I hate to bring this up again, but it looks like the final color grade got applied to the Ahch-to scenes as well, unfortunately, turning Luke’s ghost red.
For TFA, I’ve gotta go with Nev’s Starlight edit. I have no idea if it’s shorter than the original movie, but it is a better paced, more fleshed out version of TFA.
Starlight is about three minutes shorter than the Theatrical version of the film, mostly due to small trims and line cuts.
I imagine it’s like you said, the prisoners are transferred after serving their first sentence to another prison. I imagine that this new prison isn’t like the old one, but it could be similar. The prisoners could be given new sentences and put to work on new projects, and those who refuse the work are killed. There would probably be enough inmates who still believe they will be set free And/or who are resigned to the work that there’s still value in this scheme.
I only watched through the Ahch-to scenes, but I noticed that when Luke says ‘her heart’, his ghostly hairline has been doubled somehow.
Also, I know that color correction hasn’t been applied yet, but those scenes look perfect! I just want to give a gentle reminder to leave these scenes as-is when applying the final color grade, so it doesn’t end up too red like in v4 😉
All the links have been sent!
Any updates on this project?
Not really. I just haven’t had the time to get back to it with all my other projects.
Though, it does feel like something’s missing from my post…
…oh right, another crawl 😉
EPISODE VII
THE FORCE AWAKENS
It is a time of despair.
Luke Skywalker, sworn
to rebuild the legendary
Jedi Order, has vanished.
With the Jedi now facing
extinction, agents of the
evil FIRST ORDER have
risen from the shadows
of an Imperial fortress
to claim supremacy over
countless worlds beyond
the fragile New Republic.
Woefully unprepared for
another galactic war,
the Senate has secretly
commissioned the pilots
of a brave RESISTANCE
to find the last Jedi and
restore the light of hope
to the darkening stars….
Really I’m just messing around with the first two lines of the third paragraph, everything else is locked down as far as I’m concerned.
I never had a problem with the ‘horrible things’ line, and in my headcanon Anakin never murders younglings with it anyway, so there’s absolutely no problem there 😉
My headcanon on the promotions is that this was such a suicide mission that no reasonable general would have wanted to take these assignments, and it was essentially a practical joke by the leadership that got out of hand when one of them suggested that the kid and his friends who blew up the first Death Star should be in charge of the second operation.
I think that’s the only way that it would work, since you wouldn’t be able to just reposition the Falcon in the frame to fix its trajectory.
Nice engine glows!
However, one thing I can never unsee in this shot is how the Falcon doesn’t fully rotate toward the planet. All the other ships are facing forward with their engines pointed back at the camera while the Falcon’s engine is doing the Corellian Drift.
“The Motionless Picture”
Looking at the full quality file, I think the issue is actually that the edges of the model fall off into darkness which doesn’t look right when placed in front of a bright explosion. It would probably be a good idea to use a 3d model so you could get some light bleed from the explosion on the ship model as it passes in front of it. Another option would be to put some blur on the physical model as it passes the explosion and/or more aggressively matte out the edges during those frames.
The compositing of the larger X-wing looks a bit odd, though. I don’t think it should be lighter than the explosion.
Yeah, but then you have to explain how the heck a single Final Order ship was able to leave Exegol without the rest of them.
Isn’t Sheev’s ‘plan’ to guide them out with the stationary beacon on Exegol? I assume that would work for one ship just as well as a whole fleet, and the only reason why the whole fleet didn’t deploy earlier was because some of the ships weren’t quite ready yet.
I think the Kijimi scene could be kept in if it were altered to just show the city being destroyed. When I considered that option a few months ago, it seemed possible with the shiny new dialogue tools at our disposal.
Showing a Dreadnought Cannon in action would also emphasize the capabilities of this weapon for viewers who don’t make the connection to TLJ or who missed Poe’s line earlier in the edit. Even if that change is clear, illustrating it here makes it more ‘real’.
I couldn’t get even halfway through that trailer.
Blech.
I actually really like Yoda’s death scene. There are aspects of it that are rather goofy, but Hamill’s performance sells every moment with that puppet, and it puts me in such a wistful and melancholy state of mind.
An aspect of Dune: Part 2 that felt very lacking to me was Sietch Tabr. What was shown was nice, but it felt like we barely got to see how the Fremen lived within the Sietch.
That’s why I liked Part 1 more, if just slightly: that’s where much of the worldbuilding happens.
“Somehow, Darth Maul’s legs returned.”
I just had a thought about the Poe/Holdo subplot in TLJ, which is this: Poe should have had Holdo’s objective, and Holdo should have had Poe’s.
Consider: Poe at the beginning of TLJ is painted as a brash, risk-taking daredevil who doesn’t flinch at throwing away ships and pilots if it allows him to destroy the enemy. As a foil to this, Holdo is painted as a commander who would rather run and regroup with her forces in order to live and fight another day.
And yet, when it comes to Poe’s mission, he decides on a course of action which would allow the Resistance to flee from the First Order in order to live another day, whereas Holdo’s course of action is predicated on sacrificing their one and only capital ship and regrouping on a fortress planet where they may be forced into making a final stand, and this is without the later plot development that requires Holdo to destroy their capital ship in a Hyperspace maneuver.
So as a little thought experiment, let’s just imagine a movie where Holdo has Poe’s mission and Poe has Holdo’s mission:
Holdo, as leader of the Resistance following Leia’s incapacitation, consults with her officers and crew and decides that the best course forward is to send a team to infiltrate the Supremacy and deactivate the Hyperspace tracker. To do this, she needs a codebreaker capable of bypassing the Supremacy’s shields, and so she herself volunteers to go to Canto Bight and find such a codebreaker (Perhaps she even knows such a hacker personally, since she has lived with such people in the New Republic for years). She orders radio blackout to protect against First Order interception, and leaves the Raddus with a handpicked few.
Poe mistrusts Holdo’s intentions, and believes that there may not even be a Hyperspace tracker. He suspects that Holdo is in fact a First Order spy, and her leading the mission to Canto Bight is her way of escaping a doomed ship. He speaks with Finn and Rose about an alternative plan if Holdo turns out to be a traitor, and together they discover that they may be able to evacuate the ship with cloaked escape vessels and ram the Raddus in to the Supremacy, destroying it.
Meanwhile, Holdo’s plan on Canto Bight is a success, and her team successfully infiltrates the Supremacy.
While this is happening, things on the Raddus have reached a breaking point. With no radio updates, Poe believes that Holdo has abandoned them and puts his plan into action. They load the crew into escape vessels and breaks the radio silence to tell Holdo that they are going to implement his plan.
On the Supremacy, Poe’s message is intercepted and because of this Holdo’s team is found and killed. Holdo is taken prisoner, and the First Order learns that the Raddus crew is being launched toward Crait, and they begin to light up the space around the Raddus with lasers, destroying some of the cloaked ships by chance. Poe, Finn, and Rose are the last ones on the Raddus when they realize that Holdo’s plan would have succeeded, and now they must rescue Holdo as well. Finn and Poe decide to go to the Supremacy on a rescue mission, and Rose stays behind to ram the ship into the Supremacy upon the completion of this mission.
However, Holdo tells Poe to escape and lead the Resistance in her absence, and detonates a hidden explosive on her person, killing herself and Captain Phasma in the process. Rose, in her grief, then makes the decision to sacrifice herself to destroy the Supremacy.
Finn and Poe, now escaping with the rest of the survivors to Crait, must weather this storm of their making, and lead a speeder mission to take out the big gun. Finn has decided to follow Rose’s lead and sacrifice himself to save the Resistance, but Poe wants Finn to survive, believing that someone will show up and allow them to be rescued, but Finn has lost all hope. Poe, however, has regained his faith because of Holdo and uses Holdo’s own words about living to fight another day. He rams Finn, and they both crash.
Anyway, all this to say that in this version, Poe makes clear mistakes and has an arc of recognizing his risky and destructive decisions and atoning for them through the foil of Holdo.
I notice that the original frame has a lot of dirt and scratches, but apart from that the underlying film grain is quite fine. In the cleaned version, there seems to be a noticeable grain that has been added. Is that an inherent part of the cleaning, or has that been added later, such as to help mask film damage?
I added the heavy grain to help hide the missing details and temporal smoothing, and so that it would blend better with 4K77 No DNR if anyone chose to integrate these sequences.
Gotcha.
I notice that the original frame has a lot of dirt and scratches, but apart from that the underlying film grain is quite fine. In the cleaned version, there seems to be a noticeable grain that has been added. Is that an inherent part of the cleaning, or has that been added later, such as to help mask film damage?
Here’s my quick attempt at restoring the Tosche Station scenes:
That looks amazing!
Yeah, this is a great idea, though it’s honestly too good for Disney at the moment. If this was any other Star Wars project, I’d laugh and say there’s no way in the galaxy they’d think of doing this, but with Andor there may just be hope.