NeverarGreat

After watching Rogue One today and discussing it among my friends, I realized that my knowledge of Star Wars is embarrassingly deep. I know far more about the Star Wars saga and the EU than probably 99.7% of the population, and I have highly involved theories about virtually every aspect of this fictional universe.

At the same time, I do not consider myself to be a fan of Star Wars.

Perhaps some of you have the same feeling.

Sure, I like many aspects of the movies, especially the OT, but I like the Lord of the Rings movies more. In terms of the number of movies and shows, I like the Star Trek universe more than Star Wars, and would definitely say that I am a Trek fan.

The reason for this is, I think, due in large part to the Prequels and the Special Editions. After Episode 1, I read the novelization and then began reading much of the older EU materials. By the time Episode 3 rolled around, that brief phase of genuine fandom had ended, and I moved on to other things.

A few years later, the RLM reviews arrived and crystallized much of the vague, generalized dislike I had towards the prequels and the SE. At that point I began thinking about my own prequel trilogy, and continued tinkering on that front for several years. Similarly, the release of the 2004 DVDs and the 2011 Blu-rays in contrast to the 2010 Technicolor screening crystallized all that was wrong with the Blu-rays, and initiated a prolonged period of investigation as to the ‘original’ look of the film.

Without the meddling of George Lucas, I would probably not be invested in the Star Wars universe at all. My natural interests are much more in line with the fantasy world of LOTR, the vision of a Star Trek future, or creating an original work of fiction. The allure of these things is in stark opposition to my relationship with Star Wars, which is one of a problem to be solved or a paradox to be resolved. I’m not one of those 'Lucas f----d my childhood people; my childhood was quite nice, thank you. It’s that the juxtaposition of the excellent OT with the deeply flawed PT and SEs brings me back here day after day.

George Lucas created the ultimate meta-drama with Star Wars, making it generationally relevant because of the massive cognitive dissonance resulting from viewing the Saga as a single, unified vision. It is brilliant in retrospect, even if it was accidental. If his prequels and changes were merely mediocre, I think Star Wars may have already faded into obscurity, and I would be writing my own stories, rather than being fascinated by this impossible puzzle box of a universe.

So what about you? Do you consider yourself to be a fan of Star Wars, or are you here for the puzzle box?

Swazzy said:

doubleofive said:

Friend of mine says the R1 cinematographer mentions seeing a 4K DCP of ANH in this interview:

http://collider.com/greig-fraser-lion-rogue-one-interview

I have a theory about this, but it contains spoilers

If that is so, then there is a delicious irony in then making a movie about a rebel in the guise of an Imperial running away with a hard drive full of the Empire’s most valuable data.

SilverWook said:

In the old days there were people who thought Star Wars was too violent, but I’ve had the misfortune of crossing paths with someone in 2016 who seems to firmly believe Lucas made Star Wars as “a mindless celebration of high tech warfare” that “teaches kids war is fun”. Utter Bantha poodoo, but it’s bugging me for some reason.

Maybe their parents wouldn’t buy them any of the toys?

My dad turned the TV off on my grandmother when the black and white Christmas episode of The Lucy Show(1962) she was watching was deemed ‘Too sinful’.

This happened tonight. The very edge of '17.

DuracellEnergizer said:

Yeah, I can’t take that guy seriously anymore.

I thought their whole point was that even THEY don’t take themselves seriously.

TV’s Frink said:

I don’t know that I like the idea of adding Scarif. I think I prefer my A New Hope…sans Scarif.

…

I’ll show myself out.

I wish that were so.

JEDIT: All these broken DurEnergizer links make me sad. Most of the thread is gone!

DuracellEnergizer said:

So twoface is actually Tommy Lee Jones combined with Charles Kraudhammer? Chilling.

Also a big fan of NammaN & NibbiN

Exactly 24 hours until I see Rogue One. Just have to avoid spoilers until then…

JEDIT: Does it annoy anyone else on this forum when the markdown abbreviates 4-dot ellipsis into 3? I guess you could manually insert a space into it . . . .

Slotches

pleasehello said:

I read that article earlier this year. It’s pretty disturbing.

He describes Lucas’ scripts for Attack of the Clones and Return of the Sith as “Shakespearean”.

Well I DID hate the Anakin/Padme love plot about as much as the Romeo/Juliet one, so…maybe?

He looks cold.

There’s one particularly telling example of the over-use of camera movement in Maz’s Castle. Rey approaches the lightsaber chest, and there are about 3 different shots each with different camera moves that establish the chest. There is no need for 3 ‘dramatic’ shots that convey what a single static shot will accomplish. In this way the cinematography distracts from the ‘real world’ aesthetic of the original film. Lucas was a fan of documentary filmmaking, and his minimalistic style of locking down shots on tripods did allow for a ‘fly on the wall’ feeling in certain scenes. This is something that TFA really lacks.

So I just watched ‘I Am Your Father’ (2015) and for that documentary they filmed David Prowse for his death scene. I am wondering if that scene has found its way online. Also, one of the biggest unanswered questions from the doc is whether they filmed Prowse in Jedi robes against a blue screen for the final shot of the film.

The doc itself is somewhat interesting, though there’s a lot of padding to bring it up to an hour runtime.

I remember when my DVD collection looked like that, and it contained most of those movies as well. It’s the Early-Twenties-Male Movie Starter Pack™.

Granted, I don’t buy a whole lot of DVDs/Blu-rays so my collection is only about 3x that size now, and a good portion is taken up by the VHS, 2004 DVD, 2006 DVD, and Blu-ray releases of the 6-film Star Wars Saga.

Yes, I have AOTC in all 3 formats.

Yes, it’s very hollow. It was physically painful to my ears.

Perhaps it’s just my completionist attitude towards SW, but I should probably sit through those movies at some point.

Aren’t there horses in the Ewok adventures? Camels seem to be a similar case - a compromise due to budget constraints whereas an imagined creature such as a Tauntan or a Bantha would be preferred. It’s hard to imagine keeping a camel in the movie when it’s so easy to alien-ify it.

No, keep it, it looks good on him!

It sure is quiet around here.

Anyway, here’s one extremely arduous method of tackling the problem of errant grain due to multiple print generations:

For Star Wars, the best non-technicolor prints we have are apparently release prints. This means that they are probably 3 generations removed from the negative.
O-neg
Interpositive (IP)
Internegative (IN)
Release Print

Since Star Wars was so successful, there were several Interpositive prints struck over its lifetime. From these, many more Internegatives were struck, since they would get worn out during the production of release prints.

Now if we had access to a good IP or IN the work would be greatly reduced, though these prints were usually too worn out to be much use. Barring this, we have to use release prints. Dye cloud mapping of several release prints should produce an accurate image of the Internegative that produced them. Since there were probably several internegatives made of each interpositive, the release prints would have to be organized by the internegative that made them, and the process applied to those groups separately. Perhaps you can see where this is going. Say you need four versions of a single frame from prints generated by a single internegative to correctly recreate the internegative grain. In order to recreate the interpositive grain, you’d need to have four fully recreated internegatives, and to recreate the grain of the o-neg, you would need four fully recreated interpositives. All told, 64 release prints from the various IPs and INs would need to be correctly identified, scanned and mapped. It’s quite absurd.

There is one potential problem with my theoretical technique, which has to do with errant grain.

With an original negative, the center of the dye cloud will correspond with actual image detail almost 100% of the time. However, when a print is made from the o-neg, the dye clouds are the basis of the new image. The 2nd generation print will have the o-neg grain and a further dye cloud pattern. If you were to trace the centers of these clouds, some of them would perfectly overlap the grains of the previous print and retain all the detail of the o-neg, but most photons would have struck some other place on the o-neg dye clouds. These new clouds would have slightly incorrect value and placement in the image. This is what I’m going to call ‘errant grain’. If a print reaches something like 4th generation, which is about right for most prints of Star Wars, then this problem could be quite severe, and despite this precision the image will be somewhat soft. I’m still thinking of how to correct this issue.

Flattening is definitely a problem when applying a sharpening filter to an image, for example the 2011 Blu-ray has such severe sharpening that blurred background elements become as sharp as foreground elements.

This shouldn’t be a problem with the technique I’m describing, since it SHOULD increase the sharpness of all parts of the image equally, rather than sharpening blurry areas only. The reason it should do this is because it is the focus of the lens which creates the illusion of depth of field, and more accurately pinpointing the photons actually preserves innate blurriness where the lens is out of focus. A basic super resolution technique of averaging several sequential frames may cause a loss of depth of field due to a slight softening of the parts of the image which are in focus, especially if these areas are in motion. I have described earlier how sharp edges can be blurred through frame averaging.

Will the wonders never cease?

The yellows are a bit green, and the skin tones seem a bit desaturated, though that’s more a matter of personal preference.

Thanks! It occurred to me right after creating the project that this might be a better place for it…