V5 has been fixed and reuploaded, as I had messed up the flipped shots when DJ escapes the cell. Same planes as always.
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Yeah, I feel like the emergent aspects of removing the youngling stuff from the PT holds its own weight over and against what is needed to interpret Kenobi.
I bet Reva’s stuff could be edited a bit just to remove the explicit depiction of Anakin killing kids right then and there, making it a bit more general than that. She was betrayed by Anakin as well as the rest of the Jedi, and that was traumatizing. Who knows? Not yet at least.
In light of the unfolding ‘Kenobi’ series, I feel it’s worth having a conversation about younglings in these Hal9000 fan edits of the prequel films. (Incredibly minor spoiler for Kenobi: it involves referencing youngling Jedi.)
My saga fan edits operate on two levels, as I see it. The first is in relation to the known-quantity ‘saga’ films in isolation. The second is to hopefully play nicely overall with other, non-saga material. Sometimes things removed from my edits will be referenced in a book or a comic, and most often this introduces only mild contradictions as most of the removed content can still be thought of as occurring when other material establishes it to the hypothetical reader who only has my fan edits for those films. This is all well and good for books, comics, and animation, though it hits a bit differently when it comes to new live-action content closely tied into the saga.
My prequel edits do not explicitly remove the possibility of children Jedi trainees being present at the Coruscant temple, though they do away with much of what builds it up. In Ep1, we hear Qui-Gon say Anakin would have been identified “early” had he been born in the Republic, though we do not hear anything about Anakin being explicitly “too old” to begin training. In Ep2, we do not see Yoda and the younglings. In Ep3, Anakin is not explicitly shown to kill children, and this does not factor into Obi-Wan or Padme’s reactions.
Attack of the Phantom, the 2002 edit from The Phantom Editor, also removed Yoda and the younglings, as he felt the scene hurt Obi-Wan’s character. I agree with this decision. My edit of Ep3 depicts Anakin’s turn to the dark side as a bit more gradual, betraying the Jedi ostensibly as a shift in political allegiance. This is different from the original, in which the focal point for Obi-Wan and Padme is that Anakin slaughtered children, seemingly as his initial actions after switching sides. These are the substantial gains that come with omitting younglings being shown or discussed onscreen in the prequels.
In the new Kenobi show, (very minor spoilers) we are reminded in no uncertain terms that Anakin slaughtered younglings during his march of the Temple. Nothing in my edits of the prequels make this impossible, and it could be taken by a viewer as a new revelation perhaps. Nothing save for a sequel-sequel trilogy can impact the first level of operating within a coherent episodic saga, though this does put some strain on cooperating with new live-action material. It contradicts only the implication that editing gives us for Anakin in Ep3.
I havne’t made plans to modify this substantially, although I would imagine making two small changes to Ep1 and Ep2 in the event I find myself reissuing it anyway. Those being to reinstate the explicit idea Anakin is “too old,” and Anakin explicitly mentioning that attachment is forbidden for Jedi.
Not at all!
Cloud City’s intro has a female vocal, yeah. ROTJ has choral as Luke gets aggressive on Vader.
They’re two cuts of the same movie, but I think either maintains good continuity with Rey Nobody.
Legendary borrows some of the more subtle Palpatine things, but nothing explicit. The most explicit is probably hearing palatine laugh as Luke looks into Kylo’s mind during the flashback, but I would’ve interpreted that figuratively had the original been like that.
Add to the chorus of Jedi spirits encouraging Rey to stand in TROS Palpatine’s call from the ROTS trailer to “Rise.”
EDIT: oops, sorry, was mistaken
Framed portrait hanging in the Death Star conference room?
You’d think so, but it doesn’t end up working in practice to keep Rey’s parents as nobodies AND have Ochi seeking her. Because her parents then become noble in shielding her, which begs the question as to why.
I could certainly see excising this episode almost entirely if 3 and 5 bridge well, if you’re trying to cram things into a ~2 hour movie. And that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it.
It’s not gonna be as seamless as the main version but it really comes close to working. Closer than I’d have guessed. There’s still some weird things, like how Ochi is just some random dumbass now.
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Well, ‘Rey Nobody’ has finished the editing stage! I took Burbin’s feedback and applied it to Spence’s version of the bedroom duel and hangar scenes.
There’s still work to do, including retiming all the subtitle tracks to fit and reapplying all the LUTs. But, it’s a-comin’.
Also, a very minor adjustment I made which will also be present in any future issue of either version of Ascendant. TFA and TROS usually give the blue Skywalker saber an ignition sound that blends the classic one and the Sith one, whereas TLJ gives it a mostly new one based off the classic one.
So, if TFA Restructured ever gets reissued, it’ll feature a version of the ignition sound a bit closer to the classic. I will be reissuing TLJ to fix a dumb visual mistake (flopped wrong shots when DJ breaks out of jail), so I went ahead and replaced one ignition sound I had missed prior. Then, in TROS it will now feature the sound originally given to it for TLJ. The logic is that it sounds like its old self until being broken, then it takes on a different sound. (Also, Leia’s saber will be consistent throughout. Someone on YouTube pointed out that in the training flashback, her saber seemed to have a combination of Luke’s and Ahsoka’s ignition sounds. So, I approximated it and applied it to the two other times her saber is ignited, instead of using the classic sound again.)
HAL, you’re pretty darn awesome!
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Also, as a reminder, new users can PM me themselves if they know how. Asking for requests that way avoids bumping these threads.
Sending
Sending you both a PM for the link to finished product.
The funeral is still there! I just meant that scenes were restructured in order to remove Anakin’s murder confession.
Also there won’t be burnt-in subtitles because TAS didn’t have all of them, but I’ll include a .srt subtitle file for the alien dialogue.
It’s too hard for me.
I like this best of the three, although I feel Anakin’s Dark Deeds is more fitting than the Vader/Qui-Gon funeral because it harkens back to Obi-Wan reflecting on what Anakin has become. To me the funeral music sounds more like a statement than a reflection.
To Eddie’s point, I do already make a version of LOE available in which Padme dies. However, my main concern has always been for the saga itself to feel cohesive regardless of any other (in the old way of thinking about it, “EU”) material. So whether Kenobi addresses it or not, the saga viewer is still presented with the apparent contradiction.
Assuming the subject isn’t broached in the remainder of the Kenobi series, I would prefer to leave LOE as it is but to trim a couple things about Kenobi to let the viewer go on believing Padme had lived for some amount of time on Alderaan. I really like Leia’s conversation with Ben in episode 3 because when she wonders about her father, it implies she has less reason to wonder about her mother.
Now, if they go balls to the wall with a hard comment on the discrepancy by having Ben inject memories into her or something like that in a way essential to the story, then we might have an issue. But even so, two versions of LOE dodge the issue. If Kenobi does make a deliberate solution to it, there’ll still be the “saga only” version that coheres better directly with ROTJ.
Fortunately, something like this can be done in FCPX so I was able to do it while having some downtime, since I don’t have to boot into my other OS like I do for most of my fan editing stuff. (God help me the day FCP7 is beyond my reach forever.)
So I’m exporting a candidate, if everything looks right. I followed your directions, with a few tweaks I had to make when facing the reality of what’s there:
Everything else is as described: Losing the lakeside scene and using the truncated fireside scene, reordering scenes in order to remove Anakin confessing to Padme, and nixing the Dooku v Yoda duel.