cyclista

Well, the silent version was another I avoided because it sounded ridiculous, but after this I should reconsider.

I don’t think that Williams’ work lacks emotion—! Just to be clear. It bursts with it, but in a fairly specific range.

There’s something that happens in Michael Mann’s films where a four second shot on an actor’s face, or even just their eyes seems to reveal an indescribable storm of pent up, jagged emotions, which really works with a character like Anakin. I’m not sure Williams has that kind of screwed up energy and pain in his palette (which was why

Are there enough themes like that in Williams’ Star Wars discography?

was meant as a non-rhetorical question).

Sorry if that sounded like a jab at you, it wasn’t. If anything I was hoping someone else in the thread might PM me.

I wonder what they’re doing over there 😕 ?

RicOlie_2 said:

TV’s Frink said:

“It’s locked, move on to the next one.”

That line always makes me laugh.

Hmm…you need to find some places–lots of places–for that line in your edits. I can’t remember if there are many times stormtroopers go up to closed doors in the OT, though.

This would be hilarious. Incredulous at that scene, I was.

With some dubbing it could also just be a theme used by other characters in other situations. there might be non-stormtrooper scenes involving door approaches etc.

DuracellEnergizer said:

This discussion is reminding me of something I read somewhere about a Star Trek writer who wrote a mention of underwear into one of his novels, only to have it vetoed by some official at Paramount because the canonicity of underwear in the ST Universe hadn’t been confirmed yet.

I think this is kind of the gist of what I was originally talking about.

I think its kind of hilarious how offended some people sound in here, accusing me of practially having some kind of poop fetish or something.

ITT: PEOPLE OUTRAGED BY POOP

To clarify yet again, I don’t want a restroom scene, I don’t want a scene of any creature or character expelling excrement in any way, lol.

I JUST THINK IT IS WEIRD THERE IS A COMPLETE ABSENCE OF WASHING OR BATHING OR TOILET TECHNOLOGY IN THE SWU

The barber shop reference is less difficult to imagine. I mean I’m sure we all just assume that in outer space they use FloBees.

Well, the other thing is that this edit specifically works because of the absence of enormous amounts of dialogue, which can only be replaced with atmospheric sounds or music. Barring access to raw tracks, re-foleying the whole movie could be an effort dwarfing the primary aim of the edit.

The following thread might make the aforementioned task way easier though, if it ever bears fruit: http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Brashs-Star-Wars-Sound-Effects-Archive-A-collection-of-the-best-Star-Wars-sounds-for-use-in-Fan-Editing/id/12364 The thread is kind of a mess though and there isn’t a way to figure out who has what or wants to provide it or when things are being released or if they ever will be >_<

John Williams’ scores are magnificent punctuations. but I’m not sure they have the emotional complexity to carry several minutes at a time largely by themselves, while the actors just stand there emoting.

Confession: I’ve never sat around listening to Star Wars soundtracks. But the theme you linked does have a lot of gravity and darkness. If there was a more conventional edit using the same visual and plot structure as this one, I think it would basically require nothing but themes like Padme’s Ruminations. Are there enough themes like that in Williams’ Star Wars discography?

I’m also a fan of the type of music used in the Neon Noir edit, so I may have come out of the gate biased. I already listen to Kavinsky/The Chromatics/Daft Punk, for instance.

Yeah RotJ begs for edits as much as the prequels. I wish I could find the Spence edit, I’ve got the YADS/Daneditor edit and while it has good ideas about structure and makes some tangible and important changes, the editing is sub par… some scenes don’t even have the right aspect ratio 😕

NeverarGreat said:

I believe that this is pertinent to the discussion: http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2015/12/28/star-wars-storytelling-and-fixing-it-in-post

That article gives about my same critique, but with more substantiation. Thanks for the link. Now if only the author would point out more than merely Maz and Rey’s scene as a concrete example—!

DominicCobb said:

If anything that article goes to show how good the editing doctoring is.

fixed

But there is a lot of interesting observation here too. That article is definitely worth a read for perspective.

You know, I also enjoy reading commentaries like that about the difficulty of fixing things post production simply because of the utter finesse so many faneditors show - it can be fixed, guys.

I think Abrams probably just ran out of time, something faneditors often have [relatively] limitless amount of. As is often the case in creating something, being able to do something is one thing, being able to do it on time is another.

Faneditors often work alone and substitute enormous amounts of time for what would otherwise require an enormous budget. But there are margins between these extremes with gradients, and even an infinite budget, as we can see, might not magically sculpt what can only be achieved through an expense of time.

Not all currencies are accepted everywhere in the universe 😉

All this is fairly consistent with slave history though.

In America and other countries during and after slavery, there were places that agreed slaves or former slaves were people, and places that did not.

In Gladiator, Russell Crowe went from a high ranking military figure to an entertainment animal; droid bounty hunters might have gone in the opposite direction and “earned” their freedom. I always find it inconceivable how people kept track of who was a slave and who wasn’t back when just about anyone could end up in slavery - my point being that transitions sometimes happened and appearances might not be the best predictors of free or enslaved individuals in such a system.

Yeah R2 does scream a lot. But in the supposedly canon Clone Wars animated series, he gets taken apart while still conscious and doesn’t seem in discomfort.

Yeah the title styles I wasn’t sure about. I was really into the colors, but specifically the font, idk, the edit succeeded enough on it’s own that the font felt maybe/sort of like a mere gimmick. But I’m not sure what other font would fit.

I agree this arrangement of scenes would likely work as a more standard fanedit, using the normal music and titles, but the tone would change drastically and I don’t know if it would keep the gravity it has as it currently is. Also maybe I’m still in the dazzled stage and can’t be objective. I’ve watched it twice already.

darklordoftech said:

I definitely understand what you’re trying to say. In particular, I felt like the planets weren’t shown in a way that suspends your disbelief and makes you care about them.

You forgot to use the #sarcasm hashtag.

John Doom said:

I just noticed something: in TFA C3PO’s left arm is red, while the same one is rusty in AOTC. Was it a PT reference for the fans?

Bingowings said:

Maybe Rylo Ken stole Threepio’s old arm for his Vader shrine and was caught red handed.

In a “material not included in the film” YouTube video, I saw a panel from a TFA comic book that had Chewbacca tearing off 3P0’s arm, reason unspecified. Could be unrelated, but I find it likely that it is related to some deleted scene or unfilmed part of the script or something.

^ I was thinking the same thing

ZkinandBonez said:

Treating droids like people nice seems to be SW’s go-to method to immediately establish that someone is a ‘good-guy’.

I’ve noticed this before too. Seems like yet another undocumented but recycled device.

The unspoken presence of widespread slavery in the SWU always nagged at me (obviously hence this thread). I guess this is yet another detail of the SWU being analogous to our own ancient past, when heroes never used restrooms and some people were considered disposable objects.

#sarcasm

DavidMerrick said:

According to the Force Awakens visual dictionary, droids working for the Resistance are freed of any servitude and treated as equals.

I liked that a lot.

+1! I’d put that in my “what was good about TFA” thread if it was actually in the movie.

Yeah that often is the explanation for my edits here 😉

It almost seems as if it is decided on a case-by-case basis. I’d guess that almost the entire audience regards 3P0 and R2 (and now BB8) as sentient/people. But the humanoids in the films often display little or no concern if droids are maimed or destroyed in the series.

Are droids in the SWU beings, or mindless objects? This doesn’t seem to be addressed anywhere.

I just got the full edit from YouTube actually.

Just hunted down this thread in the hopes that the editors are still monitoring it. I avoided this edit for a long time because it seemed ridiculous, but even though some of the transitions were not natural or subtle enough to be up to pro standards, I was still blown away even five minutes into it.

Trufax, I’m a big Michael Mann fan, so a lot of what you were doing made sense to me immediately, but what is amazing is that it worked, and with Anakin/Hayden especially. Turns out when you cut out most of his dialogue and concentrate on mood through lighting and his physical actions, he actually works as a character that you become drawn into and curious about; he actually has mystery. Along with this, the Hayden poster was my favorite, I thought it represented the tone of your edit the best.

It was a stroke of brilliance to use epII for the base here. When watching epII for the first time, those bar scenes felt gratuitously out of place for a Star Wars film. But they work so damn well in a Michael Mann-style treatment.

I think there were quite a few places where you needed to find some way to linger on a character’s silent face/posture for a bit longer to sustain the effect, but maybe the original material wasn’t there.

I couldn’t have imagined this would work at all, but it does. That fact that it feels somehow like it can fit within the context of the SWU is amazing. The soundtrack is great too.

I hope you refine this just a little more over time. Until then, this is strange and wonderful enough.

Just posting so I can get updates from this thread. This archive sounds extremely useful.

Bingowings said:

Interestingly in Daoism the two halves of the spirit/soul are called Hun and Po which sounds a bit like Han and Poe… okay so it wasn’t that interesting :-p

No, that was interesting.

Except Han and Poe aren’t opposites or two halves of anything, unless young and old, but that’s a stretch.

SilverWook said:

I was thinking weird along the lines of Maz and Chewie making out though. 😉

THAT WOULD BE GREAT

I wanted to say something about the composition of the movie again. I don’t want to read to see if it has already been mentioned, so bear with me, all you soldiers who’ve stuck with the thread all this time.

I keep coming back to the impression that with a very few (if significant) exceptions, TFA was a great story with great characters and great settings-

-but-

-the editing was wrong all over. I don’t mean the fades and transitions, as in they were awkward or jumpy, but the assembly of all the scenes as a whole. It felt like the team had created a whole lot of great individual components/parts, but then put them together in a way wherein the whole wasn’t balanced right. I can’t break it down scene by scene and say where each should rightly have gone to balance out better, I just have a really strong impression of this. The film felt kind of lumpy. Like, almost right, but then you look closer and the building has a door on the 5th floor exiting into open air with no balcony. Or you realize that person you’ve been talking to for ten minutes has no left ear.

Dialogue, costumes, characters, scenery, architecture, everything was accurate and great - in both form and spirit - just put together without a sense of cohesion. An alternative (and more generous) criticism might be to say that it was edited with a sense of composition that was abstract and unconventional, but even that wouldn’t serve, the scene ordering/structure just deviates from the wavelength of the OT. I think this is the real and only significant flaw in this entry in the series.

Does this assessment make sense for anyone else out there? I’m really struggling to articulate something that is elusive and subtle to me.

The EU is so diverse that you’re asking people to make a huge array of choices. I kind of hate most of the EU ideas, like Giant Evil Insects and absolutely everything about and related to Starkiller, but then I like Mara Jade, and would love to see Shannon McRandle in a cameo in one of the next films.

If forced to make a choice, I’d say ST, but really the whole mass of threads comprising the EU are too numerous and disparate to treat as an entire half of a binary question, especially when canon has fluctuated a lot over the last decade.

Like Blair Witch Project? Maybe like the wampa attack scene…

Hal 9000 said:

From an out-of-universe point of view, the clear intention of the scene is to lead into Luke revealing their relationship. Anything other than their mutual birth mother is incoherent. It’s a fantasy film, not found footage.

I agree that was the intent, and within the style of these films (which is extraordinarily simplistic) it probably shouldn’t be taken any other way. But as I’ve complained before, RotJ was the first of the films to degenerate rather than continue or enhance, and it needn’t be held to such a simplistic standard for fanedits or future references.

I get the found footage gist. But it could be sleight of hand, rather than bald lead-up. A bait-and switch of “Hey, let’s discuss our parents” and “well, that’s a nice story but, um, by the way, actually you’re adopted and we’re siblings.”

Sorry for all the edits.

I honestly can’t understand the hangups about this issue personally. Why wouldn’t Leia think of her foster mother as her mother? Why wouldn’t the mother she originally spoke of be that foster mother? Why do we even assume she knew her foster mother was not her “real mother”?

Not defending the PT (which I hate), it just seems weird to me that everyone assumes she speaks consciously of her birth mother in her original line.

Lucas’ explanation doesn’t even have to come into play; Leia’s birth mother need never have been in discussion at all.

It seems weird that everyone thinks Luke spoke some kind of magic words when he said “real”, like that would cause Leia to know her foster/adopted parents weren’t her “real” ones. Is it mentioned anywhere that Leia knows before Luke tells her that the people who raised her weren’t her birth parents?

A lot of adopted children never know they are adopted; in Leia’s case, there would be good reason to hide it from her for most of her life, and her father may have gotten blown up before he was able to tell her.

kfitz said:

Do you by any chance have the Anti-Cheese Edit? Episodes II and III have been taken down, and it would be great if someone could upload them.

Thought they were on youtube, checked, not.

oh fuck I did this to myself

someone please save me

I think it could be possible that these elements are deliberately blacklisted too, as a device for subconsciously creating a mythic atmosphere. Legends don’t talk about restrooms or toilets on Mount Olympus, for instance.

If this hypothesis is true, that device would only work for one or two films; at most a trilogy, because in the course of detailed full-universe exposure over time, it becomes extremely conspicuous. Children’s cartoons might be able to get away with it, like there probably were no bathrooms in Voltron either, but adult cinema, scifi or no, is a different matter.

DuracellEnergizer said:

Canon is in the eye of the beholder. 😛

Sorry, I forgot where I was. Thanks for checking me 😉

CrazyH said:

B) Seriously, most films ignore this. It would be a pointless use of screen time.

Most films have a bathroom in evidence somewhere in the background, or feature someone leaving or entering one, or mentioning it, or something. Good god, I’m not suggesting a Star Wars bathroom scene, lol PLEASE NO. I’m just saying there is an outrageously conspicuous absence in over SEVEN MOVIES (over meaning if you count the animated material) of any kind of presence of or reference to, or even the slightest evidence, even in passing, of a restroom, or for that matter a bathing facility.

I know I said that I noticed it in the first movie, but I think the “no restrooms” tone was clear enough that I could see it was a genuine loophole, and six subsequent films bore out that intuition.

I completely forgot about that

“WHAAT??”

lol

and yet… NOT CANON