Mielr said:
I have that version too, done by OCP, I believe.
Yep... the project was my brainchild/source material and OCP's editing work combined. I was very pleased with how it turned out, although I wish I'd been able to turn up a better cam source. The only one I've ever been able to find had been projected full-screen on a wide movie screen, resulting in the top and bottom of the image being cut off in a pseudo-letterbox fashion. But OCP did a great job of melding the sources together and making it look as seamless as he could.
He did a pretty good job combining the longer/poorer quality cam version with the shorter/higher quality web version. My only beef is that for some reason, some of the inferior sound from the cam version (with crowd noise that drowns out the dialog) carries over onto the superior web video portions.
Yes, and we had good reasons for that. Since the condensed clip posted on sw.com had an altered soundtrack, we preferred having the original, though inferior sound quality soundtrack over the superior quality altered version. Call us purists if you will. ;-)
Some other notable things we did with the film:
- To try and balance out the poor soundtrack quality, OCP worked hard to incorporate Supertramp's "Long Way Home" song from a quality audio source into the soundtrack exactly where it was included originally.
- There are sections of the film where flashback sequences from ESB are shown. In the original film, they are temporarily edited in as widescreen footage "squashed" to fit a 4:3 picture. We made the decision to edit in that same footage in letterboxed form from a superior video source.
- There were at least a couple of higher-quality clips from the film available (Wicket on the Death Star, Warwick Davis saying goodbye to Luke, Leia, etc.), but as skyjedi mentioned already they were discovered to be outtakes or alternate shots and so were not incorporated into the film. Instead, they were used for the menu screen montage, which seemed to be a perfect place for them!
- OCP included opening and end credits in the film, where there were none originally. For the opening credits and title, it worked out since we were missing part of the image anyway there due to the source material. And the end credits were just an addition that didn't require altering the film.
For myself, I'm just extremely happy to be able to sit down and watch the entire film from beginning to end. I saw Return Of The Ewok for the first time at Celebration I in 1999, and have obsessed over it ever since.
--SKot
