The thing that’s throwing me off is that it goes from the planet to the lava/trees shot to an aerial pan of the castle and then back to the trees before going to Kylo. I feel like it should go planet-castle-lava/trees (with the addition of TIEs), removing the last pure forest shot.
Yes, I remember that one. Would be interesting to see the full deepfake treatment on it, though.
That’s my thought as well, so if nobody has any objections, that will be coming right back out.
Well said, Burbin.
If it came on the heels of TFA, TROS wouldn’t be nearly the letdown it was.
I don’t know if this is where I should ask this, but would it be possible to ‘fix’ the strange TLJ Yoda puppet by deepfaking him with the ESB/ROTJ Yoda?
You can actually display that intext with markdown.
Nev, you beautiful bastard.
Put this on my tombstone. 😃
Another, unrelated, question I had for you. I was reading back through your change list, and it made it seem like there would be two Kylo prayer sequences. Is that correct? I’m curious how you’ll approach that without it seeming like you’re reusing a lot of material.
I actually decided to move the entire scene up to after the Poe interrogation due in part to the problem of reusing material. The place it was in my workprint works…fine without it, though I might try and finesse the music transition a bit more. The original place for the scene in the theatrical cut is bridged by a cutaway to the band, ANH style.
I just feel like we relented and are just trying to see the positives of the story they gave us, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But I guess I wish there was more recognition of the fact that maybe this wasn’t the best direction they could’ve gone in.
People will eventually accept the bars of TROS’s storytelling cage just as they accepted the limitations of the prequels in order to continue consuming new Star Wars content.
As for me, I’m still salty as Crait about it.
I don’t doubt it was a last second decision. But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a warranted one.
I think both of you are forgetting that at its core Star Wars is a fairy tale. It’s for 12 year olds. Nev, your argument for how it should have been about the systems that subvert democracy would definitely work in a political drama or some movie that is for a much older audience. It definitely works as an underlying message in the prequels or TLJ, but I don’t believe it should be the overall message of the saga.
I respect that the story of the OT is more of a fairy tale, but like you said the prequels changed that message. That Pandora’s box was open since 1999, and any Star Wars movie that doesn’t incorporate that message feels like a regression (TFA, I’m looking at you).
I much prefer the mythical good guys v. bad guys side of things, and the struggles that the good people go through to resist the evil side.
I feel like a good conclusion would have both. It would have Resistance against First Order with a Big Bad like Hux or Thrawn or Kylo, but it would also have the undercurrents of that corrupt system argument which the Resistance (and perhaps Kylo himself) is trying to destroy.
No, Palpatine did not need to be brought back. Returning the Big Bad just to knock him down again is the easy answer to the difficult question of how to bring peace to a galaxy fractured by war. It implies that the only thing truly wrong with the attempts at peace was one dude who was always behind everything and if he were to die everything would be all unicorns and rainbows.
In the end, it isn’t individual people who are a threat to peace, not really. It is much more the systems that subvert democracy and the twisted incentives prioritizing armed conflict over negotiation. TLJ was on the right track with this necessary argument, despite how poorly it was implemented. Palpatine’s return, along with his magic fleet, throws this necessary perspective in the garbage.
Yep, I whipped up that drawing last night. I figured something scratched in metal would look scratchy like her other marks on the wall.
I was thinking of more ways to make the island vision fit, like placing some Star Destroyer wreckage in the background that sort of looked like the shape of the island and morphed into it, the sunlight being a reflection off of the wreck, that sort of thing.
But here’s the question, as RL suggested: if I just removed the vision in this scene and left the drawing, is any more foreshadowing of the island necessary?
If the vision were to be removed, that would leave only the drawing and Kylo’s mention of the island before her dramatic vision of it at the end of the film. In that case the drawing would be pulling a lot of weight so I would probably extend that shot a bit to make sure that nobody blinked and missed it.
…Moving backwards in this case.
When planning a scene of Rey’s house at night, I considered placing a drawing of the island on the wall to hint at her reference to the island in her dreams later. Now that this scene isn’t happening and I’m returning the daydream/vision scene from before, I thought it might be neat to have that drawing as well. So here it is:
https://mega.nz/file/mZdDHCIA#QsSH_MKuQF35XZlHaVdkoggimio46rzPunza0ErEWGs
No worries, if it’s good enough for everyone else then it’s good enough for me 😃
Time to move on to the next part…
https://mega.nz/file/rdMD0KLA#jdDvpvnGc2nIesQbszpXc9MWue8V1qN09hunDjAwWQU
The Kylo Prayer scene with ‘I will finish what he started’.
I think it would be a more difficult line even for Adam Driver, much less my audio-cobbling skills, but maybe it sounds good enough.
If someone wants to send me the ‘Vader’ line from TROS, I can see if that works.
Fair.
Though you’re talking to someone who has spent far too much time thinking about this stuff.
The twenty years between Anakin’s fall and ANH is really set in stone.
That’s actually an interesting point, because if you use carbon freeze/relativistic time dilation on Padme, you can really fix a lot of the issues with the timeline. If in Episode 3 Anakin was in his thirties along with Owen and Beru and Obi-wan was in his forties, you could simply have the twins be conceived then put Padme on a ship at sublight relativistic speed for a while. When she returns ten years have passed for the galaxy but for her it’s been less than a year, whereupon the twins are born. The Clone Wars could take up to ten years longer, the Jedi would be practically extinct for an extra decade, Anakin would have given up hope of Padme’s return…and Anakin would believably be in his sixties by ROTJ.
No, I’m trying not to let anything from TROS influence this edit and merely focus on getting the ideas I have into some presentable form.
Alright, wanted to whip this up earlier but have been busy. Here’s my slight tweaks to the “pre-dawn Ahch-to” sequence. Keep in mind this is a very quick and dirty pass purely to have a visual reference for my thoughts here.
- Basically, to my eye the correction seems about 90% of the way there. The big sticking point for me is the dark grey look of the sky and the frame in general. Dark grey sky reads to me as either overcast or, unfortunately, artificially darkened - not dawn or pre-dawn. To me, before a sunrise, sky and the ambient light tends to be primarily blue (check the final scene of the film as an example). Especially in a movie that trends towards blue in its coloring, it feels very off to me that we’re not really seeing that here. So I wanted to show what things might look like if you introduced that hue.
- I think as well we’re giving the TIE fire too much credit for the ambient light in the first couple scenes, so I wanted to try to tone that down, and try to restrict it a bit (so, when Rey is sitting down talking to Luke, we mainly see it on the left side of her face, not the right where it wouldn’t reach).
https://vimeo.com/527188969
pw: faneditAgain this is very very rough (yes the masking is slapdash. is it too blue? too dark? maybe!). I’ve only done the first couple scenes here to give an idea.
Personally, I don’t really have the time to do this work, as it’s very tricky to do all these masks on top of all these other masks that Nev did (you’ll notice the final shot in that clip is particularly tricky and I did a very quick and rough job of it). If someone else here thinks it’s a good idea it’s all yours. I do think if Nev was interested these changes might be easier implemented on his end (or if somehow he was willing to share project files or plugins containing the exact effects and parameters - presuming we’re on the same program). But of course no harm no foul if this doesn’t tickle the fancy, it’s just my two cents (and I’m sure Nev’s time is just as full as anyone else’s).
I think the first part of the scene with Rey and the TIE looks really good, and wouldn’t bat an eye if that was in the final edit (I assume you have the final .mov renders I made but if not I can PM you). The second part is very blue, but I do like the more directional fire effect. The original masking I did on some of those shots was quite rough from the beginning, but like you said I don’t feel that I have the time to spend days finessing the scene. I think the first part works great, the second though needs a more subtle blue to work.
Thanks, I’ll check those out.
Thanks everyone!
About replacing the ‘I’ll finish what he started’ - does Kylo ever say ‘he’ in TROS while masked? I just don’t think there’s a good version of that word in TFA since ‘he means nothing to me’ doesn’t work.
https://mega.nz/folder/GBljAIbZ#l-NefINPNwTPHqUJsNkp-A
There’s the baseline cleaned Mustafar shot plus one with rudimentary grain. If anyone has a better grain overlay, feel free to use that. 😃
Fantastic work. Smoke looks compressed, but I guess that’s what’ll happen with Youtube.
Apparently the Blu-Ray comes out on March 30th. Maybe Nev could apply the effects to the Blu-Ray source once that’s out?
If someone provided a blu-ray clip it would be a dead simple task of replacing the footage.
Vader is too young but that is because of the prequel timeline. It was a mistake to place Revenge of the Sith a mere twenty years before Star Wars.
It would have worked if Anakin was in his twenties in episode I and by the end of the trilogy he was in his forties. But that would have made Padme older by extension.
Yep. Sure it would mess with the ‘young Jedi’ line, but that could be chalked up to him becoming a knight rapidly after beginning his training.
https://mega.nz/folder/GBljAIbZ#l-NefINPNwTPHqUJsNkp-A
There’s the baseline cleaned Mustafar shot plus one with rudimentary grain. If anyone has a better grain overlay, feel free to use that. 😃
I tried mightily to have him say ‘I will finish what he started’, but no rendition of ‘he’ I could find worked at all. But perhaps it’s not terrible to leave it as is.
Placing the scene here as a prayer to Snoke definitely gives it a different energy, which to me is more of a ‘fanatical minion’ than anything else. I think it works for Kylo’s role at the beginning of the movie, and allows for different interpretations later. For example, right now ‘I will finish what you started’ could actually be directed at either Snoke or Vader. The Vader meaning has been well discussed, but if he’s talking about Snoke, it could be evidence that even now he’s intending to overthrow him and rule the Empire he built.
Not a fan of the SEs or this change, but the usual reason given in favor of it is that Vader’s hiding information from Palpatine. He doesn’t want Palpatine to know that he already knows Luke is his son.
It raises a few more questions, though. Like, why would Palpatine care if Vader already heard about it? Or, why is the movie bringing this up when it’s never really relevant again? Plus, I don’t think that’s actually what Lucas had in mind when making the change.
But that explanation isn’t so horrible, and while I much prefer the original, it’s good enough for me. What bothers me more about the scene is Palpatine’s RotS makeup.
I wouldn’t call SE fans insane, though.
That explanation doesn’t really fly for me, since it takes a spectacular amount of obtuseness for Vader to not at least suspect that the Force-sensitive teenager who blew up the Death Star named Skywalker is his kid. Acting dumb just makes him look like a buffoon in front of the Emperor. Besides, since Vader is openly calling this kid ‘Skywalker’ from the beginning in an obsessive hunt, there’s no reason that the Emperor wouldn’t know his reasons for searching. Hell, I’m sure the paperwork on the probe droid operation would have been labeled ‘The Search for Skywalker - Probable Child of the Famous Jedi of the Same Name’.
Also, the idea that Vader would have some ill-will towards Palpatine for calling Padme’s death a few hours early seems like a stretch. It’s technically true that Anakin and his anger killed her, even if the details aren’t exactly as it seemed in ROTS. The fact is that Padme eventually died at Anakin’s hand and a child exists, something that isn’t impossible so Vader’s astonishment, feigned or not, is silly.