Kexikus

Well done with the Vader scene. It works really well for me except the ending.

Vader telling Kylo what to do and Kylo following those orders right after he beat Vader doesn’t make sense to me, so I would cut that line at least.
And personally, I’m also not a fan of the “Most impressive.” Feels fan-service-y to me and I do think silence works better here.

Couldn’t you just cut Luke finishing the sentence on camera? Assuming of course that the new line is shorter than the original. That would give you more freedom.

But I see what you mean about not being able to extend the reaction shots.

Maybe the pause before “What are you most afraid of?” would be less necessary if you change the intonation so that the stress is on “you”. Then Luke would talk about HIS fears before asking Rey about HERS.

That’s really good. Luke’s lines about Leia are flawless. The first dialog has room for improvements though I think.

I think there should be more of a pause between “Because you’re a Palpatine?” and “The Force made us”. Ideally even a reaction shot of Rey that answers the question before Luke continues to try and dissuade her from that notion. Right now it doesn’t really feel natural.

Also, Luke’s second line sounds a little weird to me. The first three or four times I listened to it, the “if” was almost inaudible for some reason.

And I’m not sure whether it works in the first place. It’s not quite clear what “that fate” is that Luke is talking about. I don’t have an idea for a better line though.

And finally, I feel there should also be a pause between that line and “What are you most afraid of?”

Your ideas in this thread really sound great and I’m looking forward to seeing them fully integrated.

The clips you shared are great as well!

One tiny thing regarding Vader’s lines. The first one sounds to me like the first part of an incomplete sentence. I think it’s because the emphasis is on “fear” while it should be on “is”.

And I do like the idea of having Vader’s first line to be spoken before we see him.

Huh, shows how long ago I last watched The Clone Wars. I thought Ventress had more relevance in those episodes. I can imagine there is not much else you can do then and I agree that introducing her in this episode makes a lot of sense. It might very well be that her appearance feels less disjointed once I watch more episodes.

And I am definetly looking forward to watching more. I already really liked The Clone Wars in its original form and so I’m confident that once I get to the episodes with a better base plot, everything will click into place once again.

I originally wanted to watch a few more episodes before I give feedback but since I didn’t have the time for that, I figured, I’d at least leave some thoughts on the first episode of your show.

First of all, editing wise and from a technical standpoint it’s really pretty much perfect. The story on the other hand - and I know that you already know that and that this is something that’s only a problem for the first two episodes - is really all over the place in that episode. I feel like keeping some more weaker material from Christophsis would have helped here, but it’s been a while since I saw the original episodes so I might be completely off here, but one example of the plot not working for me is the Ventress fight that just ends with her running away and then she just never appears again. Surely there was some closure to that in the original episodes?

But anyway, that’s not the part I actually wanted to talk about since I’m sure you gave the possibilites for making the plot in that episode work way more thought than I did.

What I mostly wanted to mention is the one thing that made the episode feel like a fan edit to me and that’s the introductory text. I’m not against that text in general. In fact, I really liked the kinda cold opening with the first line “Conflicts erupt in the early days of the Clone Wars.” That’s a really great line but by the second and third line it began to feel too much like an info dump which was still kinda fine but then it continued for another three lines while I just wanted to get into those conflicts the first line promised.

So my main suggestion here would be to shorten the introduction to three lines which I think in this case is easily done (that might not be the case for other episodes of course), so let me just comment on how I could see that being done (sorry for the lengthy stuff about something you probably don’t want to change this late into your edits).

Conflicts erupt in the early days of the Clone Wars.

Great line!

With ANAKIN SKYWALKER’s ascension to the rank of Jedi Knight, his former master OBI-WAN KENOBI has requested a new padawan.

I don’t think we need this information. Except for the fact that Anakin is now a Jedi Knight, we are told the same thing in the episode when it becomes relevant. And the Jedi Knight bit could probably be combined with some other information in a later line.

Aided by a small clone squadron, the duo now defend Christophsis, a planet whose crystal factories produce military energy shields.

Something about Anakin and Obi-Wan defending Christophsis is of course important but the rest seems unnecessary to me. I mean, it’s a nice bit of trivia that Christophsis produces energy shields but it’s not like Star Wars has been known for providing reasons as to why there is a battle on a certain planet.

Count Dooku’s fleet has forced the Republic’s ships to retreat to a nearby medical station, leading to fears of an imminent invasion.

IIRC you put that in in order to connect the episode to the next one, but still, this information doesn’t feel necessary to me.

But having detected the distant signal of Dooku’s assassin ASAJJ VENTRESS, a priority target, the Jedi rush to capture her
.
That line is of course completely necessary to set up the first scenes.

They are unaware that comms have just been jammed planetwide…

That is literally the first line of dialogue in the episode, so rather unnecessary.

With all that, I think it would be possible to combine lines 2, 3 and 4 into one that just sets up that Anakin and Obi-Wan are “desperatly trying to defend Christophsis while they wait for reinforcements from the Republic feet” or something like that. Maybe include the blockade or fear of invasion or whatever. Then lead into the episode with line 5 and just skip line 6.

As a secondary suggestion, something else I for some reason expected when the first line showed up on screen and that I still like as a concept is that after each line, you could show maybe 5 to 10 seconds of footage in the style of a silent movie to underline what was just written. So after the first line about conflict erupting, show a montage of that conflict (in this case scenes from Geonosis would probably make most sense since one would watch this after AoTC) and the same with the second line and then have the third (or whichever is the last) line lead directly into the episode and show the logo and episode title only after the first scene.
I think that could work really nicely, but again, I get that you probably don’t want to make this change that late into production.

Anyway, once I got the chance to see more episodes, I’ll (hopefully) be back with more feedback on the actual episodes themselves.

I watched your edit yesterday and it’s really amazing. You managed to highlight all the great ideas and stuff of this series and make it into a really fun movie. At no point, I felt like I was watching a fan edit and I don’t think I would have noticed any of the missing scenes if I didn’t know they exist.

I do still have some feedback on a few scenes/cuts or transitions that felt a little jarring.

The first would be Leias kidnapping. I like what you did there but the fade to black with the musical sting (is that what it’s called?) felt somewhat off. Maybe it was just a black screen for too long or maybe the music was a little too much, I don’t know.

Then there is the cut rooftop chase from the second episode. I didn’t actually miss that scene at all but it being cut caused two problems for me: First of all, the appearance of the bounty hunter droid came too sudden and out of the blue for me even with the scene earlier of all bounty hunters being alerted. Maybe it’s the same in the original cut, but this appearance felt a little disjointed. The second problem I had with the cut rooftop sequence is that it included the scene where Obi-Wan struggles with the force when he saves Leia from falling. Without that scene we are only told that Obi-Wan is not who he was (with the exception of that one shot on the transport after leaving the city planet) which makes it less impactful when he gets his powers back since we never really saw that he lost them in the first place.

And related to that scene: After Obi-Wan and Haja part ways, you cut to Reva suddenly and aggressively jumping down from the roof to confront Haja. That felt quite jarring as well and would IMO work better if she just comes around the corner and stops Haja.

A few minor things: I didn’t quite get Talas motivation or why she suddenly made the decision to help Obi-Wan when she’s with Leia in the tunnel. It went from Leia asking her to do that and her not wanting to go to her just leaving the next time we see her. I can’t remember if that’s any different from the original cut but I noticed it here.
Seeing Lolas red light was the only time I noticed the original episode structure since that shot still had the cliffhanger feel of the original. Not sure how much can be done about that though.
The scene of Vaders shuttle landing for the final duel seemed to stutter for me for some reason.

And finally, the last scene with Owen. Without Reva abducting Luke and Obi-Wan helping to get him back (which I didn’t mind to lose in this cut even though it has some great Owen and Beru scenes), there was no motivation at all for Owen to suddenly change his mind and agree to have Obi-Wan closer to Luke.
When watching the movie, I thought it could have simply ended with Obi-Wan boarding the shuttle on Alderaan but I get why showing him as Lukes protector again is important and the same goes for him meeting Qui-Gon in the end. Still, Owens change of heart didn’t work for me in the context of the movie.

I also remember having thoughts about the conversation with the guy from Jabiim where Obi-Wan and Tala convince him to help but I’ll need to rewatch that scene.

But as I said earlier: Really great work!

Can I get a link to this edit? Your list of changes sounds amazing!

Can I get a link as well? Thank you!

CMMAP said:

smudger9 said:

Has anyone had a response from their PM requests?

Yes, me.

Did you PM Tackel directly?

That looks great. Could you PM me a link as well?

I think it’d work if Snoke said something inbetween.

Hux: The Republic is no more.
Snoke: Good. What about the Resistance? (this is made up as I don’t know his lines by heart)
Hux: We have their location.

That hoodless Kylo is great. Amazing work krlozdak!

Hal 9000 said:

Also, we have no plans to do FX work on Kylo Ren’s hood in the second Snoke scene; it seems like something out of our reach.

I think it’s actually very much doable (for someone who unlike me has any skills in that area) as the only shots that need editing are those where we see Kylo (and Hux) from behind, looking up at Snoke. And there is a shot with the same camera angle that shows Kylo with his hood. So it should be possible to take Kylo from that shot and put him on top of the unmasked shots.

While TLJ doesn’t contradict TFA:Restructured, the TLJ-DLC for Battlefront II kinda does. I’m not saying that we should worry about that, but I think it’s the first canon story to do so.

Well then, maybe it could be improved by changing 3POs line to something like. “It could be that R2 has the rest of the map in his backup data. If only he would wake up.” BB-8 beeps. “R2 has been in low power mode…” 3PO leaves and BB-8 tries to convince R2 of helping them but leaves as R2 doesn’t react. Then however, R2s lights come on, showing us that he is willing to help.

It’s just that it still feels stupid to me when 3PO basically tells the audience: Nope, R2 can’t help here and then in the end R2 magically (or not quite as magically in this edit) turns up and does help.

One more suggestion: What about removing 3POs line “It is very doubtful that R2 has the map in his backup data?” I never liked that line considering that R2 in fact has the map in his backup data. And with R2 starting to wake up after BB-8 talked to him, I don’t think this line is needed at all.

Yeah, it probably flows better this way. Still, maybe having 3PO say that there are 5 minutes left would be possible. And it’d pretty much fix the issue for me.

I would suggest holding off V2.1 until TLJ is released just in case anything needs fixing to make it consistent (not sure what that’d be though) or to see if any material can be used from there, e.g. to have Hux tell Snoke of the Republics destruction.

Apart from that, the one thing I’d like to see changed is to have some more urgency about SKB being almost ready to fire when Han confronts Kylo. Currently you have a scene where it’s stated that it’ll be ready in 15 minutes, then another one where 3PO states that there are only 10 minutes left and then it fires. The problem is that it takes far longer to get from “15 minutes left” to “10 minutes left” than it does from the latter to the actual shot. So to me it felt weird, that SKB was suddenly ready after Hans death. That might be fixable by just having 3PO say “5 minutes left” or by adding another cut to the Resistance being worried inbetween. Maybe the “What do we do? It isn’t working.” scene could be used here already while the “There’s a brand new hole in the oscillator.” part would of course stay where it currently is. That’d also fix that the “What do we do?” sounds like something they’d say while they’re still trying to prevent SKB from firing at all instead of having fired already.

And while I’m at it, I think it’d be nice if it could somehow be shown that the Resistance knows that they’re the next target. No idea how that’d be done though.

Apart from that, the only other tiny issue I had with the edit is Kylos hood in the second Snoke scene. But that shouldn’t even be that hard to fix as it’s mostly seen in the shots from behind and we have a shot from pretty much the same perspective without the hood that could be used to replace Kylo.

Just watched it and wow, that was amazing. It made TFA not into a masterpiece, but a really enjoyable movie! Thank you all so much for making this happen.

There are some (tiny) things that could be improved in a possible future version, but overall it’s really seamless. I don’t think I’d have noticed any edits if I hadn’t known about them. Honestly, I’m not even sure if I catched all.

So once again: Thank you very much.

Downloading now and really looking forward to watching it! Thank you very much for making this happen everyone.

Sir Ridley said:

Understandable, but in Hal’s words from last page: “I totally agree that such dialogue would be great to have there, but I don’t think the existing material to work with yield something worthy of inclusion.”

I don’t know if it would be good to imply that they’ve been talking by seemingly beginning in the middle of a conversation because either way the left out conversation is still just in our “headcanon” and audiences watching wouldn’t necessarily come to the conclusion that they had that exact conversation just by leaving out “Supreme Leader”. And the imagined left out conversation can still make sense with how it’s presented now.

Good point. Maybe TLJ will offer some dialog to improve this scene in a potential V3, but for now you’re probably right in leaving it as is.

Oh, and the slowed down shots are the pilot reactions when Starkiller fires. One of Poe and one from another pilot whose name I can’t remember. They’re both taken from the “There’s a brand new hole in that oscillator” scene IIRC.

Sir Ridley said:

Here is my final cut, including music:
https://vimeo.com/246094567
pass: hux

I believe this music works fine, and I would personally prefer to only use John Williams’ music if possible. But this is how the scene plays out now, so you can make something for it.

Sounds very seamless to me. The only criticism I have is what I posted before. It should either start with Hux telling Snoke of the Republics destruction or if the intention is to imply that they talked about that off-screen, then Hux shouldn’t start with “Supreme Leader, …” as that sounds like the first sentence of a conversation.

My thoughts on the “new” Snoke scene:

I think the scene works better with Hux acknowledging the destruction of Hosnian Prime but I can see the difficulties with making this work. The current wording was weird and it also sounds cobbled together. But maybe something could be put together from other sources, like other movies with Domnhall Gleeson.

However, if this doesn’t work and Hux starts with telling Snoke about the Resistance base and it is thus implied that they talked about the Republic before that, then the scene shouldn’t start with Hux saying “Supreme Leader” as that’s not something he’d say in the middle of a conversation.

And in any case, I think it’d be great if the Resistance somehow reacted to the imminent second attack. I don’t know all the details of what you’re planning for V2, so maybe that’s already in or maybe there’s no way to even do that, but I think it’d improve this restructure.

That’s just perfect. Amazing work!