NeverarGreat

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:

https://vimeo.com/519372759

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?

LesPaul32 said:

21C Peasant said:

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. 😃

Hal 9000 said:

If I recall correctly, Sir Ridley helped remove the timecode as well. It was some advanced, painstaking effort and far from automatic.

That’s correct. SirRidley did most of the work on the Leia scene timecode and I just tackled one complicated timecode shot in that scene. It’s really painstaking, and this page details how I did it with moving objects in the frame:

https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/The-Force-Awakens-The-Starlight-Project-WIP-WORKPRINT-RELEASED/id/54912/page/7

There might be better technology now which can better automate the process.

BrotherOfSasquatch said:

NeverarGreat said:

Hey, I’m all for someone removing the timecodes and attempting to include the Falcon deleted scene in this movie…for totally selfless reasons of course 😉

Slightly off-topic but has anyone been able to successfully remove the time code from it? Or even from the rest of the TFA deleted scenes for that matter?

I do really love the Kylo Falcon scene and that was a deleted scene I couldn’t understand why it got deleted. However, I do think it would fit better in an edit of TFA rather than this TROS edit.

The only completely successful attempt was the Leia and Kor Sella scene for Restructured. A user named Telecene did a partial timecode removal of the Kylo Falcon scene, but every other attempt has largely just cropped the timecode out.

Eventually I hope to do the timecode removal of the Klyo scene and several others from TFA, but the time and effort required are quite daunting.

I don’t think it would be practical, but I’m all for someone removing the timecodes and attempting to include the Falcon deleted scene in this movie…for totally selfless reasons of course 😉

Ehh, I think it’s too much on top of the action.

Replace each crawl with an opening narration by the main character of the respective films.

This narration continues as the interior monologue of the main characters ala Lynch’s Dune.

Hal 9000 said:

Maybe Luke hallucinated a second Sun as he was dying from focusing so hard.

The novelization suggests that the Ach-To scene begins near dusk, continues overnight, and ends with the sunrise. If that can be realized well and without making the scene difficult to see, it could be a good way to imply a longer stay on the planet. Especially now that the 16-hour ticking clock has been removed. Yeah they’re in a hurry, but that specific element is gone.

RISE. Anyone feel up to the task? Obviously we will want to use jonh’s haircut footage once finalized, but the work done to the footage can be applied to this footage. This isn’t needed, but could be a nice alteration. I’d say better as subtle; I don’t want it to look like the theater’s bulb burned out. Just enough to convey the time of day using cinema parlance.

It’s pretty easy to make the first and last parts look like sunset/sunrise. Here’s a blanket grade I put over the whole thing pretty quickly:

http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparison/KGYZGNNX

The light would be reduced throughout the scene, with some power windows to keep the firelight and ghost effects bright. The trick would be to make part of it look like night. I assume the night would be within Luke’s hut, and would take some more dedicated power windows. Rey would be cast in shadow with a slight blue glow from Luke’s ghost and the bright sky outside would need to be darkened, but it’s possible.

“My powers have doubled since the last time we met, Obi-wan.”

I’d be up for such a thing, it’s always fun to come up with ideas 😃

Hal 9000 said:

The friendship theme from TROS is pretty damn good.

Which theme would that be?

Hal 9000 said:

Here’s what I’m leaning toward as far as placement: https://vimeo.com/515582857

It works fairly well.

That said, it would work far better if someone were to paint out the medal altogether. I don’t get the connection between the medal and Ben at all, other than it’s just Leia reminiscing about her past. But even then I feel like it cheapens the moment since it would then feel like she’s not focused solely on Ben.

It’s just weird.

Ghosts at the Ewok Party

https://i.imgur.com/rqRqrRr.mp4

Servii said:

Instead of Yub Nub or Victory Celebration, Snootles and Yowza will give us a rowsing encore of Jedi Rocks as the film ends.

It’s like poetry.

My two cents: the trailer music uses an entirely different musical language than Williams, and is thus impossible to integrate into the film.

jarbear said:

Anyone else find it weird that the Falcon crashed? even if the “landing gear” isn’t working … don’t these things land more like a helicopter than a jet airplane? lol.

You’re looking at this too literally, Jarbear. It’s an artistic and thematic message that nothing in the movie is able to fly.

JJ wanted it to be a puppet originally but there wasn’t time, so I guess TROS was the first real chance for this.

It makes me chuckle that the puppet is actually less expressive so even in the case of doing things the right way it turns out wrong for this movie.

RogueLeader said:

Ooo, I’d like to hear more about this over on the script writing threads.

At one point I had an entire trilogy plotted out for a series that featured Owen and Beru as major characters, which I was toying with in this old thread:

https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/STARS-OF-WAR/id/15325

Of course, that one still has them on Tatooine. My ideas eventually diverged into two separate concepts for trilogies, the first being set within the existing prequel canon and the second being constructed as a replacement. Here’s a very rough idea of the three films:

In the first, Anakin is a twenty-something farmer on a fertile world who gets swept up into a galactic war because of his piloting abilities. After his first tour of duty he returns home a hero but Obi-wan realizes that his abilities could be used to revive the order of Jedi Knights to which he owes secret allegiance. He is hiding his true nature since the Republic refuses to allow the Jedi to serve as soldiers, but Obi-wan believes that the Republic is worthy of the Jedi’s protection.

In the second film, Obi-wan recruits Anakin over the objections of his brother Owen and the two go on to start a ‘damn fool idealistic crusade’ to bring the Jedi back into relevance by winning an increasingly desperate war against viscous robots. Anakin sees that he isn’t the first student Obi-wan has recruited. A tall young man from the core worlds flies for General Obi-wan’s command. He pilots an Invader class fighter and Anakin trains alongside him on a Defender class ship. The two become friends under Obi-wan’s leadership, and after winning some decisive victories and saving the planet Alderaan and its Princess from destruction, the Jedi Order is forced to admit that they can be defenders of the peace and warriors of the Republic. However, call-sign Vader perished in the final defense of Alderaan after Anakin prioritized the princesses’s life over Vader’s.

In the final film and after several more years of war, Owen and Beru come to realize that the Republic is being changed by the Jedi and the wars, which are increasingly looking like identical copies intended to serve as a threat to justify ever more Republic control. Their planet’s government is no longer autonomous, and they are forced off their land by robots built by the Republic’s new factories. Owen and Beru are now adrift in an unfriendly galaxy and must work at these droid factories to survive. Because of their jobs, they learn that the enemy is using the same parts as the Republic, fielding massive armies of these murderous robots, while the Republic gets only non-aggressive astromechs and load lifters to retain a flesh and blood Republic army and to disenfranchise workers. Of course, there’s the main plot with Anakin and Obi-wan but the Owen and Beru story ends with them trying to start a new life for themselves away from the Republic turned Empire.

But that’s a story for the screenwriting thread.

For self preservation, probably. They are potentially valuable equipment so it makes sense that they have a program that warns of potential and actual damage to their bodies.

Servii said:

TFA was honestly almost painful for me to sit through. Partly because I dislike JJ Abrams’ frenetic directing style, and partly because the film felt so transparent. It was a carefully crafted recreation of Star Wars, like a theme park ride, but it never felt like a true sequel to RotJ. So many of the creative choices in TFA only make sense from a meta perspective, not an in-universe perspective. And the film couldn’t justify its own existence, nor could it justify its undoing of RotJ’s happy ending.

TLJ was definitely a more intriguing film to watch and analyze. I don’t like the film, but it felt more genuine and less corporate than TFA. TFA had Bob Iger’s fingerprints all over it. TLJ felt like Rian was really trying something more meaningful. I don’t think he succeeded, but the effort was apparent. I do think that fan edits can help TLJ a great deal to work as a coda of sorts, if much of the filler and bloat were removed and it was cut down to just Ahch-To, the Supremacy, and Crait. All in all, it’s definitely the most worth watching of the trilogy.

I’d say that if the sequels have anything at all to say, it’s in terms of the meta commentary around Star Wars. TLJ just does this the most competently and TROS entirely fails.

Star Wars has always been political.

And if fighting against fascism offends the political sensibilities of some viewers, then they should be offended.

The difference between the endings of ROTJ and TROS is that the former was concerned with a small ‘insignificant’ rebellion targeting the head of a galaxy-wide Empire which has had 25 years to become entrenched, whereas the latter merely prevented a new incursionary force from gaining a hold on a galaxy that had been under the control of a democratic republic for decades.

As much as I give TFA grief for resetting the universe, there’s at least a good argument to be made that the Empire was too large and established to be defeated as easily as it is portrayed in ROTJ, thus making some sense of its return. There’s much less reason for the First Order to come back, since it was never well-established and was defeated by a popular uprising from all corners of the galaxy, not just a small military organization like the Rebel Alliance.

I don’t like the way TROS handled things, but at least now there’s a good case to be made that things are different now, as opposed to after ROTJ.