about the heist and then one ~30 minute episode about chasing Bane, without it feeling unbalanced and making the EXTREMELY wobbly pacing a lot more moderate.
• Secondly, that split means we can use the second part’s intro text to deal with the RuPaul issue. (As an aside, I’m certain that there was a planned episode that got cut here. The second episode refers to a lot that happens offscreen with RuPaul, whilst the first ends with an implication that Obi-Wan is going to track Bane on Coruscant.)
• And if a better paced duology that has time to breathe wasn’t enough, we also get not only some good Padmé but also some good Anakin/Padmé scenes, right up front in the show.
• This also lets me produce some trims above what I had originally planned and above what Smudger had achieved, most notably around the removal of the unwelcome ‘Kyber Crystal’.

I don’t know how long it’ll take to execute this two-part edit, but I’m getting started now.

Edit: I’m not sure what to call this two-part episode, but it’s cool because it gets us right to the heart of the Republic (the Senators) and the Jedi (the force-sensitive younglings). So ‘A Strike at the Heart’ or similar might be a thing. Or I could go campy - Holocrons and Hostages, for example. It’s about Sidious directly attacking these fundamental Republic institutions, so maybe there’s something there.

Boy oh boy. As someone who hasn’t watched this movie since the cinema, and has been waiting till Ascendant + saber crackle, I’m so excited to see TROS as “intended”.

So it’ll be the weekend of March 6th where I take a proper crack at the Holocron arc, which requires more brain than usual edits. And while the credits music is being refined it’s still a little early to go back and polish prior episodes.

So, forward to planning my (production number) S02E06 Lightsaber Lost, another extremely straightforward edit. I know there’s not much value add here, but I have to do them for consistency. It’s neither an amazing episode nor an offensive one, sitting firmly in the middle, but after having Ahsoka boldly charge about and fail so much it gives us a nice opportunity to both have a slow episode, and teach Ahsoka to slow down. I was never a fan of the character designs in this episode but they can’t be avoided, and other than that the episode actually looks pretty great, and it’s nice to revisit Coruscant and begin Ahsoka’s journey in the underworld. I’m going to trim the ‘fishy’ joke, and a handful of lines. Nothing major at all.

After that it’s on to a much more exciting arc, the three-part RETURN OF MAUL arc, comprising Bounty, Brothers, and Revenge. That episode will end with our Maul bros drifting in space, the scene of theirs which precedes TCW:Refocused’s cold open. (So maybe this episode would best be numbered as the season 1 finale.)

Yeah, I’ll definitely try to get it kicked off with a bang, so it’s nice and clear what the idea is. If it ends up falling flat I can just… not continue it for future months.

😉

(New OP since relaunching this idea in Jan 2022)

Focus threads:

COMMUNITY FOCUS THREAD 1: THE PHANTOM MENACE
COMMUNITY FOCUS THREAD 2: RETURN OF THE JEDI

The Idea

Like many here on the forums, I’ve been absolutely amazed by the things we’ve been able to collectively achieve when we rally around a single movie as a community and share our insight, ideas, feedback, found resources, and myriad technical talents.

There are many edits which are fantastic examples of this, with Hal’s Rise of Skywalker Ascendant as perhaps the best example of a challenging movie being improved so much by community collaboration. Elements like the puppet show, the Knights of Ren voices, the masses of new CG shots, and of course all the community voices in the “For Skywalker!” moment, were all wonderful collaborative additions. But the thread itself was also a place for new ideas to be analysed, challenged, worked through, and solved by masses of different fans, whether they had technical skills or not.

So now that TROS 2.0 is released and collective community focus is a little lighter, and there are no immediate new movies to contend with, what if we channel that great community momentum towards the existing movies?

The Proposal

This is up for debate, but my idea right now is to produce about one new thread every so often, focusing on a single movie in the saga, to provide a focused channel for similar collaborative thought and discussion on that movie. The original idea was one per month, but I think realistically just ‘when it feels like focus has died down’ is most sensible now.

I know we have some major episode working threads, and we also have the radical ideas threads, but the difference here would be about drawing as many people as were interested in to consider the same content at roughly the same time. I’d produce an OP for each thread with a semi-detailed overview of the movie and its scenes, and add as much useful information as I could that might help guide the collective thought process, then I’d maintain those OPs over time adding suggestions, ideas and resources provided by the community.

For a given movie’s active focus thread, everyone who was up for it might:

• Optionally choose to rewatch the source material or their favourite edits of that source
• Analyse the original or edits on their plot, scenes, shots, dialogue, pacing, direction, video quality/source, audio, aesthetics, tone, etc
• Highlight their favourite elements from their favourite edits, which perhaps others are unaware of
• Identify elements from the source material which might provide unexplored opportunities for further editing
• Highlight any forgotten ideas in the various threads for edits of that source, which they think deserve to be brought back to the fore
• Resurrect any older radical ideas which are maybe more possible with the new technologies we now have
• Consider priorities for editing based on the strength of the individual movie, its place in its trilogy, or what it contributes to the wider saga
• Discuss, review, mock-up, revise, create new elements which editors can choose to use

The Approach

I’d see my role in this being to remain neutral and to simply provide and maintain the resources, and foster a collaborative environment. I wouldn’t seek to impose a particular structure, so much as plant as many seeds as possible that might make it easier for new trees to grow.

In each thread I’ll take each original movie and list it out in scene order, list out common criticisms and popular edits for that movie, then conclude the OP with perhaps a few leading questions to generate discussion.

This Thread

This thread is intended to explain the intentions behind this project, act as an index for the focus threads, and provide a place for feedback on this project’s approach (what can I do better in the focus threads, etc?)

It’s also a place for thoughts on editing the franchise as a whole. Not to review the entire franchise or anything crazy like that, but to share thoughts about the ‘big picture’ which might later affect individual movie discussions. I’m thinking things like how we feel as a community about adherence to wider canon, consistency between movies (like TFA Starlight and TLJ Legendary setting up more of TROS), elements that appear in a few sources but are unpopular to some (midichlorians, chosen one prophecy, etc), elements which are conflicting or retconned (“I remember my mother even though she died in childbirth”, etc), aesthetic priorities (OT-first, modern-first, consistency vs respect for older sources), and so on.

Is there anything else worth thinking about in terms of how I structure and approach these threads? Anything you’d like to see me include in the OPs?

Interested in any and all thoughts here, folks!

Hal 9000 said:

That was a weird episode. What were those random zombies? lol

Just thinking about this, you may recall my arguing that green smoke around Palpatine in TROS could help explain part of his resurrection… now you know why 😉

Knight of Kalee said:

Eddie, there seems to be a brief editing mistake near the end of “Massacre”…in your version Grievous is supposed to “kill” Talzin’s physical form and this causes the defeat of the Dead Army, right? Because there are a couple of rogue shots of Grievous throwing away the old witch’s corpse and Talzin’s reaction to it. Other than this the episode was lit!

I’ve just fixed this, that’s up in the link.

They’re the dead Nightsisters. That’s one of the ways they manifest the force, they can use it to temporarily reanimate their ancestors’ corpses.

Oh! That’s really weird. Perhaps it rendered before I’d saved, or something. First chance I’ll get back to that is Saturday night, but I’ll fix it as soon as I can.

Hope you think so after you’ve seen them! Please feel free to give feedback, including for episodes released earlier in the order - I’m always open to revising the earlier ones just as much as the more recent ones even after discussion has moved on.

Thanks guys, I look forward to it!

Yeah, quite light ones. I think I placed them here because we’ve had a few heavier episodes by this point, so they just give us a bit of a breather before a lot more heavy ones. We get a strong all-Sith episode then a fairly strong all-Jedi episode, and next will be an Ahsoka solo episode before we get on with the ‘main plot’ with the return of Maul.

s02e05 - Seven Warriors - RELEASE VERSION RELEASED

Essentially a renamed s02e17 Bounty Hunters.
(See above post for details)

PM for access to the tracker spreadsheet which contains the links to download.

It took no time at all to turn around my episode s02e05, which was originally called Bounty Hunters.

This episode I’ve barely touched, just removing the scene where the trio see large monsters stomping through the fungal forest, since those monsters aren’t a part of the episode. I’ve kept a little of their sounds since it’s OK for the planet to have fauna (just not explicitly ones that are bigger than rancors, if you’re not going to use them).

I’ve uniquely added ‘in memory of Akira Kurosawa’ in red to the title card, which was included (also in red) at the start of the original episode. I’ve renamed the episode ‘Seven Warriors’ to better emphasise the episode’s homage nature, even though normally I don’t rename episodes I’ve barely edited.

In the opening crawl, I very lightly remind the audience that Ahsoka kind of fucked things up on Felucia, as covered in my Holocron Crisis episode (which, sure, I haven’t yet released.)

This is quite a light episode, but it serves a few functions:

1. It gives us a little flavour of the stories on the fringes of the war, which I wanted to preserve some of even though they don’t tie much into the main plot.
2. It gives us the origins of Anakin realising you can train the local populace to fight, which will be picked up in further episodes of the series, and ultimately lead to the rebel alliance (ironically).
3. It gives us a way better Hondo Origin (“we go way back” is plenty) in contrast to the horrendous Dooku Captured duology, which I’m excluding altogether.
4. It gives us some of the B-list bounty hunters who we’ll see a little more of in the series.
5. Plus, of course, it’s a Kurosawa homage, to whom the entirety of Star Wars owes much of its existence.

That’s also rendering/uploading now.

s02e04 - Massacre - RELEASE VERSION RELEASED

(See above post for details)

PM for access to the tracker spreadsheet which contains the links to download.

Slight change of plans. I had the motivation, but not the mental capacity to handle the Holocron episode, since that one has a lot of possible approaches which are going to need real focus to pin down. So I’ve skipped it for now until I can give it a proper crack. I’ve jumped straight into the following episodes, since they require a lot less brain.

First up is Massacre, which barely needed any editing. The only thing I changed was borrowing Smudger’s idea to remove all references to the extra witch who resurrects the dead Nightsisters, allowing Talzin to be the one who does that. I think I’ve improved on Smudger’s idea slightly, editing some dialogue to make Talzin explicitly state that it’s her who’s going to do it (though to be fair it was already fairly explicit in his version).

This one’s definitely at the extreme end of what the force can do, but it’s fun - zombies versus robots - and it continues to show us that Nightsisters can do weird shit, and that there are more layers to the force. It also explains - nice and soon after you’ve just had the Nightsisters introduced for the first time - why they’re not major galactic players for long. It’s also a good bit of context if you’ve played Jedi: Fallen Order.

That was an easy one so that’s rendering now and should be up in a few hours. If you choose to watch it bear in mind that “officially” you’ve just watched the Holocron arc, which features the Republic and Jedi reacting to Cad Bane stealing a holocron containing the identities of force sensitive children on Sidious’ behest. Next up is Bounty Hunters, which I think is another straightforward one.

I appear to have mistaken Chase’s message!

Hey gang.

Regrettably Chase Adams has told me he’s going to be unable to produce animated concept art due to personal commitments, which is a shame. So we’re back to static art, unless anyone else would like to pick up the mantle. Alternatively, if anyone knows the tools and techniques to produce art like that, (or can point me at the resources,) I’d be eager to learn myself.

It’s only been twelve days since I last released an episode, though it does feel like longer. I was quite stumped on the Holocron arc, though I’m going to try to crack it today. I should perhaps steer away from estimating how long things will take, because I don’t want to disappoint you guys. But my motivation hasn’t dropped, don’t fear!

If anyone has any feedback on the comments or episodes in the last couple of pages it could be really useful.

EddieDean said:

I still have all of Smudgers’ episodes available, PM me for details.

I think that hits the nail on the head, Sade.

Weird. I was paying attention the whole time, must have just slipped past my mind. Either way Hal, and all collaborators, you’ve managed to squeeze a few extra percent of quality out of an already solid movie to leave it in its best state yet.

Ah, maybe I did!

I just watched this last night and really enjoyed it. Definitely my favourite structuring of Rogue One’s scenes to date, and those improved deepfakes really help too. I really liked the focus on Jyn’s POV, especially the removal of Cassian talking to Draven.

For my two cents I’d trim out the planet title text, since Star Wars tends to avoid them, but that’s super minor.

I think the only thing I missed in this version was the hint at “hyperspace tracking”, I thought that was a nice nod forward to TLJ.

Is it a clone? I thought it was now canonically Palpatine’s spirit inhabiting a Palpatine clone body? So, functionally the original Palpatine reborn.

It’s moot anyway I suppose, I think there’re two valid schools of thought here.