GMatias

Thanks for checking in!

And I have!

One of the reasons for the break was computer upgrades, which got held up about an extra month thanks to supply chain issues. But that has now been resolved and work has started up again.

I’m holding myself to a very soft July 1 deadline for putting out THE NEW ORDER’S workprint.

• The only real FX work is the basic masking of the Tarkin scene mentioned above, which is 6 shots I’m about 20% thru right now. (And let me take this opportunity to again say how bullshit rotoscoping is. Every time I feel like I had a good run of adjusting keyframes on a mask, I play it through and realize I forget a whole section of the shape for half the runtime…)

• The next heaviest load is making or setting audio for 3 scenes I’ve rewritten dialogue subtitles for. Part of that is manipulating audio from named characters (Galen in one scene & Maz in another), while the other is an extended version of the “droid stole a freighter” scene from TFA with different context. That should be easier if I can squeeze out audio from an online translator service. Fingers crossed.

• Last is a general cleanup pass for subtitles, title cards, jump cuts, bad audio fades, etc.

So fingers crossed for a July 1 (or thereabouts) for a release!

I think that works really well!

EddieDean said:

I spotted in Faraday’s TROS novelisation thread something worth considering here:

In the original draft of ROTJ, the forest moon of Endor was orbiting Coruscant as a kind of nature sanctuary, hence the ‘sanctuary moon’. I wonder if there’s a value add by revisiting that idea, which you could potentially achieve via the crawl, some C-3PO dialogue, and VFX to add the planet in the background.

Pros would be that it’d bring the climax nearer to the heart of the galaxy, increase the jeopardy, contrast Coruscant’s industrialisation with Endor’s nature, and add some nice options for visuals and alternate options regarding the location of the Emperor’s throne room and the way the SSD/DS2 are destroyed.

Cons would be that it might bring the fleet strengths into question (you’d expect a lot more defence above Coruscant, and a more likely pincer trap), and it might conflict with other movies which feature Coruscant or the DS2 wreckage.

I think the credibility cons outweigh the pros for this, but I could be wrong.

I don’t buy (1) the Empire building the DSII in such plain sight and (2) nobody taking a shot at it sooner. BUT if they had been building it somewhere in secrecy and it’s now finished enough to be moved to Endor over Coruscant (like Yavin IV with red Yavin in the background somewhere) for some kind of dedication ceremony that Palpatine is planning as a cover story for drawing out the Rebel forces? That idea I would buy much easier.

SpenceEdit said:

Here’s a cool example of a small change making a big impact. Out of curiosity, I reversed the shot of R2 standing over Leia during her death scene, which makes the end of the shot the reveal of her limp hand. Small change, huge difference, and something I only thought of after staring at it for a month wondering why it wasn’t quite working.

https://vimeo.com/700838434

I’m hoping the fact that it’s raining upwards in the background isn’t too noticeable, because I absolutely love this change.

It’s not super noticeable. I was looking for it specifically and there was maybe 20% of that shot where you could tell it was going in the wrong direction. But we’d seen it fall correctly in the last two shots so you would REALLY have to go out of your way to pick that nit.

Good job!

Eyepainter said:

Got my voice back! My illness is getting better! My lungs are hurting, but otherwise, I’m recovering. Time will tell when I’m ready to come back to the commentary track, but I believe that it will be soon, possibly within a day or two! 🥳

Glad to hear you’re on the mend!

Ice said:

I just listened to the radio drama.

The opening sequence is:

Luke in Ben’s hut contructing lightsaber helped by R2
Droids go to Jabba’s palace -> Sarlaac battle
Vader arrives on DSII

Interesting!

JEDIT: I asked a question about how the 180-degree rule works in this case, but I clearly confused Nev’s still image here for RL’s Boba shot from his mockup. And trying to reword the question just made it worse, so I’m giving up on it.

That mockup looks pretty good!

EddieDean said:

• Luke does acknowledge on the second Death Star that he expects to die (with the Emperor) as the rebels destroy it, and while this is a noble act, it’s only really touched on by the one line so it’s not delivered as powerfully as it could have been. To me, the tension that’s lost by having the rebels likely to passively kill three main characters is not worth the benefit, so I’ve always preferred Spence’s approach, which places the Emperor’s throne room on the Super Star Destroyer and has the death star float outside his window to make that very clear.

I’ve said this in other places, but I’m a big fan of Spence’s ROTJ edit and will be incorporating a LOT of the execution there into the ROTJ section of my saga edit.

The trick with having Luke/Vader/Palpatine NOT on the Death Star in terms of the larger saga is that in TROS, Rey goes to that exact location of their fight and it’s made very clear that spot is on the Death Star. How do you reconcile that? Here are some possibilities:

• Swap out the Death Star husk Rey looks at in its TROS establishing shot with a downed Super Star Destroyer, and trim a shot or two of the wreckage as she’s sailing towards it. Once she actually gets inside, there’s nothing we see that couldn’t be on the SSD.

Or

• Reinstate the “2 Death Stars” concept from the ROTJ planning stages. (You can find info on it from Adywan`s ROTJ Wishlist thread here: https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Info-Ideas-ESB-and-ROTJ-Wishlist/id/8826/page/23#345416)

  • Two Death Stars = one larger, still under construction, and serving as a decoy. One smaller, also operational, and sporting Palpatine’s throne room. The rebels are attacking the bigger, shielded one while Palpatine brought Luke to the smaller one.

  • This keeps all the Spence visual ideas of showing the still-under-construction Death Star out the window behind Palpatine intact. It also kinda explains why there’s still so much Death Star left to fall on the forest moon after we see Lando barely escape it atomizing itself in the explosion - because it’s the smaller Death Star knocked into the forest moon by the force of the bigger one’s explosion.

  • You could also incorporate some of the Piett Sacrifice ideas mentioned in the above thread by having Piett slam his SSD into the smaller Death Star to stop it from firing.

Yeah, that looks great right from jump. Big improvement!

I’d love to help out, even if it’s with a non-voting status. Just to get some extra mileage out of all this Saga thinking my edit is inflicting… er, allowing me to do.

RogueLeader said:

A gif so accurate my head is starting to hurt…

Yeah, I’m saving that one for future use!

Bingo! Looks really great!

I think it looks much much better! Great job!

I feel like somewhere between 25% to 50% (maybe 33%) S-Curve adjustment would be the sweet spot. Maybe a little more on scenes that are brighter or have a heavier red/orange tint and less on the ones that are already blu-ish green or more neutral.

But it’s getting closer!

Quick update: taking a few weeks off working on this to do some non-SW stuff, but should be back at it by the end of April.

My kneejerk opinion is that I prefer the orange look screenshots to the kitchen-sink ones. I do like the greater contrast of the kitchen-sink screenshots and I think the color choices are good, I just get the urge to adjust the brightness or exposure on them because they look too dark to me in most cases. That is probably just me or something that wouldn’t be as obvious in-motion, I dunno.

Here are some quickie thoughts for the second effect:

Seems like you have two places to make that work: (1) when Ben pulls the saber out before attacking the Knights of Ren, or (2) just before that when Rey and Ben have their mental connection.

(1) The trick with this is you have less footage to work with. For a beat like this it seems like you’d want to focus/zoom in on the saber, but you have about 3/4 of his arc of pulling the saber from behind his back before the shot ends. And without a closer shot of the saber blade, I’m not sure that a flash or bang would work as well as you would like it to.

But I don’t think this idea for this shot is unsalvageable, just that you might need to settle for something a little more subtle. Maybe the saber starts off crackly as Ben pulls it out, but the blade heals/calms over the course of that shot & the following extension of it where Ben does his “OK, you asked for it” shrug.

If I were attempting that, I’d try a simple opacity masking: have the blu-ray footage for those two (or three, if you want to include the quickie interim shot with 3 or 4 frames of blade in it) on one track and lay the identical HAL9000 footage over it. Mask the saber on the HAL9000 footage so that it’s the only thing showing, and then slowly shrink the mask starting from the hilt on out. The tracking should be done for you by using the identical footage.

(2) Same VFX idea as above, but have that effect occur has Rey is holding the saber by her face. The idea being that her connection with Ben is centering/calming her and that’s reflecting in the saber. That might be placing the emphasis more on her than you want, but it has the benefit of enough screentime and screen location to do the effect in a more noticeable & organic manner.

Yikes! Hope you and the family are on the mend!

Eyepainter said:

Aside from a few technical glitches, I think it looks great! I’m not sure what’s going on, but that’s probably my fault for not paying attention all the time. I trust that it’ll all come together when the project is complete!

Ha! That’s fair. The audience would have heard/seen Galen’s explanation about what the weapon actually does before this point. So what I’m trying to show here is:

• Hux is broadcasting his speech, as Samuel L Jackson once said, as some cold-blooded mess to say before you pop a cap in someone.
• Tarkin Base shoots the cannon, and the beam enters hyperspace on its way to Hosnian Prime. Which is essentially what Disney said was happening in TFA but they didn’t film any material to give the viewer that impression. I’m trying to rectify that.
• As it is in hyperspace, Leia’s people (and one would assume the inhabitants of Hosnian Prime as well) start getting readings of the hyperspace distortion this massive about of raging energy is causing as it prepares to fall back into regular space. Leia knows her Senate colleague Holdo was there voting on the Senate resolution to impose sanctions on the Empire (which we’ll kinda see before this), so we imply that she makes a desperate call to try and give Holdo & crew any warning, even tho Threepio confirms everyone there is screwed.
• Holdo was already about the leave the system anyway. so she escapes but stays long enough to see the beam coming in because I just love the visual of her staring it and the Empire down.

The red tinting, if I haven’t mentioned it before, is from the idea that in the B&W version, things that are connected to the Force are given color. So the Force Duels are in full color, and things like lightsabers, DS beams, hyperspace, and kyber crystals should have some tint to them.

New test clip: the Hosnian destruction and Holdo’s Escape Redux!

https://vimeo.com/691641417

Right before I made the thread for this project, I did a mockup for the idea of having Holdo and The Raddus barely escape the destruction of Hosnian Prime. This would, in my edit and in most Sequel edits I think, introduce a glimpse of the character before her appearance in TLJ material and tie things together slightly more than before. This clip is the updated version of that idea now slotted in with the rest of that material in the current edit. Feedback would be greatly appreciated!

Like the previous clip, this is more of a test than even a workprint version, so there are things to fix/change/finish at every level. But it helped me work out some pacing issues, start testing Force-tinting again, and made me come up with a hopefully simple solution for the idea that Hux broadcasts his “last day of the Republic” speech to the galaxy before firing the weapon.

As for the workprint for THE NEW ORDER as a whole - my spreadsheet tells me I’m 86% done with it. Getting the workprint done would probably be a score of 95% or so, so that 86% feels kinda about right. I’ve got three or four more sequences to lock down before I’m ready to start sending things out: (1) the Senate report, (2) Rey’s extended flashback, (3) Galen’s explanation of how this new threat works, and (4) the weapon firing & post-fire debate from this clip. Probably sounds like a lot, but everything already has a mildly rough edit in the timeline, and I have notes/thoughts for each one that I just need to implement. So without screwing myself by mentioning an actual deadline for this, I’ll say ‘getting sooner every day’ and leave it at that.

Oh man, those look gorgeous! I’m such a sucker for concept art.

That’s what I’m hoping! Fingers crossed!

NeverarGreat said:

We would still need to establish that Leia has unfrozen Han, I think.

How about this:

-Crawl establishes that Luke is completing his Jedi training in isolation, leaving Leia and her allies to attempt Han’s rescue alone.
-Vader goes to the Death Star.
-Establishing shot of Jabba’s palace at sundown.
-Leia wanders through sleeping fortress, unfreezes Han.
-Sinister laughter from Jabba. “I know that laugh.” Cut to black.
-Indeterminate shots of Dagobah, darkness of the cave in the swamp. Voiceover from ESB. “Friends you have there.” “They were in pain.” “Decide you must, how to serve them best. If you leave now, help them you could…but you would destroy all for which they have fought and suffered.” Reveal Luke in a cave working on a lightsaber. He does not activate it.
-R2 emerges from crevice on Tatooine. “We’re leaving? But what about master Luke? I thought he was going to rescue captain Solo…You mean we’re going to that horrible fortress…alone?” Cut to the theatrical version “Of course I’m worried, and you should be too. Lando Calrissian and poor Chewbacca never returned from this awful place.”

Spence’s ROTJ edit has an opening pretty similar to this except he has the Luke/Yoda Dagobah stuff between the DS2 opening & Leia sneaking unto Jabba’s. He uses the ‘Luke walking to the X-wing before seeing Kenobi’ footage to fade in over Jabba taunting a newly thawed Han to sense they are in trouble. He didn’t include the deleted lightsaber build scene tho but it still works.

I had a longer bit of the hallway scene where I use cutting & cropping/zooming to give you more of a sense of Kylo making his way down the hall towards the door, but right before uploading this I pulled it back to basically just what you see here.

• You know he’s there by hearing him speak and his saber noise & light

• You can see bolts being reflected

• You see the soldier pounding with a saber slashing in the background.

I feel that’s all you really need. In my edit that’s not the Tantive IV, so Leia’s not on board & they don’t escape. So we go from that cut to black at the end to fading in on an M80 cruiser where Leia slaps & demotes Poe.