NeverarGreat

SilverWook said:

Jango doesn’t realize there’s a tracking device on his ship until he’s near the planet, and once he believes Obi Wan was asteroid chow, may have assumed that the Jedi had no time to report his position.

Right, but he technically doesn’t even need to know what his part in the plan is. Dooku could have told him ‘Jango, if the Jedi start snooping around, come find me on Geonosis.’ He says to the Geonosians that the Republic is ‘treacherous’ for raising an army, but he’s all smiles about it with Sidious.

The whole plot is just so convoluted, I would just as much buy that Palpatine had orchestrated every little event in the movie as buy that the Jedi starting the war was only the result of Obi-wan’s investigation.

So why would Dooku erase a whole star system from the archives? He is obviously aware that you can’t actually do that since Hyperspace navigation requires precise calculations. We can’t have ships flying into missing planets or being flung wildly off course, so gravitational effects must remain. If the reason was that he didn’t want the Jedi to know about the clone army, I’d argue that a more effective way of doing that is not drawing attention to yourself by deleting a planet from the Jedi archives, a planet that people know about and that is home to a highly technologically sophisticated and wealthy species. If Dexter had just said that the dart had come from Kamino, it’s possible that Obi-wan would have simply assumed that was where the bounty hunter bought his weapons, not where disgruntled Spice Miners on the Moon of Naboo had hired their bounty hunter. That was after all the leading theory of the Jedi as to the source of the assassination attempts, so the Jedi could have demanded that Obi-wan go investigate that moon instead of Kamino. It is only after they discover the star’s deletion that Yoda gets suspicious and demands that Obi-wan take the trip.

If I were making bets, I’d say that there was a good chance that Dooku deleted the star system on orders from Palpatine, or even that Palpatine deleted the system in order to draw attention to the absence.

Another thing, why does Jango lead Obi-wan right to Geonosis? Unlike Kamino, this system hasn’t been suspiciously deleted from the archives, so if it was Dooku who wanted to delete planets to keep things secret, he forgot this big important one where they’re literally planning to build the Death Star. Perhaps its role in the war happened after Dooku could no longer access the archives. In any case, why did Jango go there? He knows he was just tracked down by a Jedi, does he think that he’ll be safe on Geonosis? Why not just go anywhere else in the galaxy that’s not the secret base of your employer? It’s the same problem that happened in ANH, where the Falcon could have gone anywhere else and gotten rid of the tracking device.

My guess is that Dooku fully intends for the Jedi to find Kamino and Geonosis, and although he is working for Palpatine, he secretly plots the overthrow of Palpatine and the defeat of the Republic. He’s an idealist after all, and though he goes along with Palpatine’s plan, he believes that he only does it to get close enough to Palpatine to put the proverbial knife in his back. So in Episode 3, perhaps he was the one who, alone, led the attack on Coruscant to capture and perhaps kill the Chancellor.

Perhaps the Clone Wars explain the character of Dooku, but I DON’T WATCH IT.

It’s an interesting question. I suppose we should ask ‘important to whom?’

For people who want to watch the original film but are opposed to acquiring any fan reconstruction or preservation, an official release is absolutely more important to them than Despecialized.

For people who just want to watch the original film regardless of where it comes from, Despecialized is just as important as an official release.

For people who appreciate the work of dedicated fans more than profit-minded studio execs, Despecialized is more important than an official release.

I haven’t discounted the prospect of doing them, but I’ll decide that after this project is finally finished.

It’s gonna be great.

I would suggest double checking all of the trench run shots where the lasers are very small, since the cleanup has a tendency to erase them:

This is just an example of the type of shot I’m talking about, I don’t know if any in this shot were deleted.

Good idea. I’ll add that explanation.

There is also the small thing that Palpatine needed the Jedi to discover the clones so that he could start his war. As I understand it, Palpatine ordered Jango to use the toxic dart on Zam with the knowledge that the Jedi would eventually trace it to Kamino. He also must have ordered Dooku to erase the planet from the archives, which would draw attention to itself when combined with the existence of the dart. It then follows that Palpatine must have ordered Jango to go to Kamino and wait for the Jedi to show up, and then lead the Jedi to Geonosis so that the war could begin. It sounds really contrived when put in those terms, but that’s George Lucas for you.

If anyone has another reason why Jango would singlehandedly lead the Jedi into a war, I’m all ears.

Thanks!

Also, I’ve updated the first post of this thread to include some more current info on the project.

I was thinking more along the lines of a single large explosion taking up perhaps 1/8th of the sky. For that to work it really does need an establishing shot of a ship leaving Maz’s castle, then cutting to Finn boarding the transport as the explosion happens, then he turns and sees the debris in the sky, with the star destroyer just entering the frame from the right.

One thing that I didn’t consider was that Finn asks ‘Where’s Rey?’, and in this sequence of events it might imply that Finn feared that she was on the destroyed ship.

This is one of the last scenes of this half of the film I haven’t finalized yet, but here’s something close to final:

Luke Leia Han

Indeed, it’s the same settings I used for the Reel 4 preview.

Or at this point perhaps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMLbeuShF8s

Here’s a part of Reel 6

Alternatively if you have photoshop CS6 or later you could use the Chalk and Charcoal filter on the image and then invert it:

This is one of those shots where the true color of the shot simply doesn’t exist in the Blu-ray. Note the magenta of the cup on the left, which is supposed to be white, still retains a magenta hue in the correction. Similarly, Luke’s dusty offwhite shirt has too much green in the highlights and too much magenta in the shadows, and the correction still doesn’t completely remove these inaccuracies.

This picture skews red but still shows how Luke’s shirt is definitely not white like Leia’s gown:

You could also try increasing the contrast of the base clips and perhaps blur the backgrounds, so that the characters are accentuated and the background is muted.

Fascinating. The color is improved in most shots, but there is now a pinkish tint to some scenes instead. Two steps forward, one step back.

I think there was the possibility in 1999 of crafting a trilogy in the Clone Wars era without relying on many of the previously named characters, a story which would expand the Star Wars universe and people’s imaginations. Unfortunately Lucas went in the opposite direction and made a story which was over-reliant on name recognition and under-reliant on story. Remember that the ONLY thing that the prequels needed to be was to be designated as 1, 2, and 3 and come before the OT in chronology(and they didn’t even need to be that). There was no requirement that the prequels be connected via character or theme.

Unfortunately after Lucas made it clear that the entire saga (1-6) were going to be about the fall and redemption of Anakin Skywalker, people then assumed that Skywalkers must be involved with every numbered episode. Now if someone proposes remaking the prequels without Anakin or Obi-wan, the story feels incomplete or misguided. This is the power of framing. Lucas was allowed to frame the discussion in terms of Anakin, and the only way that most casual viewers could see past the framing is if they were given a trilogy which was as imaginative as the OT without including these well-known characters.

Furthermore, if any alternate trilogy was made, it would be incredibly jarring to the general audiences unless the alternate prequels were made in continuity with the Lucas Prequels, since those are the films people are aware of from that time period. You would ironically be REQUIRED to make an alternate prequel focusing on Anakin and Obi-wan just to ‘set the record straight’ on their relationship before venturing into uncharted character territory.

SilverWook said:

We’ve already seen a bit of Rey’s flaws and failures. Her reluctance to admit she’s been waiting in vain for family that’s never coming back, makes her pass on Han’s offer to join him and Chewie. Running away from her destiny is what gets her captured, and almost costs Finn his life. I imagine she may carry some residual guilt over Han’s death going forward as well.

I was referring more to her physical competency more than her emotional weaknesses. I have no complaints about her emotional issues, and to your list I would add that she may have anger/darkside temptations going forward, which is perfectly understandable. It’s just that she is a mechanical wizard, a fighter who can hold her own against several opponents, an ace pilot and a crack shot. She herself seems surprised at how adept she is at these last two things, which gives me hope that her abilities will be explained in the sequel, but as it is now her abilities strain my credulity. I don’t want to give the impression that I am against ANY female character having such competence, for example I fully buy the character of Imperator Furiosa. I just don’t buy Rey’s abilities thus far.

I’m very happy that they’ve gone in the direction of strong female leads (though having a young female scavenger main character rather takes the steam out of my own prequel rewrite). However, I feel like Rey is a bit too competent to act as an audience avatar, and may even do some harm if seen as a role model. Keep in mind that Luke was always a flawed character who failed as much as he succeeded in the OT, so people seeing him as a role model recognized that failure is a necessary element of success. Rey on the other hand succeeds to an uncanny degree in TFA. I hope that Episode 8 delves into her character flaws to a greater extent. Of course, we haven’t seen enough of Jyn Erso to make a determination about this, but from the trailer it seems like she will be a more obviously jaded and damaged character with a balance of strengths and weaknesses.

That_OT_Ruler said:

Is there any official official statement from the crew about the reshoots? What are the reshoots going to do?

Hopefully they will embiggen the cromulence of the film.

I think it’s pretty cool to imagine how the humans from Earth came from or became the humans in Star Wars, but again, it’s unnecessary. The only Earth/Star Wars galaxy crossover that I accept as canon is E.T. as a Jedi.

It would be interesting to see Owen as Anakin’s brother and a soldier fighting alongside him in the Clone Wars. We get a hint of military know-how when Biggs says: “Your uncle could hold off a whole colony of sand people with one blaster.” In one of my prequel ideas Owen and Beru served in the war but left for the Outer Rim when the Republic began to transition to the Empire. They had no stomach for a war that they didn’t believe in, and tried to get Anakin to come with them but Anakin would have none of it, deciding instead to follow Obi-wan. They end up going to the Outer Rim with a fleet of deserters and refugees, so Anakin couldn’t have found out where they ended up if he tried. Eventually Obi-wan and Anakin part ways, and Obi-wan takes the newborn Luke in search of Owen. He finally finds them on Tatooine after months or years of searching.

The additional shots really do add to the scene. It’s a shame this wasn’t in the Blu-ray cut.