NeverarGreat

That is far and away the best fan film I’ve ever seen.

RogueLeader said:

EDIT: I do have to say, it does help that BB-8 says the location is “need-to-know”, and how it seems like Rey relents and basically says, “if you can’t tell me where your Base is, then I’ll just drop you off at Ponema terminal”. Which helps explain why she doesn’t take them all the way there. It could raise the question of why Finn doesn’t tell her and would that make Rey suspicious, but the scene moves pretty quick and Rey seems to accept that she just might not be allowed to know. So either Rey assumes that Finn isn’t allowed to tell her, or that Finn doesn’t know because he is a just field operative or something.

That’s exactly what I was trying to convey with the edit.

A lot of what I am doing is super subjective and nitpicky, and even though I try to construct a logic for it the fact is that movies are a mire of subjective feelings and assumptions held together with music and goodwill. In the end the reasons for cutting or keeping a moment come down to the sum total of these feelings. For example, when my girlfriend and I first watched TFA we both immediately interpreted BB-8’s thumbs-up as a well-known rude gesture, and not because we weren’t sold on BB-8 but maybe because we were more invested in him than in anyone else in the scene. Personally, I wouldn’t react well if someone got in my face and admitted to lying to me, while simultaneously putting me on the spot to betray the trust of people for whom I care. Mission or no mission, that would get me defensive and angry, hence the interpretation of the rude gesture. I totally respect that this might not be the prevailing interpretation or even one that makes logical sense, but it’s the feeling that’s stayed with me and the deeper reason for this change.

And who knows, maybe later I’ll decide to keep the scene for one of the justifications you describe or for some other reason. My interpretation isn’t more valid than that of anyone else, hence the attempt at logic when making an edit to share with the community. 😃

RogueLeader said:

Maybe Han doesn’t feel like finding Luke is as important as it seems to us and the Resistance. So to Han, taking a brief detour doesn’t feel like a big deal.

Haha, I never thought of that! It’s all Han’s fault!
That is easy to say, but it is still likely something else could have gone wrong before they made it to the Resistance. Someone else could have tracked the Falcon, or someone could have recognized them at Ponema Terminal, who knows?

True, it was just a funny HISHE moment on my part. 😃

And if you make it to where BB-8 chooses not to tell them, then it kinda becomes his fault that all of that happens instead of Han’s. Alternatively, you could make BB-8 not know, but you would think a Resistance astromech would know where the Resistance Base is.

I’m willing to accept that BB-8 is hardwired to protect the Resistance even if it causes problems.

Every option presents problems, but I think just having Han not want to face Leia raises the least amount of issues.

I think that Han might have been able to get the intel from BB-8 due to his old Rebellion status but decides to go to Maz anyway. Later Maz declines his request and says that he should go, implying that she can provide the location, so I think that aspect of his character remains in either version. I also feel strongly that Han’s appearance should be in service to the plot of getting to the Resistance rather than being simply a detour, especially since we’re supposed to identify with him as a knowledgeable father figure as Rey does.

Also, it is kind of weird that Rey is just gonna drop them off at Ponema Terminal. Why not just take them all the way to the Base, then go back? If she is so concerned about getting BB-8 to the Resistance, why not make sure he gets there?

That line feels out of character for her, doesn’t it? She’s established to be so decent and promised that she would get him back, but then suddenly doesn’t after BB-8 bets everything on her. I think that line at least makes sense in the latest version.

Yeah, I did like four versions trying to keep the head turns and thumbs up, but none of them really worked without him eventually spilling the beans. In all the versions BB-8 knows the location of the base, but he refuses to give it to Rey or Finn.

https://vimeo.com/320440596

Password: fanedit

I suppose there might be room to keep the head turning when Rey says ‘I’ll drop you two at Ponema Terminal’, showing that BB-8 is torn on his decision, but ultimately it should go against every bit of his programming to give the location to someone who just lied to him about his identity as a Resistance fighter.

Your point about Han’s reticence is well taken, and I think that is part of why he doesn’t want to go there directly. But it seems extreme for him to endanger the galaxy just because he doesn’t want to face Leia.

Something that just occurred to me - if Han hadn’t suddenly appeared, Finn and Rey would have flown BB-8 to the Resistance without incident, Rey wouldn’t have been captured, Finn would have told the Resistance about the Starkiller before it destroyed the Hosnian system which would certainly have allowed for the Senate and fleet to be evacuated, the fleet could have bolstered the Resistance forces in taking out the Starkiller, and Han himself wouldn’t have died.

I’ve made some more progress on the edit over the past few days, mostly incremental progress and tightening up transitions but some actual new changes.

One change that has proven oddly difficult is removing BB-8’s mention of the Ileenium system. In the original, Han decides to go to Maz’s place because the Falcon is too easily tracked, yet they eventually take it to the Resistance base and to Luke’s island anyway. Removing our heroes’ knowledge of the Ileenium system also makes Han’s assistance necessary. But anyway, I’ve tried about everything and still can’t find a seamless way of skipping that information. Maybe it will require cutting the entire exchange.

RogueLeader said:

Huh, I didn’t notice it in your first version, but that little “Force” sound you added when Han grabs the saber really helps sell it.

You can kinda still hear the background music in one of Leia’s lines, and it’d be nice if that “too much Vader” line could fade out more.

Definitely something to clean up.

A few other things, it looks kinda weird to me how he opens his mouth. I guess it is meant to be like he is about to say something, but I might cut that a little shorter, because it feels slightly jarring to me. Maybe don’t have his mouth open so wide? Not really sure.

I struggled with this quite a bit. Cutting earlier felt weird since he isn’t too outwardly emotional, but as you say it’s weird anyway.

Also, I can think there should be a lot more space between the “Vader” line and Kylo stabbing him. I’m guessing it is meant to be like Kylo’s instant reaction, but I kind of think it would be nice to keep a little bit of that tension the original had, where we are just sitting there waiting for the worst to happen. So maybe a less of a gap between Han’s two lines. Let them be a little closer together. I also think you shouldn’t use that shot of their hands tightening on the saber until after the light disappears and Kylo starts doubting Han. Because from what I understand, what he first hears about Leia is positive, but then when he hears Han’s words, it is negative, so maybe after he hears Han’s first lines (or both) then you can cut to that shot. Just my two cents though. The way you have done the room darkening looks really good too by the way!

Thanks, I can certainly put the saber tightening shot later and see if that works, the main reason it’s there is because it keeps the focus on Kylo instead of cutting away to the sun.

Interesting idea, but it would be over a decade before Rey is even born at this point.

I fully support any attempt at removing Leia as the ‘other’, but this raises a separate problem. The ST is based on the canon that Luke and Leia are sisters, so any removal of Leia’s powerful destiny would also have to keep her relation to Luke for the ST to function.

So, if an edit kept Leia as Luke’s sister while downplaying that she is the ‘other’ and keeping that mysterious, then it could work, but in no version of the story do I think that name-dropping Rey would make sense.

I think something along these lines is good, while not overwhelming people with categories:

• General Star Wars Discussion
• Episodes of the Star Wars Saga
• The Expanded Universe
• Theatrical Cuts vs. Subsequent Releases
• Toys & Memorabilia

Then if you wanted to organize discussion of each trilogy or each film, you could have individual stickied threads for general discussion of each trilogy/film in the saga subforum.

This assumes that Starkiller is mobile and/or can drain stars from lightyears away. Neither ability is indicated, though it’s not ruled out completely. However, it makes sense to me that the only part of the Starkiller that can affect faraway stars is the ‘Hyperlightspeed weapon’.

The TLJ soundtrack is definitely one reason it’s so hard for me to fully appreciate that movie. Whenever it seems like Williams will fully commit to a new theme there is some sort of rug-pull which interrupts the flow. Probably my favorite new themes of TLJ happen at the Fathier chase and before the Hyperspace ram, which means that as soon as the themes are fully developed there is no chance in the story to revisit them in their full power anymore.

Thinking about the popular response to Star Wars movies over the years, I realized that the goodness or badness of the films might not be as important as where they sit in relation to the OT. Anything close to the OT in the timeline benefits from a ‘Star Warsy-ness’ simply due to proximity, whereas the one film so far which has been two movies removed from the OT can begin to be appreciated as its own weird thing. The unfortunate middle chapters are caught in a no-man’s land of disrepute simply by their position.

It’s far from finished at the moment, unfortunately.

…

Here’s version 2 of Han’s Death scene, edited to have a bit more of the ‘test’:

https://vimeo.com/319503968

Password: fanedit

^ I was debating whether to see that or Alita yesterday - We went with Alita simply because it was unknown, and I kind of wish we’d seen HTTYD instead.

Alita is technically excellent, thematically interesting, visually weird, tonally disjointed, and phonetically abysmal.

ziggyonice said:

NeverarGreat said:

Here’s a more polished version of the scene, with some improved transitions and an edit to the Hux/Snoke dialogue. The rearrangement of the Kylo/Snoke dialogue has been dialed back but still retains the main idea.

This looks good, although (personally) I think the “He means nothing to me” line is too confusing on its own.

I definitely wouldn’t say the earlier Snoke scenes were failures. I really liked how you ended one of them with Snoke calling Kyle Ren “Solo.”

Thanks, I also like that bit and might keep it in the 2nd Snoke scene.
‘He means nothing to me’ is intentionally confusing since we don’t know what it refers to yet. I’ll sit with it for a while in any case.

Speaking of Kylo and Han, I had an idea for their final confrontation that would hopefully give some more depth and emotion to the scene.

https://vimeo.com/319079063

Password: fanedit

Since I’m thinking about cutting a lot of the Han/Leia dialogue about Ben, I thought it might be good to include snippets here, where they essentially act as evidence in Kylo’s final test of his parents. I think Kylo’s twisted ‘Thank you’ is much more meaningful in this context.

Mocata said:

Is Tunisia even viable for film crews these days? As for this (vaguely rumoured) show I can’t imagine them spending a lot on location shooting of any kind. The Mandalorian is just being shot in California from what I’ve read.

I would be dissapointed if this didn’t crop up at least once an episode:

Wolfman said:

In my opening post on this thread I have a picture of the Odeon Guildford UK where I saw all the original Trilogy.
Here now is a picture of the cinema actually showing Return Of The Jedi.
I remember standing looking at those posters. Excellent.

Monster Trucks

A really fun time. Feels like it came out of the mid nineties, in the best way possible.

g-force said:

I’m skeptical. I see a lot of detail in the results not even present in the original image. Also not sure why blurring and sharpening operations would be changing the color. Is there some temporal smoothing going on as well, which is getting rid of the compression artifacts? Or are the “before” images not a true representation of your source?

A lot of denoising operations have an option for reducing color noise, it looks like some color has been lost through such a method.

It also looks like the algorithm is mistaking a lot of the shadow detail for noise and erasing it, seen most prominently in the doorway to the right and in Anakin’s hair.

littlev87 said:

I think you should consider using transitions similar to this video for your dream sequences.

https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/The-Destruction-of-the-Jedi-Temple/id/63925/page/1#1270201

They really give a similar feeling to the “force back” when she first touches the saber.

I will, for sure. Although I’m not a big fan of the style, I can see how it might be effective in certain situations.

RL, I haven’t seen that movie, but it should probably be on the list!

Here’s a more polished version of the scene, with some improved transitions and an edit to the Hux/Snoke dialogue. The rearrangement of the Kylo/Snoke dialogue has been dialed back but still retains the main idea.

https://vimeo.com/318133232

Password: fanedit

Okay, so after the failure of the combined Snoke scenes I reverted to something closer to the original with the first scene:

https://vimeo.com/318024713

Password: fanedit

It now serves to expand the time our heroes spend together on the Falcon, and keeps Kylo’s lineage obscure. I was torn on whether or not to leave in ‘He means nothing to me’, since that’s the biggest giveaway linking Kylo to Han, but it could also be that he’s referring to Luke, so there’s at least a little ambiguity before the confirmation after the Maz Castle battle.

Also, whereas the original scene implied that the Awakening and Kylo’s conflicted feelings were separate, in this version I wanted to suggest that the awakening sensed by Snoke is purely caused by Kylo learning of his father’s involvement, leading to the awakening of long-suppressed emotion. Or alternately, Rey’s awakening is what Snoke originally senses but Kylo does not, and assumes that Snoke has discovered his weakness. Snoke then senses Kylo’s real issue and presses him on this front.

Indeed, although it’s only the very beginning and very end of the theme which is spliced together in the Takodana attack.

It is bombastic to an extent that it’s difficult to distinguish between what bits are used where, but there is a development of the theme throughout its brief 1:15 duration. I intentionally used just the first half during the interrogation, and relied on the last half for the alarm. With the brief spliced appearance on Takodana, it’s never simply repeated but hopefully serves as a developing motif to signify the First Order’s strength, something that was sadly lacking in the theatrical version.

RogueLeader said:

Nev, those are some good points. I especially like how you highlight Luke’s idealism as somewhat of both a flaw and a strength.

I think merely them having more altruistic qualities is something both Luke and Rey have in common. They both do want to help people. Rey wants to help BB-8 and the Resistance. Luke wants to help Obi-Wan and the Princess.

True, but Luke only helps Ben after he literally has nothing left for him on Tatooine, and his motives with regards to Leia are clear. He already hates the Empire, so joining the Rebellion is a no-brainer for him.

And like you said, Rey’s major characterization revolves around her own sense of belonging and identity.
Personally, I think having Rey join Kylo would have been a really big mistake. I don’t think it was a coincidence that this was the same scene that made Rey come face-to-face with her origins and what they mean for her sense of self-worth. Yes, Rey is looking for belonging, but really in that scene she was presented with a choice between belonging with Kylo or belonging with the Resistance.

I think in her mind, she realized that if Kylo is still willing to kill others when he doesn’t have to, then he hasn’t really changed, but he is just more of the same.
And you have to remember that Rey doesn’t know Finn is aboard the Supremacy, and although she has come to understand Ben more during the film, her one main friend is Finn, and for all she knows he is on those transports. Her letting Kylo keep destroying the rest of the transports would have been out-of-character for Rey.

Definitely. There’s no version in which she would forsake Finn. She toys with having split allegiance in this movie, and it would have been interesting to explore how Finn would fit into all this. Kylo could have brought up Finn since he knows it’s on her mind, and she would point out how Finn is more like Kylo than Kylo since he has no allegiance to either the First Order or to the Resistance (as far as she knows anyway). She could paint Finn as the beginning of Kylo’s new vision, one where the a truly new order could rule the galaxy. Then the conflict clearly becomes one between Rey’s vision, where the two sides are saved and peace is restored, and Kylo’s vision where the only way forward is to burn both sides to the ground.

I think I saw this suggested somewhere, but I can really only picture the moving going two other ways:
One, Holdo could have rammed the Supremacy as Rey was reaching out for his hand, as if she was going to join him, but the following explosion snapped her out of it and made her flee. You probably re-edit this and people could just assume the saber somehow got messed up in the explosion.

Two, Rey could have told Kylo that she would join him if he stopped firing on the transports. He could have said fine, but we are still capturing them. They go down to Crait, Rey would be standing alongside Kylo, seeing him slowly lose his cool. And when Luke shows up, they both go out to meet him, and Luke apologizes to both Rey and Kylo, and he convinces Rey to go run back to the Resistance and help them escape, while he has his confrontation with Kylo Ren.

This would have been an interesting way to go, but maybe better would have been to have Rey escape the way she does in the original, so simply cutting the battle over the lightsaber.

But, even though I might write up these alternatives, I don’t necessarily agree with them. I still think Rey’s decision to not join Kylo was belonging-driven, but in that moment she realized that Finn and the Resistance could be her belonging rather than Kylo. But I think that choice comes from a healthy place, like, Rey at that moment realized that it didn’t matter if she was nothing, that she could create her own identity, and in that moment she chose that is not what she wanted to be.

That sounds great for the end of her character arc, but maybe not so great when there’s still an entire movie to go. Maybe that’s why so many people feel like there’s not much more to explore with this story.

poppasketti said:

In any case, when confronted with the choice to turn to the dark side, Rey makes the same choice as Luke. That’s because they are both essentially good people.
When Luke was tempted by Vader and Palpatine, he rejected the offer. It wasn’t Luke’s training, it wasn’t something he learned along the way, he just was a good person. That’s why we like him. The same goes for Rey. One thing we’ve known about Rey from the beginning, when she takes in and protects BB-8, is that she’s good. Ultimately, it came down to a moral choice.

I don’t think people give the writers the proper credit for Rey’s character. People simply focus on how good she is at using a lightsaber, when training is not about ability, but about character. I also think that sometimes people mistake flaws in the storytelling with political agendas, and that’s really unfortunate. I wish there was something better to do, but I though I could at least write about it.

I think that boiling Luke and Rey down to ‘Good People’ ignores a lot of what makes these characters unique. Let’s just start with the example you gave:

Rey, a scavenger who scrapes by each day with barely enough to eat, nevertheless refuses to take ownership of BB-8 or sell it for what must be weeks of food. In contrast, Luke has no qualms with the buying and selling of droids and will even hunt down R2-D2 while strongly suspecting that he really belongs to old Ben. Luke’s interest in the droids, at least in the beginning, is contained to their involvement in the Rebellion. The reason we as an audience believe that Luke truly cares for them is because he treats them as human servants rather than unfeeling machines, but that doesn’t make Luke nearly the selfless person Rey is when we meet her.

Luke has a core of idealism, which goes hand in hand with its inherent flaws - naivete and delusion. These flaws drive his story toward its natural conclusion in the Original Trilogy. It is this idealism which I think people mistake for inherent goodness in his character, but goodness has no flaws. If Luke were an inherently good person he would have immediately returned R2 to Ben and gone on to campaign for droid rights instead of killing thousands of people in the name of a terrorist organization.

A good person would have treated Yoda as an equal from the outset, would have heeded him during his training, and would have stayed and kept his promise instead of naively running off with the expectation that he could save his friends. It was not goodness which made him seek out the light in Vader, but idealism of the Jedi ways and of his mental image of his father which made him believe that a Jedi could never be truly evil. This is why Luke’s final confrontation with Vader is so great - he is vindicated through the very flaws of naivete and blindness, without which he would never have underestimated the ability of the Emperor to destroy him.

What I’m trying to say with all of this is that being a good person doesn’t make for compelling drama. If Rey were simply a good person, her story would be as dry as Tatooine in a drought. Luckily there’s more to Rey than that, but I argue that her driving characterization is one of goodness, which is inherently boring. If instead she were truly searching for belonging and personal mentors, her flaws would be defining aspects of her character and lead to great drama. In such a world, Rey would have taken Kylo’s hand because she has no other mentor, but instead her primary motivator in this scene is her essential, boring goodness and the movie suffers for it.