I was Anakin’s age when the movie came out.
I’ve never seen a marketing blitz at the level of TPM since then.
Today I happened to drive past a Taco Bell/Pizza Hutt/KFC conglomerate that I ate at during that time. I remember the place overflowing with Star Wars stuff.
I could probably try a few different "Artoo"s.
Here’s what I think is the best I can do using TCW, but I hope to be able to skip around the radio drama for ANH later on. I also wonder if the ESB radio drama has something appropriate, hopefully reworded slightly, for “At least you’re still in one piece; look what happened to me!”
The audio is very much temporary, with minimal smoothing just to get the idea across and a rough idea of how it would sound.
This 3PO dialogue is driving me crazy. So far all I’ve really been able to do is shorten the first line to remove space travel: “Oh, my, sounds rather perilous.”
There’s a line that is so close to working, but the last word of the line can’t be removed without sounding obvious. It’s, “I hope never to end up on a mission of that nature [again].”
I’m sure you won’t be the only person wanting that, so perhaps someone at the time could share their efforts with you. We’ll see, though, as we get there.
No, not really. I’m on the Mac side of things, to boot.
No, it would just be a separate mkv with the crawl and rest of opening shot. However one would rip or edit, you can just overlay it and export.
Actually, it would probably make more sense to encode them as BluRay-compliant H.264 inside an mkv, the same as the edit itself anyway.
I bet the first part of that line could work, but I can’t imagine the last part working because he emphasizes “starships” with force.
It’s difficult to find a replacement line because it has to have scene-ending punch. I queued up several Clone Wars episodes featuring 3PO to see what emerges. Snippets that might work so far include:
“I’m afraid that was a long time ago.”
“Just the usual capacitors, nothing special.”
(In a sad voice) “It’s all coming back to me now.”
Something like “I am a protocol droid… I can advise on etiquette.”
I think that’s fair, Ridley. Since all three are getting a V6, if you wish to encode them I can include the crawls as .mov files. 😃
I’ve wrestled for a while this afternoon on getting something for that little scene, and the right lines at the right duration just don’t seem to be there.
There’s a lot of 3PO in TCW, though, so there must be something appropriate that can be done. I will just need to approach it again later. If anyone has access to the show, I’m open to suggestions here, too.
Edit: Here’s the best I’ve gotten so far. (Audio is very temporary and not spruced up.) I’m not sure if this line is confusing, but the intention is that R2 and 3PO have been comparing notes of their various histories, not talking about a shared history. Might be too confusing. The last shot is a little packed, but removing the last phrase makes it too short. 😕
I’m not sure if this is intuitive enough, but I should be able to replace 3PO’s line before the podrace with the following, unless we find something better:
“Oh, my. It’s all coming back to me now. You may be up for adventure, but I am not.”
And it might do to replace his AOTC line with, “For a mechanic you seem to do an excessive amount of thinking.”
I replaced Anakin’s, “Yes, sir” with “okay” from the dawn before the race deleted scene, and removed Jar Jar muttering “okay” as he bends down toward the wrench. I also brought the music that originally lead into the horrible children to a fade out a little earlier to coincide with a note that makes it sound deliberate.
Here’s the scene; see what you think about it and if the wrench is all that needs fixing, hopefully it’ll be quick work for someone interested in helping. Unless we think it’s okay to just see and hear it fall through the hole onto the ground?
https://vimeo.com/337012978
password: fanedit
No; I will adjust the existing commentaries to fit the new sync, and disclaim at the beginning that the commentary tracks were originally made for a prior version. I don’t hate myself quite that much. 😛
Thanks for that answer; it clears some things up I was wondering about. The color bits/range/whatever should stand to be improved in almost any film moving from BluRay to UHD, it sounds like.
I suppose if we go with this new 3PO line, there’s two other scenes that should be altered:
Before the podrace: “Oh, my, space travel sounds rather perilous. I can assure you they will never get me onto one of those dreadful starships.”
Note that any replacement for this line should have some sort of similar punch because right afterward we smash cut to the beginning of the podrace lineup.
Then, in AOTC: “I’m not worried, R2, it’s just that I’ve never flown before.”
I am certain TCW (and maybe Rebels) have ample dialogue to borrow for these two. But before I hurt myself roving aimlessly, anyone have any ideas?
I hope some of you with the technical insight about these things will chime in.
As we all know, AOTC and ROTS were shot using then-state-of-the-art digital camcorders rather than on film, the former being the first ever movie shot completely digitally. This arguably did the industry a favor by pioneering or what have you, but the films seem to pay the price by having substantially less picture information than their film-based predecessors to hand off to increasingly higher resolution remastering.
AOTC and ROTS were shot, mastered, and distributed in 1080p and short of re-rendering out CGI created around 2001-2004 (which I imagine would be extremely unfeasible), they seem to be locked into that resolution forever, since there is no additional picture information to pull out of not just the masters, but the ‘original negative,’ as it were.
I know that the new UHD 4K format offers more than just sheer resolution increase, like HDR and better color depth. What I want to know if whether anything at all about the new format could possibly benefit movies like AOTC and ROTS, over the efforts of people around here who would do upscales of them (like emanswfan). Would the studios just be doing exactly what they are doing here? Or does the new format allow color details, if not outright resolution details, to better come through from these two movies?
I wonder, too, if they’ll do TPM justice in 4K if its two sibling movies can’t be helped.
And let me iron out the audio for the podrace fixing-up scene first, before entertaining animating the falling wrench. To make sure it’s good otherwise.
It’s not a slam dunk in 5.1, listening to each audio channel separately. However, I think a regular viewer would take it in just fine. I’ve brought it down in the mix slightly and I think it’ll work well enough after all.
I was actually looking around for 3PO dialogue to potentially replace, “I find that Jar Jar creature a bit odd” in the event that including some of Jar Jar’s tomfoolery doesn’t pan out. I stumbled onto a mention of this line of dialogue and thought it would be great to use if at all possible.
Here’s about what the 3PO line would be like. I guess it depends on how badly we want it; it’s not perfect. But, when I gave it all I know how to give it, it certainly would not the most questionable audio decision included in these edits.
Hmm, the “special” thing turns out not to be as easy as I had hoped. There’s a line of dialogue I was hoping to lift for 3PO from the Clone Wars series.
The line is, “…I was once the protocol droid to the chief negotiator for the entire Manakron system.” I was hoping to use a truncated version in place of, “I’m not sure this floor is entirely stable.”
However, the dialogue in Anakin’s room is not isolated to the center channel, and there is a lot of noise on the clip from TCW, leaving me with little to use!
Shit, you’re right. That’s damns subtle, though. I bet it’d be relatively easy to animate the wrench as falling past that opening rather than into it for a single digit number of frames, if the clip is good otherwise.
I’ve got something special to show you all later today, hopefully, too. 😉
The audio is rough, because I don’t want to sort out the intricacies unless we like where this is going. I wanted to try to re-include only Jar Jar getting his tongue caught in the energy (without any other clowning around), and this is the way it seems the scene has to be in order to make that work. Unfortunately, there’s a necessary shot of him wildly dropping the wrench in reaction to Anakin calling for him.
https://vimeo.com/336833977
password: fanedit
I’m probably overanalyzing it, but my thinking is:
ROTS emphasizes that she is okay despite passing out (Obi-Wan even kneels to check on her) specifically so that the reason for her death can be due to emotional anguish, which is made explicit later.
In LOE, it is again emphasized that she’s fine, and she goes on to survive the movie, with the robots telling us that she was badly injured. We need to infer she will die eventually from what happened, with no textual reason to believe it will be due solely to long-form emotional anguish. I actually think the bone cracking is helpful in any fan edit, both Boleyn or regular (removing the ‘lost the will to live’ and even ‘we don’t know why’ lines).
I did tone down the effect, removed high frequencies, and moved it to after she speaks. If you weren’t watching the edit on a good sound setup and paying attention it would be easy to miss, but it’s there.