RogueLeader

EddieDean said:

I think this idea has legs. I don’t think it’d be too tricky to start - one could watch through TPM and Jar-Jar’s couple of other appearances, taking notes in a spreadsheet of each line, timestamped. You’ve then got that for quick reference to identify your available replacement sounds. Isolate those lines in a working project to create common source replacement words (“I’m”, “I”, “Me”, etc), then take each line in place and replace what you can to tidy it up whilst preserving the meaning, ideally against the video to check for acceptable lip-sync.

Man, I love the data analyst mentality you bring to this forum. For some reason the idea of putting that much work into trying to improve Jar Jar, 23 years after the movie came out, is equal amounts of ridiculous and totally something that we would do. Honestly, one of our first Community Focus edits being Jar Jar related feels totally appropriate, since he basically was the catalyst of the fan editing subculture.

I think that guy’s dub is one of the best out there, but if I personally had to pick, I think I would still try to improve the dialogue as it is, because a major dub like that would still stick out to me. But there’s nothing wrong with going in both directions! Especially if he is down to record dialogue for the entire film (if he hasn’t already done that).

In regards to frankenbyting Jar Jar’s lines, that’s something I could maybe play around with. I don’t have TPM with all of the audio tracks atm, but if someone could share at least the audio with me I could potentially play around with it and do something like Eddie suggested (whenever I actually have spare time).

I’ve been thinking about the movie since you made this post, so I’ll share some random thoughts I’ve been having.

The Crawl

I like the direction of the crawl you posted, Eddie.

I think the big complaint of the original crawl is that it got people’s heads scratching before the movie even starts. The goal of the crawl should be clarify things for the audience. Get everyone on the same page, keep it simple. Think about the original Star Wars opening crawl. It gives some background, but we’re left with a few simple ideas: There’s a big, evil empire, and there’s a rebellion fighting against them. A easy to understand tale of underdogs fighting against tyranny. We also get the gist of the basic plot: the bad guys have a super weapon, and the good guys stole the secret plans for it. We also learn about Princess Leia and her crucial role in this mission.

With this TPM new crawl, there are a few key words used that I think help establish important themes or ideas for this trilogy: complacency, corruption, and greed. These words highlight the problems in the final years of the Galactic Republic, and it establishes people like Padmé trying to fight against this corruption, and personally paying a cost for it. I think centering Padmé as an important character in a new crawl is a great idea. It might do a better job at investing the audience in her journey from the get-go. Like you mentioned before, a common point made about this movie is how it feels like there isn’t a main protagonist. Maybe Padmé technically isn’t, but I think anything would help to give more characterization to this ensemble.

I think another thing worth discussing is runtime. There are a lot of TPM edits that really cut down the runtime of the film, but I personally think if you’re trying to make an edit of this film that could’ve realistically been a theatrical release, the runtime should be at least be 2-hours. Preferably not shorter than the original Star Wars film, but that’s just my opinion. But I do think such a rule can help editors prioritize which cuts are the most important to make. You might be able to make a great 90-minute movie, but would that be too short for a Star Wars movie?

Nemoidians and Sidious

I know I just mentioned being careful about cutting too much and making the movie too short, but if I were to want to cut any scenes, I think I would cut a lot of the scenes between Nute Gunray and Darth Sidious. There’s a few reasons for doing this. 1) I feel like the pacing just halts every time we cut back to what the bad guys are doing. 3) It feels like a lot of information is repeated in other scenes. 2) I actually think it would serve the narrative more if we kept the Sith’s involvement in the plot as mysterious as we can. I actually wonder how much it would actually hurt the movie if we cut all of Sidious’ scenes. Would it be better if the actual phantom menace was a figure only alluded to in the first film? I’m sure there are edits that have already done this. We are talking about the most fan-edited film in history, after all.

Jar Jar Binks

In regards to Jar Jar, instead of totally dubbing him, I’m curious if it would be possible to play around with his dialogue to simply tone down his sometimes confusing Gungan dialect. A few examples:

“I spake” to “I speak”
“You saved my again” to “You saved me again”
“More did you spake?” to “More did you say?”
“Ex-squeeze-me, but de mostest safest place would be Gunga City” to “De safest place would be Gunga City”
“’Tis embarrassing. My afraid my’ve been banished. My forgotten. Da bosses would do terrible things to me. Terrrrrible things to me if me goen back dere” to “Tis’ embarrassing. I afraid I’ve been banished. I’m forgotten. Da bosses would do terrible things to me. Terrible things to me if I go back dere.”
“Wesa goen underwater, okeyday?” to “We go underwater, okay?”
“My warning you. Gungans no liken outsiders, so don’t spect a warm welcome” to “I’m warning you. Gungans don’t like outsiders, so don’t espect a warm welcome.”

Obviously how doable this would be would depend on how easy it is to isolate Jar Jar’s dialogue, and if you could find the right pieces to frankenbyte the dialogue changes. I recall Brian Blessed (who voiced Boss Nass) gave an interview where he said “I tried to make sure my noises didn’t interfere with dialogue”. He basically said that he thought that Jar Jar sometimes made noises on the line, and he has a lot of plot, so the audience would go, “What’s he saying? What did he say?” Anyway, I’m not saying Brian Blessed should be the authority on this, but I think it is a fair point.

And of course, basically every TPM edit in the past has toned down Jar Jar by cutting certain scenes or lines whole cloth, or muting Jar Jar’s voice, but I’m curious how possible it would be improve the dialogue that is necessary without overdubbing Ahmed Best’s performance. Because I think one issue with cutting a lot of Jar Jar is that if you cut too much Jar Jar, the edits feel less invisible as they should if you’re going for an edit that could pass as a theatrical release. This method might allow an editor to keep more Jar Jar, but make him less annoying. Another positive thing about this route would be that you probably could get away with these dialogue changes without Jar Jar’s mouth movements being noticeably off, since the CGI twenty years ago wasn’t as true-to-life as it can be now. And I know this is something other editor’s have played around with, but maybe the pitch of Jar Jar’s voice could be played around for more grating lines and yells. Not sure how helpful it would be but maybe it could be.

But maybe this idea could also be used for Watto and the Nemoidians to some extent.

Padme

Speaking of pitch, something I would like to see would be to change the pitch of Queen Amidala’s voice back to Natalie Portman’s natural pitch. I’ve heard other people say this is difficult or impossible with how the audio is mixed, but I find this choice pretty unappealing, and it makes the Queen more relatable and human if she had something closer to her natural pitch. It’s honestly kind of impressive how George was able to get such a wooden performance out of Portman after her great role in The Professional. It’s crazy how much crap Jake Lloyd got for his performance as Anakin, but at least he was more emotive than Natalie was in this film.

It’s kind of funny, I know there is a video somewhere on YouTube where someone does exactly this, but all of the comments are saying how it’s supposed to be like that, and give all of the reasons and excuses. Like, sure, give all of the in-universe reasons for why that is cool or whatever, but I feel like it makes her less relatable and more boring to listen to, even if people are not consciously aware of it. I guess it’s just a testament to how opinions of the prequels have changed.

Anakin

Not a lot to say about Anakin that hasn’t already been done, but there is one idea I recall regarding how Anakin gets connected with Qui-Gon and company. This was an idea I had back years ago, but I’m pretty sure the Phantom Editor also mentions in his commentary having this edit when he did his edit, but decided to not go with it. Basically, the idea would be that you would replace Jar Jar getting accosted by Sebulba, with Qui-Gon seeing Anakin in a fight and breaking it up. This deleted scene originally takes place after the pod race, and the Rodian thinks Anakin cheated at the pod race, but if you could assume they are just talking about a game they were playing. One benefit is that it would help you avoid another of Jar Jar’s goofy antics, and it also lets you see another side of Anakin that we mostly see as sweet and innocent. I think one of the reasons he didn’t use it was because of the quality of the scene, but perhaps there is a better quality version of the scene available now.

On the other hand, I do like Mrebo’s idea for the scene, which gives Anakin a little extra agency. Maybe you could use both ideas, since you would need to invent a way for Anakin to pair back up with the others (unless you just assumed Anakin caught up with them after Watto let him leave).

I’m sure I’ll have other ideas later, but that’s a lot for now. One other idea I had is that you could potentially use establishing shots of Mos Espa from the Book of Boba Fett somewhere in TPM, if you wanted to show a bit more of the city. Feels weird to talk about edit ideas that have been discussed for the past twenty years…

Mrebo on these forums recently had a good idea about using Anakin’s conflict with Sebulba as the party’s (and the audience’s) introduction to him, and then changing Anakin’s subtitles to have him explain why he’s brought them to Watto’s shop. This made our first introduction to Anakin one where he’s driving the plot and standing up for himself. And while it requires the shot of Jar Jar spitting a frog onto Sebulba, that element might be softened by the new context that “It’s the will of the force that we met”, though perhaps that’s a bit of a stretch.

Could you copy/link his comment regarding this idea? I was going to bring up a specific idea regarding Anakin’s introduction, but I’m curious what exactly he suggested for this.

I think that’s a good idea Faraday! The last time I watched it I did feel like it didn’t totally hold up, so potentially reworking it might turn out well!

This might not be right for Legendary, but maybe a future edit could imply that somehow in one of the flashbacks.
Maybe when Ben uses the force to collapse the hut and it cuts to black, we could hear a few brief lines of overlapping dialogue from the other students arguing/fighting.

“He killed Master Luke!”

“Luke attacked him!”

“Murderer!”

“Traitor!”

“No!”

lightsaber ignites

Then it cuts back and Luke sees the aftermath.

Also, Nev had the idea of replacing Ben’s blue saber in the flashback with Anakin’s saber, which I think would fit pretty well with the idea of the KoR being Luke’s students. Maybe kyber crystals and lightsabers were really hard to find by the time Luke started training students, so none of his students ever built one. That’s why the KoR don’t use them. And maybe Kylo finally tried to build one, which explains the rough construction of his crossguard lightsaber.

I like the Craster’s Keep comparison. I never made that connection but I picture something like that too. Maybe sides were being formed way before that night, but when it finally happened, people had to choose sides quickly and then all hell broke loose.

Anyway, I still think Hal’s dialogue change is a valid way to go with it. It simplifies things. Raises less questions. It would be interesting if we could somehow imply Ben was defending himself, but I also don’t think Ben really cares to try and justify his actions to anyone at this point.

That is fair. I personally like the idea that the students gathered around the ruined hut, thinking Ben killed their master, and started picking sides until someone struck first. Like you said, it doesn’t totally pin it on Ben.

Though if you went this direction, it would be nice if there was some hint that the Knights in TROS were the other students. Nothing really gives us that impression. No sign of force sensitivity, no lightsabers, no relevant dialogue, etc.

On speakers I couldn’t even notice. I’ll try to listen with headphones later.

This is a good idea. I like Charles Soule but I think he dropped the ball on fleshing out Ben’s fall. Just looking at the movie, the line definitely implies what Hal says. I think this definitely simplifies it, since the Knights of Ren apparently aren’t some of Luke’s other students.

Glad this is being brought back! I definitely see some merit in going back through the Skywalker Saga with fresh eyes now that the Sequel Trilogy is done. I could see some slower months covering big picture stuff that is mostly discussion, where other months could be executing smaller ideas that could actually be used in edits. It might be a good idea to go back through old threads and see what were some common ideas that were never really made.

I think you should pursue this idea.

Acbagel did something similar with his edits, though I think where he ends up is different from your ideas. Though I don’t think either interpretation is any less valid.

Going into the sequel trilogy, I also felt like the flaws with the old Jedi doctrine were going to be addressed in some way. Addressing this doesn’t mean the answer is a ‘gray Jedi’, but I think a future Jedi order would have to learn from the mistakes of the old one, which ties into TLJ’s message of failure. I mean TFA makes us ask the question, “What went wrong with Luke’s Jedi order? Why did things fall apart again?” TLJ does end with Luke reaffirming the Jedi, but I still thought we would go into TROS with ghost Luke passing on some wisdom about how the Jedi need to grow, but the film never really gets into that.

The prequels paint this picture of the Jedi’s views on emotion and attachment being a double-edge sword. On one hand, it takes away temptations from the dark side, but the Jedi don’t seem to teach their students how to deal with their emotions. They just tell them to let them go, or bury their feelings. And this bottling of emotions tends to make some people erupt, which is what happened to Anakin.

Again, at the same time I also think you could see the films as saying that evil will always rise, and so it is worth fighting even knowing evil will rise again in the future. But I think there is merit in wanting to end on a different note. That the next generation will try to learn and grow from the past, rather than just do the same thing over again. And TROS doesn’t really continue that idea explicitly beyond Rey having a new lightsaber color (which isn’t really new outside of the movies). So to me, the idea of making Skywalker a title is like a rebranding of the Jedi, or simply a new denomination of Jedi.

With the Be With Me/Jedi voices scene, I’ve had two different ideas for it. On one hand, you could change the Jedi voices to give her advice that shows that they’ve learned their mistakes from the netherworld of the Force, and are ready to pass on that wisdom to Rey. Stuff about how her fear or anger do not define her. Not sure if you would try to rework lines from those characters throughout the movies, and maybe throw in some new original voices of unknown Jedi to get specific lines to hammer your idea home.

Another idea could be that when she says “be with me”, instead of hearing the Jedi, she could hear/see glimpses of her found family (Finn, Poe, etc.), and this motivates her to stand up and face Palpatine. It would be more implicit, but the idea would be that her attachments gave her strength, rather than making her weak.

Anyway, just some ideas but I get what you’re going for.

I wanted to chime in and say that I like both of Burbin’s ideas. It did feel funny for Grievous to be focused on the witches before he has even taken care of the Jedi in his lair. Like, he has Jedi running around in his house and he’s like, “I need to go kill Ventress and those witches!”

But the only issue with using the Dooku call scene with him sitting is his chair is that we see Fisto cut that chair in an earlier scene. Might not be a big deal, but it is worth considering if you use that scene after Fisto has escaped. Again, it’s a quick scene so it might not be a big deal.

I also like Burbin’s idea of having Talzin just speak to Savage through voiceover, rather than cutting back to her in the flesh. I also wonder if it would be nice to have some kind of establishing shot for the coda, rather than immediately cutting to inside the diner. I think there is an establishing shot of the diner around 4:30 into the original episode that you could use if you reversed the footage. Might not work but I think it would be nice way for the audience to take a breath before this little epilogue starts.

Also I can’t recall, but does every episode end with that music that transitions into the credits? The music we hear over Dooku monologuing about the threat of Savage and sensing something sinister does work, but I also can’t help but connect it with Ahsoka and the episode it is originally associated with. The music just kind of feels sentimental and melancholy. Might be a stretch, but I also think it would be interesting if you used Maul’s subtle theme from Solo for this scene, since that sinister presence Dooku is sensing is presumably Maul. Too on the nose? Maybe that could be used for another Maul episode down the road.

Also regarding the opening text. Instead of the last sentence starting with, “And Ventress now returns…”, I wonder if it would sound better to rephrase it like, “Now, Ventress returns…”

Anyway, I think the episode works really well as-is, but I can see how these changes Burbin mentioned could potentially improve the episode even more.

Eddie, I watched your Massacre episode over the weekend and I was really impressed by it. I went in with a notebook in hand, ready to give some feedback, but honestly I didn’t really notice anything that stuck out to me. The transitions worked well (I especially like cutting from Grievous’ repairs to Ventress’ ritual), and I didn’t notice any audio hiccups.

With what material you had, it is very impressive how you connected these two episodes, and thematically it makes a lot of sense. Like you’ve already said, there is a cool parallel in us seeing the homes and origins of these two minor villains, as well as making their antagonism with each other more personal.

There are some times where I think a more traditional L or J cut would make for a more natural transition than the more Star Warsy wipe, but that’s just a part of the shows style that you’re trying to stay consistent with, so it is not really a complaint.

Anyway, great work here. These are the kind of edited episodes I really love seeing. Sorry I don’t have more detailed notes for you but I genuinely didn’t notice anything that stuck out to me.

DMC said:

This is a lot of fun. The possibilities are endless! 😂

This is so perfect 😂

Horizontally stretch out every shot of Boba Fett in the OT to more closely match Temuera Morrison’s body-type.

Hal 9000 said:

3PO bolts upright, eyes red.

“This dagger is a pathway to the dark side of the Force. It’s weirder must surrender to their own inner darkness to allow it to lead the way to the Wayfinder… … Only this blade tells.”

Exactly. And we can make however many iterations as we want to see what sounds right, since it’s all digital. Then we could even apply some distortion to it, but the key thing is that it’s Anthony Daniels’ voice.

Not that we will add anything else to Ascendant, but I never imagined we would’ve gone to Fortnite AND Tiktok for edit assets…

I like the idea of R2 telling 3PO about their past adventures, rather than just restoring his memories. This was the proof-of-concept I did awhile back for this idea. We don’t have to use it for Ascendant, but this might be relevant again now that we have this software available.

https://vimeo.com/434479633

Holy crap. We could potentially make 3PO never getting his memory back work with this.

I think this would work for little bits and pieces, but I think you can see that you won’t get any emotion out of these lines. This would work best for filling in important exposition for an edit.

EDIT: This could be used for the dagger idea we had awhile back as well.

I had assumed the DJ was staying in a cell for a reason. That maybe he was safe there from potential threats, since he was basically guarded by armed security. He clearly can enter and leave whenever he wants. Or maybe that’s just where he wanted to meet Finn and Rose to prove his skill. But I could see how that might bring up some questions though.

I’m pretty sure that take was discussed back in the day in regards to Hal’s edit. I think it was played with, but the timing/speeding up of the shot didn’t feel right or something. At normal speed I think it happened a little too quickly or something. Maybe someone could try it again though.

Regarding DJ being the Master Codebreaker all along, I wonder if you could do it without the whole red plom bloom thing.

Idk, I was thinking that maybe the Abednedo guy that gets them arrested could be working for DJ. Like, when we first see him talking to the cops, we could give him an alien dub and subtitles that say, “He heard they might be coming. Find them!”

Then in the casino, he could say, “There! Put them in cell 38!”

This would make them finding him less coincidental. Maybe Max contacted him to let them know they were coming, and then DJ had his person bring them to him.

CaptainFaraday said:

Awesome document! It’s way less dialogue edits than I thought it would be.

For the last one, I had an idea, but your mileage may vary on how it would alter the scene in a practical editing sense. Have Palpatine say, “But the only family you have here…” and then he opens the roof to show all the Resistance losing the battle. He later refers to them as her family too, unless I’m misremembering it, so it would lean into the “found family” theme of the movie to make the villain derisive towards it.

I like this idea. Anything where we can retain the most dialogue as possible. While maybe that approach isn’t the necessarily the best, if we remove too much dialogue it might come off as noticeably edited.

Haha, yeah, I feel like off-screen dialogue could be a useful tool in a TLJ edit.

I think I suggested once having an offscreen Rebel officer tell Holdo that “transports have arrived undetected” when some rebels escape one of the ships that run out of fuel. The point being that it shows Holdo testing her plan. After this, she knows that they could all take transports down to a planet without the First Order detecting them.

I also suggested on Faraday’s TLJ thread that you could have some rebels chattering about a potential spy during Holdo’s briefing. Just something quick, like, “Is there a spy?” Even though one of our main characters don’t bring it up, having the idea just being uttered could help add some general mistrust in the air.

I hope you don’t mind the general edit discussion on your thread, Nev!

I think what I would do to address that would be to add a green light to the wide shots of the hologram to where we want to say the tracker is. Then add some kind of flickering/distortion effect so it looks like they’re shifting between different holograms, which should hide them zooming in and out of the ship.

The “slice” on the graphic lining up with the collision point is a nice detail I hadn’t considered before.

I think the idea I’ve leaned towards a lot in the past is to somehow imply that the hyperspace tracker is partially in hyperspace. So maybe you could add some hyperspace effect within the window of the tracker to make that connection clearer. And maybe change the sound it makes to better connect it with hyperspace.

Perhaps only the tracker is partially in hyperspace, or it radiates to the whole ship. And during the build up to the strike, you could cut back to the tracker to imply that is what Holdo is about to hit. And we can change other graphics in the film to better imply that is what Holdo is targeting.

I think the benefit to this is that it balances out the strength of this new technology with an equally powerful weakness. It can track ships through hyperspace, but at the cost of being vulnerable to light speed ramming. This would also help address why this tech may not be used in the future. Great reward, but also a great risk.

A little unrelated, but I also think it could be cool to add little bits during the opening battle to show that it takes some time for a ship to “scan” a ship and then be able to track it through hyperspace. This would help show that if Poe hadn’t have stayed and destroyed the Dreadnought, they wouldn’t have had enough time to scan the Raddus and then track it through hyperspace. This would also help give some leeway in the lore for the Resistance to still make quick strikes on First Order targets without being tracked. But maybe the risk of getting rammed, like I suggested earlier, would be enough to make the First Order reluctant to constantly use the tracking tech.

sherlockpotter said:

And…if the edit will be re-rendered anyway, might I suggest one final tweak to the finale in the spirit of the season?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bcwm4AM0cxorLSwpSC2unc0jNK1B7HTQ/view?usp=sharing

Hahaha, that totally got me. 😂

Also, if it comes to that, maybe someone who downloaded it could just upload it to their drive share that link until the normal link works again.