NeverarGreat

Life has yet again gotten in the way, and forced me to take another break. I have made some more progress, but the droid auction is still in its preliminary grade. I just went back and checked it, and I definitely added too much yellow in an attempt to counteract the magenta. That scene is next on the roster.

Here is the approximate status of the reels:

Reel 1: Preliminary Grade 100% - Finalized 75%
Reel 2: Preliminary Grade 90% - Finalized 20%
Reel 3: Preliminary Grade 100% - Finalized 90%
Reel 4: Preliminary Grade 100% - Finalized 100%
Reel 5: Preliminary Grade 100% - Finalized 93%
Reel 6: Preliminary Grade 80% - Finalized 80%
Total Preliminary: 95% - Finalized 76%

The biggest bottlenecks for me are the lightsaber composites. If those were done, Reels 3-5 would be 100%. In fact, if someone more knowledgeable about image stabilization and degraining could prep the SSE lightsaber shots, that would go a long way to helping me finish. This is one of the downsides of working in Premiere, it’s simply not set up for complicated effects work. I only need the lightsaber training on the Falcon and the hangar section of the Vader/Obi-wan duel.

However, the end is in sight!

I agree that it boils down to the other person’s perception. If I were talking to someone of my parent’s generation, then I would have no problem labeling myself a Star Wars fan since they usually give the originals much more weight. If I was to talk to someone any younger than myself (I’m a filthy millennial), there is a good chance that their impression of Star Wars would be Episodes 1-7 with each one weighted the same in their mind, and now Rogue One. Since the majority of those films are mediocre-to-bad in my opinion, perhaps the best idea is indeed to say I’m a fan of the ‘originals’. Yet even then there’s a good chance that they have only seen the downright ugly Blu-rays, and so their definition of the originals is different than mine as well.

We live in different categorical worlds, we Star Wars-ites!

Oh I’m definitely a ‘fan’ of the OT, or at least ANH, ESB, and some of ROTJ. However, I think it’s disingenuous to say that therefore anyone who only likes the OT is a ‘Star Wars fan’, since the Star Wars universe is vast and ever expanding and much of it is of dubious quality.

For comparison, I consider myself to be a fan of the Tolkien mythology, in book and film form. This is despite the decidedly poor-to-mediocre Hobbit Trilogy (which I’d like to fanedit) since the majority of the mythology is excellent.

My point is that if you’re not a fan of the majority of something, it sends the wrong message to say that you are a fan of that thing. Star Wars is like anime in this regard. I really like some of it but most is not to my liking, so it makes sense to say that I’m not an anime fan.

Now if the Star Wars universe were to be expanded for a hundred more years, with most of the added material of brilliant, high quality content, I would happily call myself a fan of Star Wars.

I assume he was just looking through the negatives which were unused in the final film.

Haven’t heard this brought up yet, but beginning in TFA and now especially in Rogue One, the end credits music simply does not fit with the tone of the final scenes. It’s incredibly jarring to have just sat through the killing of all the main characters and a brutal murder-spree by Vader only to have the music ramp up for two seconds to a fun, adventurous crescendo.

If I were to re-edit it, the Tantive would only belatedly enter the battlefield to receive the transmissions and then jump out of system, apparently free from pursuit, to continue its mission to retrieve Obi-wan. We wouldn’t see Leia’s face at all. Then, as others have suggested, we would end with the Death Star firing on Scarif and the deaths of Jyn and Cassian. Fade to white. After a few seconds of silence, begin subdued music more in line with the tone of the ending.

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.