NeverarGreat

I really like the idea of opening the film with the escape from Naboo, as you illustrate with your video, but I feel like it cuts too much action from the film. For example, with your version of events there is no place for the Jedi attempting to cut through the Federation Ship, which is one of my favorite uses of the lightsaber and a good introduction to the Jedi as warriors.

Furthermore, I’m still left with the problem of Anakin being included on Coruscant, which requires showing the Jedi Council. I believe that showing the Jedi (including Yoda) to be boring and ineffectual is one of the worst problems of the prequels universe. And if Anakin never goes to Coruscant, I don’t have to explain why they didn’t leave him there instead of dragging him into a war zone later on.

This is just an idea for a fanedit, but I realized today that in many ways, it makes more sense for The Phantom Menace to be structured so that Coruscant comprises Act 1 of the film, Tatooine comprises Act 2, and Naboo comprises Act 3. The reasoning is that after the Jedi learn of the invasion army, it makes more sense for them to escape to Coruscant than for them to go to Naboo, where they will simply have to escape again, this time with more luggage. In this version, Amidala and Jar Jar are already on Coruscant, deep in negotiations related to the blockade.
 

Here is a more detailed breakdown of how it could work with existing footage:

The Galactic Republic is dying.
a greedy Trade Federation,
in league with Republic officials,
is tightening its grip on the galaxy.

Feigning innocence, the Trade
Federation has surrounded the
peaceful planet of Naboo with
a blockade of deadly starships.

The noble chancellor Valorum,
in an effort to expose the Trade
Federation, has sent two Jedi
Knights to discover the truth…

Part 1

A red-painted Republic ship lands in the docking bay of a Trade Federation cruiser orbiting Naboo. The Nemoidians assure the ambassadors that the contents of their ship are perfectly legal, and would be happy to admit them. The Jedi disembark and are taken to a council room, where they drink tea. While there, the ship is destroyed and the Jedi fight their way to the bridge, where they are rebuked by powerful battle droids. Escaping into a ventilation shaft, the Jedi soon make their way into a secret hangar where they find an invasion army. They decide they must contact chancellor Valorum. They then notice a sleek silver spaceship apparently just waiting for them to commandeer, and in the final shot of the scene this sleek silver ship escapes the docking bay, piloted by the Jedi. On the bridge of the Federation ship, the Nemoidians receive a transmission of Queen Amidala transmitting from Coruscant, and relays the information that the Chancellor’s ambassadors are with them and must reach settlement. The Nemoidians deny the existence of the ambassadors, and the transmission ends.

On Coruscant, Senator Palpatine paces back and forth in front of Amidala (who has presumably just finished her discussion with the Nemoidians), bemoaning the state of the galaxy. He suggests that the only possible action would be to call for a vote of no confidence in Chancellor Valorum. As this is happening, the silver ship lands on the landing platform on Coruscant, where only Valorum and his guards are waiting. The Jedi mention the complication of things with the Chancellor. They then say that they must speak to the Jedi council immediately. Later that day in the senate chamber, The blockade of Naboo is brought up, and the vote of no confidence in Valorum is called. The sun begins to set, and two Jedi walk along a parapet towards the sunset, having completed their business in the Jedi Council. Later, Palpatine returns victorious from the Senate, as he has been nominated to become the next Chancellor. However, Amidala decides to go back to Naboo in order to be with her people. The Jedi arrive at the starship, and inform the Queen that it is their pleasure to protect her. They leave the planet and go to light speed.

Part 2

After entering Hyperspace, a bomb goes off on the starship, knocking out the hyperdrive. The ship reverts out of Hyperspace only for them to realize that there is a Federation ship nearby. It begins to attack them, and only a quick repair by R2-D2 saves their lives. They flee to Tatooine to repair the ship, and there they meet Anakin. The Nemoidians report to a cloaked figure on Coruscant that the ship has escaped destruction, and this cloaked figure orders his apprentice, Maul, to find the renegade starship. Back on Tatooine, Anakin becomes integral to the story. In order to acquire the parts to their ship they bet on his pod in a local podrace, and after a BRIEF race in which he kills his primary competitor Anakin is freed. Maul fights Qui-gon and then they all escape the planet.

Part 3

The Nemoidians order the invasion of the planet to begin as the silver starship leaps out of hyperspace. In the confusion the ship is able to get through the blockade and land in the forest, whereupon the rest of the plot of the movie takes place much as it does in the Lucas version. The only major departure is that Anakin more quickly destroys the droid control ship without landing in the hangar.

I’m not convinced that this version would make the underlying plot of the film any more clear, since it was designed by Lucas to be opaque to reason, but at least the entire underwater city and fish chase scenes are excised, as well as much pointless slashing at battle droids with lightsabers in Naboo, and also any and all visual depictions of the Jedi Council. In this version, the action rises naturally from the expositional Coruscant scenes to the podrace and clash with Maul to the four final battles at the end.

So what do you think?

I’ll think about that when it’s done. Like any long project, I can’t think about much else other than the finish line right now 😉

Oh and as an aside, the final dogfight is grueling. The first few reels benefit from long takes, but this section probably has an average shot length of less than two seconds, I’m seeing a whole lot of variation between shots, and there are a tremendous amount of gradients which are simply missing. Lucasfilm clearly didn’t care about these brief shots.

Shot by shot, as Dr Dre begins his first pass on the film, I am wrapping up my first pass. Actually I’m down to the last ten minutes of non-credits shots, and I’m very happy with the last three reels. I’ll have to give the first three reels another look since my process has evolved quite a bit, but it’s nearing the end of a long road. 😃

Smithers said:

The argument that George Lucas always intended the Jedi to be selfless and emotionless people is not true. Hell, in the first draft of TPM (found here: http://starwarsuniverse2.tripod.com/id7.html) Obi-Wan ends up falling in love with Anakin’s mother!

I can’t decide if you are trying to be funny or you genuinely believe that these ‘rough drafts’ were written by Lucas.

I’m guessing the former.

Haha!

I believe what you are referring to is the clipped highlights of the Blu-ray when played on most (all?) players. The only explanation I have is that when originally encoded, the highest value was 255 rather than broadcast safe 235, so when players ‘expand’ the values, anything above 235 is clipped. Therefore, you must import an unconverted transport stream of the Blu-ray into your editing program and bring the highlights down before making further changes. I’ve tried to convert the Transport Stream into RGB in avisynth with a contrast reduction before the RGB conversion to see if it would retain the highlights, but no dice. The only method that I’ve found to do this is bring the TS file into Premiere and use a curves adjustment, which operates in the YUV colorspace. Perhaps you have a better method of doing this.

Regardless, I’ve found that virtually all of the highlight information exists in the Blu-ray data. Now if only there was a way to recover the superblack detail.

DrDre said:

It’s fine. 😃 Here’s my adjustment. It needed a red boost in the darker tones, and I’ve made it a little brighter. Somehow the eyes look more alive with the boosted blue tones, compared to some of the earlier attempts, but I think this is the one for me:

This looks the best in terms of skin tone that I’ve seen so far.

I think it looks quite good, I’d just make sure that Tarkin’s uniform remains green even in the shadows.

As you know my corrections have been manual in contrast to your algorithm. I think that this provides certain advantages. I was able to achieve my results with only a curves adjustment, saturation adjustment, and the channel mixer. The channel mixer is one of the most versatile tools on account of it’s ability to reduce the stressed color of the blu-ray. If the green-green channel is lowered and mixed into the red and blue channels, it reduces the green artifacts that pop up on the skin tones in these scenes, as well as give Tarkin’s skin tone a more consistent hue. Also, where the skin tones are a great deal darker than the film sources suggest, one way to fix this is to boost the red-red channel, then mix green-red and blue-red (while keeping the totals of these mixes at 100 of course). The result is reds which are substantially lighter and less saturated than the Blu-ray, and a good match to film sources. Of course you must keep an eye on the solid red, green, and blue lights in these scenes to make sure they don’t become too diluted, but often these lights are too saturated anyway. This makes me think that a channel mixer tool was used on the Blu-ray to get the colors this distorted in the first place, otherwise it wouldn’t work so well in fixing these problems.

This is my best guess as to how this scene should look. The Death Star Walls are blue and green. Tarkin’s uniform, as has been discussed on my thread, is green (although color problems in the blu-ray don’t allow many color gradients here, which is why Tarkin’s hair has gone a bit green).

The attempts to make the walls neutral just look dead to me, like the home video releases where the color has been washed out.

These are certainly in the ballpark.

One of the biggest problems with fanedits is that they can feel jarring and out of place, especially when we know how the movie is ‘supposed’ to play out. The Dooku appearance feels like that, but I think that the shots themselves are actually very well done. The trouble, as you said, is that we are essentially foreshadowing two evil characters at once. I’d suggest that the shots be reordered.
First, remove Dooku from the opening shot.
After ‘You will be a Jedi’, cut to the excellent panning shot of Palpatine, since he is already going to ‘watch [Anakin’s] career with great interest’
Then have the Jedi talking about the master and apprentice, and after this exchange have the opening shot duplicated and zoomed in, so that it slowly pans to the right and shows Dooku, and then shows him walking away.

It also seems strange that the big ending isn’t included. I wonder if the music could be changed to something grander, and simply have the entire scene dialogue free.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. Again, really good work on the Dooku shots.

Here’s an example of the changing color of the walls from the Blu-ray (uncorrected). This sequence has some horrible color smearing that seems to be on every version of the film from 77 onward, but it’s also clear evidence of the wall sections being painted different colors:

The wall on the left has about ten points more green than the one directly beside it, and neither are gray according to the blu-ray.

JEDIT: Yes, Mike has also said that the walls were painted different colors - see his discussion about the wall sections abutting the droid alcove across from the Falcon, which was intended as a more neutral gray.

That Tarkin shot looks to be as close to perfect as I can find, with perhaps a bit too much teal in the grays. However the skin tones look good, and the olive of his uniform is good.

Indeed. It seems like there’s slightly more gray in the greenish officer uniforms than in the Nazi uniforms.

Yeah, that looks alright.

Very funny guys.

But yes, the shirts are blue, pants are grey, stormtroopers are white, Tantive walls are white with a very slight green tint, Death Star Walls are dark blue/green, lightsabers are reddish pink and sky blue, 3PO is coppery-yellow, R2’s metal dome is blueish grey, his panels are very dark blue/almost black, Tatooine is dusty yellow brown, etc, etc.

But here’s a question that I haven’t seen yet: What color is Tarkin’s uniform? As far as I can tell from behind the scenes pictures and other sources it’s green, but I’ve heard other people say that the Imperial uniforms are supposed to be gray or tan. I’ve always assumed they’re the green of Nazi officers, such as this yellowish green one here:

Here’s a costume photo from ROTS, the background of which I’ve balanced to neutral gray. Is this accurate?

I very much doubt that the look of Tatooine is because of fading.

from this article: http://www.wilhelm-research.com/pdf/HW_Book_10_of_20_HiRes_v1c.pdf :

“Based on the many Technicolor imbibition prints he has
examined in recent years, Robert Gitt of the UCLA film archives had this to say about the image stability of the process: If you took a Technicolor dye imbibition print and you projected it many times at a drive-in theater and put a lot of light through it, the dyes do fade a little bit — particularly the cyan — although not that badly. But if you are careful with Technicolor imbibition prints, and keep them in the dark and don’t show them a lot, they don’t seem to fade at all. I’ve never seen one that has faded if properly cared for. It is a remarkably good process. Technicolor imbibition on triacetate base is very, very good.”

Of course, the process itself can be (and was in the case of Star Wars) uneven in terms of color across shots, but I highly doubt that every shot is wrong. For example, many shots in the Death Star are simply too green, but among these incorrect shots are shots where the color is accurate, and it’s easy to tell the difference. With Tatooine, you say that every shot has these issues, so there are no shots where you can get a good idea of what it should look like on the print. I know that there are Tatooine shots without the pink shift, so my recommendation would be to simply take the most color accurate shot of Tatooine you have (the one that most matches the actual shooting conditions and/or other reference photos) and work from that as a basis for the correction - it’s what I’ve done with the Death Star interiors.

The shot you mention is actually the first shot of reel 5, and is more blue than most of the surrounding shots. It does look nice in isolation, but there is a lot of variation in the color of print sources, and most of them have a strong green tint in this scene. I could still tweak the contrast, but I’m fairly happy with the color.

Congratulations on your first post! You have taken your first step into a larger world. 😉

Thanks!

dlvh said:

NeverarGreat said:

“I’ve finished this scene in my version, and the yellow is actually gone from entire shots (if you notice, the flowers in the lower left are supposed to be yellow as well). It’s a problem with hundreds of shots of the blu-ray, which means that I’ve had to pull these colors from other sources since they simply no longer exist in the blu-ray.”

And what did your shots of this scene look like, my we see?

Sure:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/164143/picture:1

Screenshot Comparison has recently been increasing image saturation for some reason. I also may give it another look since Silver Screen was made available after I finished this scene.

Jedit: Now two comparisons at link

Reuploaded the images at more accurate saturation.

DrDre said:

Here’s another shot from the same sequence.

Funny tidbit: on the print the food in the bowl is actually orange/yellow. Good ol’ George probably thought people didn’t like yellow food, so he turned it into gray goo for the bluray release. Some of these changes are just weird.

Bluray:

Bluray regraded:

I’ve finished this scene in my version, and the yellow is actually gone from entire shots (if you notice, the flowers in the lower left are supposed to be yellow as well). It’s a problem with hundreds of shots of the blu-ray, which means that I’ve had to pull these colors from other sources since they simply no longer exist in the blu-ray.

Sheepish said:

NeverarGreat said:

Some of the grading goes too far in my opinion, for example making mauls black cloak look green. But I like how you got rid of the purple. Very strange choice for Lucasfilm.

See, I’m not really seeing green. Maybe that has to do with the settings on my monitor, but if there’s green to that cloak, it certainly presents a problem, as I didn’t do any green level adjustments in that scene.

…though I did use a slight teal filter to neutralize some other colors. That may have done it. I’ll give it another look.

One way to check your work is in Photoshop, where you can get RGB info for any pixel. It’s showing higher green levels for the shadows than the other colors.

Some of the grading goes too far in my opinion, for example making mauls black cloak look green. But I like how you got rid of the purple. Very strange choice for Lucasfilm.

Someone (I can’t remember who) uploaded scans of an original trailer, and though it’s a bit yellowed, it has a much more pleasing tone to me. It’s also a good idea of how it may have looked on a release print:

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/163375

Sounds good, I’d like to see some screenshots of the new coloration!

DrDre said:

The problem is that none of the production photos I’ve seen seem to reflect a pronounced green shift. The JSC is pretty inconsistent in this respect, and so are the print scans. So, although it certainly off-white, if there is a green color, it’s a creme color with the slightest hint of mint.

That’s it exactly. By subtly green, I simply meant that the pixels have a few points more green than anything else, which is what this photo shows. 😃