regularjoe

Short of refilming and redubbing parts of the movie this is the weakest link of the OT.

Stick with what you have and try to work with that to improve it.

You're able to read a lot of posts here, some common things that people do is move Luke on Dagobah to the beginning of the movie and cut a lot of the cutesy dialogue throughout the movie.

In my cut I moved Luke at Dagobah to the beginning of the show.

I also cut Ben entirely.  He doesn't really do anything for the movie and just barfs up a lot of things said in the last two movies - aside from talking about Leia.

NOW Luke doesn't know that Leia is his sister.

Later in the movie I had to trim some of the dialogue when Luke and Leia say goodbye.  No loss, it's a bad scene that goes on too long and really has a lot to lose.  

Now the kicker comes in during the final lightsaber duel.  Vader uses the force and when probing Luke's feelings about his friends pieces together that Leia is Luke's sister. NOW we have the other and it also validates Luke losing his s*** during the final saber battle, it is literally a revelation to everyone in the Emperor's throne room, Vader included.  It also makes a nice call back for folks who like that sort of thing as it was Vader who told Luke in the last movie that he was his dad, now it's Vader telling Luke he has a sister, too.

Just some ideas for you to work with there, cruise through these boards and you will find more.

boon23 said:

Now I've got it. The rarest video in my collection is a mini fanedit I made: I cut out the dream sequence from th emovie Grand Canyon. Nothing else. But it improves the movie a lot for me. I think no one else has this.

 But but but but....my mind boggles.

I do a lot of fanedit stuff myself, too, some along these lines.  Mostly I  put deleted scenes back in movies and tweak tv shows.  I've done all of The Walking Dead to fix various issues and am working on a LOST with no flashbacks and in chronological order, almost done with season 3.

The closest that I did to this was adding the beginning of Terrance Malnick's Tree of Life to Prometheus.  I had to cut all the voice overs so basically we now get the creation of the universe and planets, then the engineers arrive, then you get dinosaurs and a comet comes and wipes them out.  Cut to the TED talk by Wayland about all the things that technology will do for people if you join him on the ride...

The Italian three DVD release of Wim Wenders "Until The End of The World."

People understandably are put off by the "reader's digest" cut that was released in the USA.  4.5 hours of Wenders goodness.  I believe it has content not on the later German release (deleted scenes come to mind).

I like what you're doing a lot.

My wife doesn't follow this sort of thing much.  I watched your "opening credits" and she said, sounds like someone turned it into a 1980's TV show.

I watched the cantina draft scene and liked what I watched.  The volume of the music is too loud and after a while I turned it off due to that.  The intention of the clip was great but the music overpowered it so much that it undermined what you're trying to do.  You're off to a great start and I think that sort of thing will be easily conquered by you.  

I'm looking forward to where this goes and wish you the best in your efforts on it.

Harmy said:

Why does the thread need any action, if there's nothing new to discuss concerning its topic?

 I keep hoping for a Special Edition of this thread with all off topic posts removed.

deleted post

I agree.  I used to wish that someone would make this or that edit of a film and never see it so I rolled up my sleeves and figured out how to do it.  If you want something done your way badly enough then make it happen - yourself.

The yads/danedits are really good, I, well, I tweaked them.  When you author something sometimes when you look at your own work you know in your mind how you want it to be and you see the finished product it's the finished product and your vision...it's sometimes hard to spot the forest for the trees.  When I watched these the progression to the Vader reveal was pretty obvious to me and I even commented on it on the thread for it.  I felt based on the editors reaction that they weren't going to act on my suggestion so I went ahead and fixed it myself.  I can't really recommend my own edit as I haven't put it out there.  

Thanks for the compliment, Ronster. 

What works really well with the scene is that the news is just freshly dumped on Luke and then Vader says, if you won't turn to the dark side then perhaps she will and then Luke.  Loses.  His.  S***.  And it absolutely makes sense, much moreso than in the original version where Luke already knew the brother - sister thing so it wasn't a shock.

I tweaked the yads edit of RotJ.  There were three versions of it and I used the Boba Fett-less one for my main but included the sister act.  I set it up so that Yoda dies saying that there is another Skywalker but Luke doesn't know the identity until the end duel on Death Star II.  Vader senses Leia being shot via the Force and does the math about everyone's relationship and it is a revelation to everyone in the room.

Here's a suggestion, for RotJ-R and PT-R how about having two official threads, one for updates and one for suggestions.

I almost never use ignore features on forums like this.  

Actually, I've never used the ignore feature on forums like this.  I used it for the first time in the past month for a couple of people who are constantly harping and the majority of the time their input.....jeez, just learn how to do it and make your own fanedit.  

It's really tedious having to wade through pages of bickering posts to try to find some news and it would be one thing if these posts actually advanced the project but about 90% of the time they don't.

I'm really glad to hear that the next version has the repaired version of the scene.  One is able argue either way for the flow of the structure of the scene based on how it is played out, for me the issue is continuity.  As a twelve year old kid I was noticing that C3PO's behavior was not consistent throughout the scene and it has always been a speed bump watching the scene.

When I first laid hands on Ady's cut the first thing that I looked for was the scene in the Death Star where Darth Vader is talking and then stops talking but then shakes his fist for emphasis.  It amazes me that with all of the times that the movies have been tweaked that GL has never fixed that, it can't be THAT much work.  This scene was the continuity flub that bugged me the most.

I would think if you take off Boba Fett's mask he's wearing a Guy Fawkes mask.  His communications browser goes through a TOR network and all that stuff to retcon it a bit.

timdiggerm said:

We should probably start a "Spot the Errors: ROTJ!" thread

 Well, there's two big errors:

1 - the first half of the movie

2- the second half of the movie.

I'd like to think after watching the three Danedits that the movie is salvageable.

I recently made my own cut which eliminates every on-camera shot of General Grevious.  He is a McGuffin whose sole purpose is to isolate Skywalker to make him more vulnerable to Palpatine's manipulations.  He is now only referred to and never seen.

I used the ADM Extended Edition as my base as I wanted the inclusion of the birth of the rebellion scenes. I also cut the silly Matrix style part of the lightsaber duel between Anakin and Obi-Wan.  I'll probably make more trims after I've watched it a few times, GG just had to go.....loathe him more than Jar Jar Binks.

I don't know about Ady but I have learned that the OCD is a cruel mistress and she never takes off time.

^ this is done in the dan edit of RotJ and it works.

It was six hours long because a lot of things weren't explained clearly enough.

There is nothing in E1 that is needed, the entire film is expendable.

E3 in my opinion would benefit greatly from the entire elimination of all on-screen scenes of General Greivous.

There needs to be a moratorium on the Wilhelm scream (not kidding).

That is one horse that has been soundly beaten to death.

Ryan McAvoy said:

Is it just me or has Adywan sculpted a c*ck and B*lls into the lower left rock face?

Probably just me...

Ah s*** jeez now we're going to get eight pages about how in the original edition the left nut was bigger but you could only see 40% of it because of the bad matte painting but that was ok because it is after all a defect of GOUT.  It was however a blue ball and should have been grey and the explosion aka money shot was too big because it was really supposed to be used for the death star blowing up and not a TIE fighter.

I don't know if you ever click on the signatures on some of the posts in this forum.  I clicked on one and it took me to a Facebook page for someone who works at ILM (and has for some time).  If you're worried about someone at ILM knowing about fanedits, that ship has long sailed.

The book makes it pretty clear that Lucas wanted what I will call a hood ornament of a director, specifically one who knew his place.  They state in one paragraph that I read last night that he was actively trying to replicate a television model of production as opposed to a film industry model as far as the relationship between the producer and the director (I was ignorant that there were even differences).

Just wanted to bump this thread back up a bit.

I am reading  the new Rinzler book and quite honestly I can't stop thinking about this edit while reading the book.  So much of what they got wrong, well, we all got to see it.  Your fanedit has gone a long way to restoring this movie to something that actually fits in the OT and I actually enjoy watching this movie now.

It is interesting to read how a lot of people at the preproduction phase are pretty much WTF about the ewoks.  Love it that McQuarrie basically said, I'm not abeting this by making art of it and left the work to others.

I am a huge David Lynch fan and I am actually happy that he didn't direct this.  Lucas had a way that he wanted to go with this and hell or high water that was going to happen - cute and Ewoks.  I keep reading the book and it blows me away that as smart as he is that he can't reconcile the serious nature of a movie where a man essentially is told the solution to the universe's problems is to murder his father and his father's boss and the rest of what he did.  Here, let's have a belching toad thinger.  It's not yin and yang, it's two north poles pushing against each other.

I was delighted to read that they considered Peter Weir as I am a huge fan of his film Fearless.  Also am glad that he didn't work on this as his movies tend to be about the interior landscapes of his protagonists and while that would have served the Luke story exceptionally well again the clash with the Ewoks would have eviscerated anything that Mr. Weir's talent brought to the production to elevate it to the quality of say TESB.

Thanks again for your edit. If you ever tinker with it more I'd really like links.  There is only one thing that I would change with your last iteration but it's something that I know you feel strongly about not including as much as possible.

We don't know in the scope of the six movies that it took twenty years to make the "first" Death Star.

It's entirely possible that there were earlier versions that didn't work, maybe they fired up the superlaser and it tanked the whole thing.   Back to the drawing board as they say.  Perhaps they made one that was sabotaged ("there'll be no one to stop us this time......").

What we do know is that there is 20 years between trilogies and that one is seen under construction at the end of #3.  That doesn't mean that the one that you see at the end of #3 is the same one in #4.