Yep. In contrast, the LOTR fandom is based on the writings of a single author, so even if the adaptations vary in quality there is no serious disagreement with the underlying stories.
Jumping around some more, one of the biggest holes in this edit has been between Poe’s interrogation and his rescue. The workprint has a couple shots of Rey’s house at night, but in order to make it more of a real scene I thought it might be neat to see her in the morning trying (and failing) to send BB-8 away.
Password: fanedit
Placing Rey’s dialogue here instead of in her first scene with the droid actually makes her seem a bit more blase about the droid’s fate, and grounds her a bit more in a selfish mindset. It’s only in this scene where she really relents.
If this new concept shows promise, I will adjust the wide speeder shot to differentiate it from the previous one and perhaps add the twin suns low on the horizon.
I’d love to check out your workprint. I’ve done a couple edits of The Force Awakens myself, but yours sounds like it has something new to offer.
A link would be most appreciated.
Id also love a link to the workprint! If you don’t mind me asking when do think you’re gonna wrap up the edit entirely, and do you plan on making edits on 8 or 9?
PM Sent!
I don’t mind, but I’m afraid I don’t have an answer for that…there will be a version 1 when I’m satisfied that everything feels complete. That may or may not include removing timecodes, but we’ll see.
There are threads for 8 and 9, but until this is finished I’m not giving them much thought.
Thanks, it’s nice to see it in a fuller context. It would have been interesting to see how people would have interpreted Finn’s motivations if we had this scene instead of the dying trooper, since it would have shown that he cared for the innocent civilians in the war rather than his fellow troopers. In this context, his later actions make a lot more sense.
The Star Wars fandom is approaching 50 years old, there’s been a lot of time for division to take place. Off the top of my head, in chronological order, there’s:
SW vs ESB
SW and ESB vs ROTJ
The OT vs TPM
The OT vs the PT
The Lucas Saga vs the Saga+EU
Lucas vs Disney
The EU vs NewEU
The Lucas Saga vs TFA
TFA vs TLJ
TFA+TLJ vs TROS
Episodes 1-8, the Old EU, the NewEU, the Holiday Special, Jaxxon, The Bigger Luke Theory, Every Fan Film, etc… vs TROS
So yeah, the fandom isn’t so much a unified group so much as it is a loose confederacy of groups with precious little to unite them.
I haven’t seen a simple TFA extended cut, nor have I seen anyone flawlessly remove the timecodes of any deleted scenes except for SirRidley’s work on the Leia scene for Restructured. A user named Telecine did a version of Kylo on the Falcon, but that’s the only other attempt I’m aware of.
At some point I’ll at least attempt a timecode removal for Kylo on the Falcon and Rey being comforted by Kalonia, at least if nobody else has tried.
PM sent!
Just FYI, the latest changes haven’t yet been applied to the workprint.
Children of Dune
I remember quite liking this book the first two times I read it, but the latest time it felt rather lacking in plot. Most of the book is mired in a swamp of introspection which often teeters on the edge of full-on Randian rant. I really want to still like this book and it still has its moments, but they’re getting fewer and farther apart as I get older. 7/10.
Jurassic Park
Speaking of rants, I had no idea that Ian Malcolm was the John Galt of this story. This is a rare case of the movie being better than the book. Maybe you could appreciate this book if your interest was computer science in the early nineties or the vagaries of Chaos Theory, but I’m a simple man who wanted a story about dinosaurs but got fifty diagrams of computer menus instead.
I’m just happy that Malcolm died at the end. 6/10.
The Lost World
“Somehow, Malcolm returned.”
The film is trash, so I had high hopes that this was merely a problem of the story being lost on its way to the screen. I still haven’t finished the book, but from what I can tell, the book is trash as well. It’s a different type of trash than the film, but equally worthless. Nobody in either telling has a good reason to be on Dinosaur Island Version 2 and they all deserve to die. I keep reading out of morbid curiosity, hoping that at least the raptors get a good meal. 1/10.
Mistborn
Just finished re-reading the first book. It’s pretty great. An engaging magic system, parts of which remind me of Attack on Titan, and characters that don’t make me want to punch dry-wall (Lost World, I’m looking at you). Overall, it’s a very solid 8/10 up until the last sentence of the epilogue, when that line drops the entire book to a 7/10. I’d recommend striking it from the page with a Sharpie marker, you’ll lose nothing by it.
I would still heartily recommend the three-part series, however.
When Obi-wan is fighting Vader on the Death Star, near the end he escapes back into the hallway and summons a Force projection of himself to stand against Vader in his final moments. He causes his projected body to disappear when it is ‘struck down’, then causes the cloak to disappear some time later.
Then Obi-wan escapes the Death Star while the Rebels are attacking and telepathically communes with Luke before escaping.
He then projects himself to Luke several times after this such as on Hoth and on Dagobah, which is why his visage continues to age.
Yoda does the same thing when he ‘dies’ on Dagobah.
Anakin feigns death on the second Death Star and ditches his armor on the shuttle while Luke is distracted during flight. And, you guessed it, all three Force Lads meet up on Endor and give Luke a Force projection send off before piling into Obi-wan’s ship and retiring on Canto Bight.
Alec Guinness talks about Darth Plagueis
My only gripe is Kylos’s hood/robe thing coming on and off between shots.
Which shots are these?
Kylo watching the base charge,
Kylo walking down the corridor towards Rey
Kylo destroying the chair
Those shots we doesn’t have it and then he does
Huh, you’re right. I hadn’t noticed that before. However, this continuity error was present in the original film.
Here’s a rough version of the new sequence I’m considering for the Hosnian Destruction. It’s closer to Restructured, but unlike that scene there’s actually too many shots to fit into the music duration.
Password: fanedit
My initial impression is that it’s still too rushed. Unfortunately, the scene on the Hosnian planet needs to stay in that place unless I opt for a complete rescore of those shots. Also, If Hux orders the firing before Chewie detonates the explosives, it would give that motivation a bit more clarity. Alternately, I could cut back to the Oscillator while the weapon is firing to see Rey and Finn decide to leave, which probably needs to happen on screen. That would allow for the weapon to reach the planet without feeling too abrupt, maybe. There also needs to be some recognition from the pilots…
Does this direction show promise?
My only gripe is Kylos’s hood/robe thing coming on and off between shots.
Which shots are these?
Unfortunately, it was like that in the deleted scene so unless I broke up those shots with other cutaways it will have to stay as it is.
JEDIT: I also still haven’t found a good replacement for the muddled ‘Ship clear’ line. If anyone knows where to find a similar trooper line I’d be super grateful.
Thanks! The lights were new. The Workprint just had some sounds of machinery added, but I was wracking my brain trying to come up with a feasible way of making this hangar ‘come to life’ and realized that hiding elements of it for later reveal would be much easier than adding new elements. The trooper chatter and announcements helped with these scenes.
The one area that I’m still not entirely happy with is Kylo’s interaction with the officer after the Falcon crash. ‘Captain’ doesn’t gel quite right. This was taken from the LEGO game. Does anyone know of a line he says while masked in the films that could be used instead?
Maybe after the pain has been blunted by time…maybe. 😉
Anyway, on this project I’ve gone back to an earlier concept for the Starkiller Infiltration. The previous iterations all felt too choppy and stitched together, so I’ve consolidated the Mind Trick scenes back into one. The workprint version of the Kylo Falcon scene came after the X-wing attack, which felt strange because it pulled focus away from that action for too long. Besides, it was originally supposed to take place before the fighter attack. Here I’ve returned it to a previous spot after Rey avoids the guards. With the addition of extra dialogue and that establishing shot, I think it works a bit better.
Password: fanedit
How did you guess my plan for TLJ?
This will all be obsolete once time travel allows for the past to become an infinite holographic recording device.
With the declining cost of data storage, I’m questioning more and more if I should delete any file ever again.
The plan is overvalued as it doesn’t take into account audience rejection
Audiences might not like where you are about to take this franchise, it doesn’t matter if you planned it from the beginning, the second you implement it the audience will reject it.
So?
Audiences don’t like Rey or the fact that she is going to restore the Jedi order, no amount of execution is going to save an idea that audiences simply won’t accept.
What are you talking about? I have heard that people have specific issues with Rey, but I’ve never heard people outright dismiss her character or dislike the idea of her restoring the Jedi Order.
The fantastic beasts franchise is obviously meticulously planned, but audiences don’t like the shit Rowling is selling from a foundational level.
That franchise doesn’t seem meticulously planned to me at all; the first movie was about fantastic beasts but the second one treats them as an afterthought. If that was always the plan, then they would have named the series 'Grindlewald and Friends."
Planning for palpatine’s return since the beginning isn’t going to make the idea any less shitty
That’s true, which is why they weren’t planning for Palpatine’s return from the beginning.
You might be put in a situation where audiences demand something other than you planned and you will have to scrap your story and reboot mid series in order to avoid audience rejection.
Again, who cares about audience ‘rejection’ if you’re confident in your story?
Which puts us back to where we came from with the ST(and how episode 9 came out of nowhere)
We don’t need a plan, we need good ideas
A good idea is worthless without committed execution; in other words, a plan.
I believe the fault lies with Disney and the make-believe “Lucasfilm Story Group” that they created
I just want to say I really appreciate you giving such a measured take on the situation.
Is sarcasm?
It’s Abrams’ fault. It’s his name on the movie, his name as producer, his name as writer. He made the movie. Acting like a larger plan would have stopped him from making a bad trilogy-ender doesn’t make any sort of logical sense (almost as little logical sense as saying the story group was “make believe,” or further, thinking the story group was anything but canon checkers for the creatives). He abandoned “the plan” TWICE when making TFA (both Lucas’ notes and then Arndt’s treatments) and it became a much-loved, well-reviewed success - the highest grossing (domestic) film in history (and likely will be for the foreseeable future).
The beginning third of TFA (The one with most of Arnd’s fingerprints) is widely considered to be the best part of that film, and the last third with the Starkiller (JJ’s invention) is widely seen as the weakest aspect. It’s also a film that only worked at the time because the audience was expecting answers to the mystery box questions, questions that were either abandoned or turned out to be blitheringly stupid.
There being “a plan” for The Rise of Skywalker wouldn’t have mattered one whit, because when he did get the chance to come back, he ignored HIS OWN PLANS (Rey Kenobi, Finn the Jedi, Stormtrooper rebellion) to pursue something completely different. And it didn’t work.
Which goes to show that JJ isn’t a guy with a plan. He generates concepts from the beginning of a story to its end, with most of those concepts withering away as new ones take their place.
Had Abrams made a good movie out of his new on the fly plans (like he did with TFA), none of us would be talking about plans, or “executive meddling” (he’s the executive doing the meddling at the behest of other executives, btw). But he made a bad movie, and now we’re all trying to figure out how it could have happened. But the truth is it happened because nobody bats a thousand. He’s made bad movies before, and he made a bad movie again, this time to end the sequel trilogy. The idea that Disney could have stopped that with a “well conceived plan” doesn’t make any sense. It’s wishful thinking. The dude doesn’t follow plans no matter where they come from, even if “Following the plan” were some surefire key to success, and it isn’t.
Every movie is a risk, and there isn’t some cheat code or safety net to prevent bad movies from coming out of the creative process. It takes work, talent, collaboration, skill, and luck. Every time. No matter what the plan is.
I just fundamentally disagree. I think that a script is important. If you hire subpar writers, you get subpar plans. The best part of TFA was Arndt’s and Kasdan’s involvement. But if you look at the rest of JJ’s filmography, you get the man himself, Kurtzman, Orci, and/or Terrio. This team has never made more than a merely competent film.
Intertextuality
Rebels is frustrating 'cause everything is interesting except the main cast, Ezra especially.
It would have been cool if the show had actually explored a small corner of the galaxy under Imperial control, but instead we got Thrawn, Vader and Palpatine losing to this tiny crew.
The Sixth Sense would be in my top 10 for sure.