Hal 9000

Wow, Nev, I’ve been a slacker on keeping up to date with this project lately but that Senate idea is compelling. Really hoping it turns out. It’s just what is missing from Restructured, as you highlight. The idea would be that they did “listen” to Leia’s emissary, but it was too late. We see their amassed ships be destroyed along with the Hosnian system overall, but a few could have launched to be there by the start of TLJ.

Would you mind sending me the most current version of that, Nev? I’ll play around with adding an extra like 5 seconds to that vision and see what I can come up with.

Ah, that’s important!

Thanks!

The blue lightning I would just chalk up to artistic choice and palantir-ish misdirection.

I could see about tightening Rey’s reaction shot as you describe and see how it plays.

And I’ll see about Rey’s lips during that moment. Could probably just use less of that shot and more of another, but hard to say until I can sit down to look.

Anyone who has the current link to my SW stuff now has access to the workprint. It’s at the root level of the Star Wars folder.

Looking to make sure it’s coherent and nothing was missed. Not really looking for big ideas, but the implementation and content of affected scenes. It’s not a V3, just an alternate version. Thanks in advance.

Nev, it’s great to see you keep improving this. That R2 clip was super good.

Rendering out a workprint for the Rey Nobody alternate version of Ascendant, thanks largely to Spence.

It’ll just be a low quality, non-color graded video to be able to see how the pieces fit together. Once it’s finalized, I’ll proceed to reapply the LUTs manually to the entire film and sort out the jigsaw puzzle of all the subtitle files that’ll need to be synced up again.

Here’s the change list:

• Thanks to Sir Ridley, a different version of the same crawl is used in order for the title font to match TLJ (hugely important)
• The hint about Palpatine’s ability to possess (certain?) people is moved back out of the opening sequence and where it originally belonged, for clarity’s sake given that Kylo no longer has an ace in the hole of knowing Rey’s parentage
• Removed Rey sensing her parents during her first Force vision where she sees the Sith throne (could perhaps use a bit more, but it’s serviceable)
• During Kylo and Rey’s Forcetime conversation right after Rey meets the village girl on Pasana, removed a line or two that are moved to the duel in Kylo’s quarters
• Removed Rey saying she’s sees Ochi’s ship before
• Yellow lightning, to add a little distance from what was intended (in-universe logic aside) to tie her into Palpatine (using work by skenera two years ago)
• Used Spence’s version of the duel in Kylo’s quarters, and restructured the lead-in from Poe and Finn similarly (used Spence’s literal audio from the sequence as he provided it)
• Used Spence’s version of the hangar revelation scene (again used lifted audio from Spence)
• Removed Rey’s lines, “He killed my father… and my mother” (last instance of using audio right from Spence)
• Restructured one scene around the Ach-To sequence, also removing Finn sharing his inference that Palpatine was seeking Rey as a child
• On Ach-To, removed dialogue about Rey’s Palpatine heritage
• Removed several lines of dialogue as Rey and Palpatine converse, following Spence, though also removing line, “She will take her revenge.”

The ending will not be altered from the regular version of Ascendant. It’s the same ol’ Ascendant, just that Rey is never established to be descended from Palpatine, and that her parents presumably are as TLJ describes them and don’t factor into this story.

Icecream2448 said:

Please don’t cut Rey’s ugh.

Okay.

I don’t think messing with that would make for a seamless result and it’s not a big deal.

And to clarify: this isn’t a V3, just the Rey Nobody alternate version.

The blue lightning has an overall heavy blue cast even without the blue lightning so I think it fits okay as a vision or even misleading implication that it’s the huge blast we see put right after it.

And for the opening vision I had just snipped out the first bit about her parents so that it is just her “vision about the throne of the Sith and who was on it.”

Heh. I guess it goes without saying!

And I try to stick loosely to official versions of shots without having a good reason to deviate, because otherwise where do you draw the line?

I’d love to use Adywan’s version of that X-Wing shot, make no mistake.

And I’m open to ideas about Mos Eisley, although I like what’s in my current version. It’ll depend on what Dat_SW_Guy presents to work with, too.

Yeah, it at least leaves room to wonder about such things because the sabers are two different colors at all. Good read on it.

The primary reason is to help clarify the saber in the third act when two blue sabers are exchanged and tossed all around against a heavy blue backdrop.

Especially with the inclusion of Leia capping off the sequence of ghostly voices, the purple color makes it clear whose saber Rey wields.

Carrie had indeed expressed a preference for that color when asked, when Leia’s lightsaber was merely a hypothetical.

Also, from a saga-only perspective at least, this saber was introduced and dispatched with in this film. Given the history as shown, it would seem there’d be minimal squinting required to have this change cohere well enough with future media.

I thought maybe this would be a fan edit done with a tiny time budget. Something like, “I prepared the source but only did 30 minutes of NLE work before exporting.”

Well, I think the yellow makes more sense for a Rey Nobody version than in the regular version, and that’s enough to override resistance to the idea for me.

Dramatically more important than this, however, Ridley exported a variant of the opening crawl that is the same as what’s already in Ascendant except that it uses the same font as TLJ for the film’s title. Because… this version does more, better or worse, to cohere with TLJ.

Here’s how it looks.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tp_qxpg2zyKNFoF2bwbIH4AZzccM9TmI/view?usp=drivesdk

It was skenera that done that, two years ago today.

Settled. It’ll be yellow for the Rey Nobody version.

Me too! It makes the yellow color for her saber at the end mean something.

I’m not sure whose permission I’m waiting on.

Just saying, guys… it’s not too late for yellow lightning for Rey. It would help separate her from Palpatine, and I already have the completed footage.

Eh, eh?

That sounds interesting, would like to see it. Some variation of that line would work well with the later “your new family… dies.”

Well it looks fucking amazing.

Did Ridley do the crawl? Because if not…

I disagree, Octorox, I think the line is Luke ribbing his past self in a way entirely appropriate to the journey he completes by the end of TLJ.

Lawdog, I think that line might be a little weird, as it seems to draw a contrast. “Luke’s father was there and… your family is… here too?”

All right, the day has come. Thanks for Spence, I have most of the pieces necessary to start working on the Rey Nobody variant version of Ascendant.

In Spence’s telling of the story, Rey’s parents remain drunken bastards who are irrelevant to the story. Ochi is just a Jedi hunter who happens to have the clue to Exegol, with no other meaningful ties to Rey. (His ship looks similar to the one in TFA, but this is never addressed.) Kylo reveals to Rey that her vision that disturbed her about taking the throne will indeed come to pass, implying that Palpatine knows this. Palpatine evidently told him this, keeping to himself that this is exactly what he wants to happen, which he reveals to Rey later. (Maybe for this version it’d be better to revert the reveal about essence transfer to the third act to Rey, otherwise Kylo ought to have suspected it.) Rey decides to pursue Palpatine to kill him, seemingly giving into this prophecy.

Where I plan to deviate from Spence is to avoid having Palpatine spell out for Kylo in the opening scene about essence transfer, so that the logic can be Palpatine getting Kylo to hype Rey up about coming to kill him. I’m hoping to, after the hangar reveal scene, have Rey resolve to want to kill Kylo Ren rather than Palpatine.

It doesn’t really seem possible to have Rey’s parents be noble or hide her without the Palpatine connection. Raises too many unanswered questions, and is halfway toward the destruction of TLJ’s established facts that a ‘Rey Nobody’ edit values.