As stupid as Maul’s return was, any character can be written to become more powerful over time, and at least with Maul he would have had a ready-made justification for existing and wanting the power of Palpatine which was denied him when he fell. That at least makes him a character, unlike Snoke.
Continue the scene from TROS where Rey bemoans that the wayfinder got destroyed, where Luke reveals that he used his powers as a Force Ghost to shield Kylo’s wayfinder from harm when Rey set fire to his fighter. He explains that this is why he was in the right place at the right time to catch the saber she threw at him.
I absolutely love this one as a Bad Edit Idea because it’s the exact sort of thing I could see somebody very earnestly trying to implement unironically.
Someone’s gotta be obsessively pedantic, how do you think I come up with this stuff? 😉
I’ve done some more tweaks to the sequence as suggested, mostly small adjustments. The biggest thing is replacing the simple feather effect on Luke’s Ghost with a proper glow:
http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparison/KGG6LNNX
Continue the scene from TROS where Rey bemoans that the wayfinder got destroyed, where Luke reveals that he used his powers as a Force Ghost to shield Kylo’s wayfinder from harm when Rey set fire to his fighter. He explains that this is why he was in the right place at the right time to catch the saber she threw at him.
I made a mockup of something like that a few pages back, actually:
Password: fanedit
Since then the discussion has turned in favor of having a pre-dawn to morning timeline, but it’s up to the community and Hal to decide what’s best for this scene. I don’t have an opinion either way but I suppose we’ll need to come down on one side or the other so I know whether to leave the hut scene dark or lighten it gradually.
Not at all, I can certainly bring those levels down a bit 😃
Sleep and a life is overrated anyway! 😉
Hey, I never said I’d do it right away 😉
Not at all, I can certainly bring those levels down a bit 😃
Okay, here is the new attempt at implementing these critiques:
Password: fanedit
The fireside chat is now even darker, with much more roto work.
The second half of the Hut scene is now lightened to merge more seamlessly with the next scene.
The sunrise scene has a grade which is now at 50% strength to keep a bit more of the original look.
YES! Dude, that looks amazing. God, seriously, wow.
Just two things kind of stand out to me, and maybe I’m wrong, but…
At the second establishing shot (the wide of the fire after Luke pops up), the green on the hill behind them might be a tad too bright? I think it would either been tinged orange from the firelight, or still kind of shadowy.
When Luke stands up, it looks like a feather mask? That’s what I was experimenting with too, until MR pointed out that it makes the background around Luke’s body light up too, rather than being a true “glow” in the immediate space. Clearly I’m not an expert on it though. MR linked a video that might explain it more. That’s the only shot I noticed where the glow seemed kind of off though.
Seriously, amazing work!
There are a lot of feather effects going on with Luke, yes. I will see about toning down the green there because you’re right, but it’s basically impossible to have a glowing Luke without seeing a brightened background behind him. I chalk it up to Ghost Magic 😃
Its progressing really nicely Nev, really nicely.
I’m thinking the Luke by the Log stuff is going to be the pain in the butt to work with since is glowing is different affected by the original shot’s day time coloring/brightness.
You have no idea. Luke has basically no glow in the original due to the high-key lighting, so practically all of his brightness now is due to roto work. Same thing with Rey’s hood. Luckily the scene just short enough that after working on it, I still have some sanity left. Barely 😉
Okay, here is the new attempt at implementing these critiques:
Password: fanedit
The fireside chat is now even darker, with much more roto work.
The second half of the Hut scene is now lightened to merge more seamlessly with the next scene.
The sunrise scene has a grade which is now at 50% strength to keep a bit more of the original look.
Somebody get Adywan on the line!
Ah yes, that’s a good one.
This is the best I’ve seen it so far, but I’m still not buying those shots in the sitting on a log scene. Way too warm and bright.
Harsh, but fair.
But I can’t look at it anymore tonight, my eyes are more tired than this movie’s cliche’s.
JEDIT: One thing that I’ve noticed while working on this is that I ‘buy’ Luke’s ghost much more in dark scenes. There’s a good reason the previous films only showed Force Ghosts at night.
To show how much I love y’all:
Password: fanedit
No sound, for even my love has limits. And I don’t have a good source 😉
Anyway, there’s no second establishing shot since I’m not sure if it can be made dark enough for these scenes.
The fireside chat is just about as dark as it will get, methinks, and the light entering the hut is slightly brighter to give more of a gradient into morning.
It’s an interesting idea to start the island scene in total darkness. It would make sense to have a shot of the island at night from TLJ for this, maybe with a small spot of fire. To darken the flaming TIE sequence is doable, and I bet the next shots could be darkened a bit more as well to further match the hut.
Yeah, it’s best to keep the scenes together.
Here’s a mockup of what I was thinking:
Password: fanedit
This way we can interpret as much time as necessary between hut and shore, and doesn’t spoonfeed us the answer to the wayfinder problem.
It’s important to clarify that I’m not trying to be rude when I say the following. I think your work is really well done, Nev.
But why should we delete portions of the film in order to keep this cosmetic change? It looks like Luke’s “You have everything you need” would have to go so you could create a transition to something else for a while. I’d personally prefer to have content rather than a little less content in a different shade. What do you all think, though?
Again, I think it’s a cool idea but might not be worth it.
No offense taken!
I was just spitballing ways to make it seem like more time could pass, and in that idea the ‘you have everything you need’ could stay and just be moved to directly after ‘the thousand generations live in you’, and the transition would happen right after that. The idea would lose the lines from Rey about how she’s stuck on the island, but that feels if anything like she has allowed Luke to make her decision for her and is now committed to going to Exegol where as if you cut those lines of Rey’s we can allow her more time for her decision.
It’s not strictly necessary of course, but it might be worth looking at if people aren’t sold on the passage of time based on color grading alone.
I think the scene in the hut looks beautiful and the dialogue should remain untouched.
Would having a night shot of the island from TLJ help in any way?
A night shot of the island would only make sense at the beginning or end of the Hut scene since I don’t think the first part of the sequence would work at night. If it went anywhere, it would probably go right before the Hut scene, but I don’t think it’s necessary if the time is implied to be dusk at the beginning of the scene.
The trouble is that it’s really hard to sell a nighttime look to the island except for inside the hut, so the time skip would have to happen between their conversation and the hut, which isn’t great, or between the hut and her finding the wayfinder.
Yes, it’s cut.
I wonder, what if the scene in the hut ended with ‘A thousand generations live in you now.’ (cut to Rey, Luke’s voice offscreen which drifts off into echoes) ‘You have everything you need’.
Cut to: Rey finds the other wayfinder.
This would allow Luke’s ghost an exit and give Rey a chance to think and decide what to do, maybe have a bit of sleep, then get the wayfinder the next morning and Luke’s help would then be a bit more of a surprise since he’s already had what could amount to a decent exit, with his last appearance being the fanservice icing on top of the plot cupcake.
I feel like it’s similar to the trip to Alderaan in ANH; based on the events that happen on the Falcon, it feels like it takes maybe twenty minutes, but the ‘canon’ timeline takes hours at least.
Every change of location in the island scene is written to lead into the next, but there’s no reason that Rey couldn’t have had a bit of a sleep at some point while waiting for Luke to appear in the hut or the TIE to stop burning. In a perfect edit I would maybe try to cut Rey racing out of the hut to check on the TIE so as to better imply that she took her time and spent the night while waiting for the fire to die down, but that may not be feasible.
Here’s a full mockup of the Ach-To sequence, featuring a regrade by NeverArGreat:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UpnKp8-35PMwuWDXiv2ZjIvsZ93y0BE0/view?usp=sharing
I agree with everyone else that the nighttime and morning regrades look fantastic. Not sold on the evening, though.
Also, I find it somewhat hard to believe that Rey and Luke would be talking ALL night long. Of course, Ahch-To could have a shorter day/night cycle if we wanted to. But the impression for the average viewer is that she was there for about 10 hours. Meh.
Is it possible that when she is burning the Falcon it is night? That would not only make the timing make more sense, but also remove the evening regrade that doesn’t look as good.
The issue is that there are quite a few shots with a bright sky directly behind/through Rey and Luke. I masked those out and darkened them for an evening look, but I don’t know if replacing them with night would work at all, and if it did it might just look obviously day for night. It would certainly be harder than masking the door and window of the hut.
As someone who didn’t know much about the historical events described in the film, I also felt like it was rather directionless and dull, but my girlfriend found it interesting because she knew a lot about those events beforehand so it was interesting when the narrative ‘went off the rails’ by the end.
I just didn’t know there were rails in the first place, and after being told that my estimation of the movie went up.
I can certainly give the scene another go, since I agree that the first bit is too orange and it probably doesn’t go dark enough leading into the hut.
As for a de-blued Luke, what kind of effect should we be going for here? Do we want the overall blue of the effect pulled back so that he’s more ‘ghostly’, or is the intent to bring out more of his natural colors so that it appears like a faded version of Mark Hamill?
Based on the discussion of the Kylo Falcon scene, I wondered what progress has been made in modern content aware filters so I did a test in After Effects and compared it to Telecine’s work:
Password: fanedit
Keep in mind that Telecine probably used multiple approaches whereas I simply threw the shots into the machine and rendered the results. The settings were set to ‘object’ tracking, and I did a fade around the timecode of 5 pixels. I think some of these results are pretty good, all things considered. Of course, Telecine’s work is more seamless in most shots.
In particular, shots 2 and 4, the long tracking shots, are both improved in AE. There’s some trouble with both, but it’s not insurmountable. Also, shot 5 looks just about perfect to me right out of the can. This is good news to me since the moving camera shots are the hardest to work with in my traditional Photoshop approach. I think a combination of approaches would be ideal here, doing the more painstaking image replacement for static shots with elements moving past them, and content aware filters for moving camera shots.
Although, I wonder if the ‘surface’ option is better for static shots where objects move in front of the background. Used with the ‘reference frame’ option, it could be ideal.
So, has anyone else played around with this or other content-aware filters, and if so, are there any tricks you’ve found to get good results?
Kylo Searches the Falcon - No time code
Most of it is not my work, but I did touch it up a bit.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zBPwVfzpl8kW58uNOWS5UPHgDklb3kMt/view?usp=sharing
On the topic of the TFA Kylo in the Falcon scene: 21C Peasant posted the above wizardry over in the “Info: Fixing the TFA and TLJ Deleted Scenes” thread a few months back.
For my money, this is the most polished version of the scene out there at the moment. It’s so close to being completely seamless, imo.
However pie-in-the-sky the idea may currently be, I would absolutely LOVE to see this Kylo/Ben moment integrated into TROS somehow.
That version is Telecine’s work with the first shot cropped to remove the timecode.
JEDIT: I have done some experimentation here, so I’d suggest moving this discussion away from Hal’s already burdened thread. 😃