sade1212

-snipped-

I’ll remake this post when there’s something to see.

I certainly agree with prioritising pacing and presentation over chronology and canon. This is a fanedit, after all - it’s supposed to be something a bit different and shouldn’t be afraid to be as bold as necessary. The original, official format of the show will still exist for everyone who either doesn’t care for (or more likely has just never heard of) this project.

I like your ideas so far - I’ve also been lurking. I’m not entirely sold on the idea of intercutting the Domino Squad arc with Christophsis (though I admit I’ve not seen any of Smudger’s edits), since all the other edits you’ve described so far are focused more on a single arc/battle/event. Isn’t there the implication of a significant time jump between Clone Cadets, Rookies and ARC Troopers?

Hmm, perhaps you’d be interested in D+77, D+80 and OTD83 (or alternatively the “Destiny Edition” of ROTJ). These combine footage from the newer 4K masters of the special editions, which look much more natural and less oversharpened than the old blurays, with scans of theatrical film prints of the original trilogy. They’re not completely unspecial, but the things they do keep from the SEs are the more objective improvements like the better compositing, which makes the Endor speeder bike chase look a lot better.

Despecialised is quite outdated at the moment. There’s been a few big breakthroughs in recent years (4K film scans of the OOT, and the new Special Edition masters) and Harmy is currently working on a version of Despecialised which will take advantage of these.

Rodney-2187 said:
Others left too, most notably Count Dooku.

While this is true, he leaves it over a decade before Order 66, and then goes on to become a Sith, whereas Ahsoka leaves within a year of the end and for more “correct” reasons. The audience is on Ahsoka’s side but not Dooku’s.

Rodney-2187 said:
I don’t remember her fighting Sidious.

In Rebels. There’s no clash of sabers but she holds him out of the WBW for a few moments.

Rodney-2187 said:
Lots of people did.

Yes, but not many Jedi did (despite what Mace Windu may insist, Ahsoka doesn’t quite count as an ordinary civilian). We’re led to believe in the OT that Luke is literally the Last Jedi - the fact that Ahsoka has rejected the actual Jedi Order by that point so she doesn’t count is a very smart bit of weaving between the lines of the pre-existing text. “Luke, when gone I am, last of the Jedi will you be. Your… father’s apprentice is still alive, but count not, does she, because white her lightsabers are, so bother to mention her ever, I will not.”

“No… there is another.”
“Oh, Ahsoka? Yeah I suppose I probably could make a ghostly appearance to her and try to get her back on side -”
"No, Obi-Wan! A foolish idea, that is. I mean Leia - who, convincing Luke to let die, we were, just a moment ago… "

Obviously I slightly exaggerated Ahsoka’s unlikely list of accomplishments for my previous post, because it was essentially just a set-up for the punchline that I love seeing her character despite knowing she’s overused. NFB makes some great points on how Ahsoka could be made more interesting in the post-OT era - I can only imagine the YouTube meltdown about how dIsNeY rUiNeD aHsOkA if they did place her at odds with Luke Skywalker, though.

Anakin Starkiller said:
You had me until Luke’s wig. It’s a much smaller detail than Pasaana and given the choice between the two I wouldn’t pick Luke.

I just really hate that goofy wig. Every night I dream of grandmaster JonH returning to save us from it.

Holding out for a Hero unironically improves that whole sequence. Almost helps me forget Ben Solo’s last words were “ow”.

it still says Ashoka Tano

I hope it wouldn’t make such an egregious spelling error! 😉 Every time I see Ashoka I read it in Sean Connery’s voice (RIP).

My hot take is that Ahsoka is a ridiculous Mary Sue author-insert shoehorned-in overpowered OC - it’s absurd that Anakin Skywalker would have a padawan he never mentioned, who was the only Jedi with sufficient foresight to leave the Order (and in doing so became a key influence on Anakin’s fall), was a key founding member of the Rebel Alliance, has held her own against Grievous, Maul, Vader and Sidious, survived the entire Original Trilogy, and has even had her life saved by time travel. I would however, love to see her in everything: I want to see her meet Luke Skywalker and help set up the New Jedi Order, I want an elderly Ahsoka to inspire and pass knowledge down to Rey, and I want her to talk to have an emotional conversation with Anakin’s force ghost. She’s great.

Re: current thread topics - I agree that turning Pasaana into Jedha is fairly pointless. Making Pasaana a non-desert planet would be neat, but that kind of large scale VFX is really ambitious and the time would probably be better spent on something like Luke’s wig. Making Lor San Tekka’s lines be less like meaningless fourth-wall breaking waffle would be great (“This will begin to make things right!” feels arrogant in a post-TROS world… same vibe as “A Jedi’s weapon deserves more respect.”). The Sequel Trilogy does not do big-picture “worldbuilding” well, so any edit which narrows the focus to just the main plot and characters and leaves the actual state of the galaxy as vague as possible (e.g. removing any mentions of exactly how powerful the First Order is) is a winner in my opinion.

Anyway, the main reason I’m in this thread is to ask if anyone has a functioning link to a version of the TROS ending scene without music? I think HAL posted one a few months ago but the drive link is dead. Cheers.

I agree - working backwards from the finale, Ahsoka has to be the main character; Maul the key villain, and Mandalore the key location. Arcs advancing the plot of those three are the “main story” of TCW, I suppose. Prior to the revival, it wasn’t as clear - maybe Anakin or Obi-Wan could’ve been argued to be the main protagonists, with Ahsoka being a side-character, but I don’t think Season 7 leaves much doubt. You wind up getting a lot of Obi-Wan content in Maul’s story, and you get a lot of Anakin’s development in Ahsoka-centric episodes, so that makes things a bit more convenient.

Unfortunately Maul isn’t even introduced until Season 4 so this doesn’t help give a great deal of structure to those first few seasons. Perhaps a focus on the clones early on would help. Domino Squad, Rex, and the Order 66 chip conspiracy all play a significant part in the finale, so it’s necessary to include all of that as some sort of show-long side plot. Personally I like to watch Clone Cadets, Rookies and ARC Troopers back to back, since I forget which Clone is which otherwise…

I really like the idea to include the recent Star Wars TV intro from the Mandalorian - would be nice if it included TCW characters, but I guess R2 and Threepio count. Have you considered doing a sort of cold-open? I feel like the Mandalorian has used them very effectively - every time the music swells and the logo and episode name appear, it’s hype. Seems like a good way to give a little signal to the viewer to pay attention (and/or a trick to cut bits of the episode). Of course, you’d have to put the introductory text before the cold-open, but Solo gets away with doing that.

This certainly sounds novel and the Celebration video is nicely done. I’d like to see the others - Vimeo, Streamable, Dailymotion work; or you could share the files through Mega or, if they’re small, something like Catbox.

This sounds like a great idea. I recently watched ATLA for the first time, which has very little filler and good pacing, and it made me wonder if there was a way to rewatch TCW with a focus on quality over quantity. In the past I’ve attempted to stick together a TCW movie with Anakin as the POV/focus and lots of timeskips, but because of the issues you’ve laid out re: movie edits, it had awful pacing and was an inferior experience to just watching the episodes I picked in order.

I feel like the biggest problem with TCW’s pacing is the last two seasons. This is somewhat unsurprising, given the show was cancelled for six years and then briefly uncancelled. There’s no real way to deal with a key part of Maul’s storyline being in a comic, though.

How do you intend to deal with the newsreels within arcs? IIRC, TCW often has later episodes of an arc take a different perspective, given context by the newsreel, or has something happen in between episodes of an arc. I’ve never seen Smudger or NumeralJoker’s edits so I apologise if this is basically a solved problem already.

There’s a similar discussion in this thread.

Personally, it doesn’t bother me, since Star Wars is the name of the franchise now and saying “the original Star Wars film” every time is just clunky. But I did grow up with there being six Star Wars movies already… The name ANH predates the Special Editions considerably so I don’t see a reason to associate it specifically with the SE.

I also call the 60s series “Star Trek” “Star Trek: The Original Series” for similar reasons.

jedi_bendu said:

I honestly really admire how new canon content like Rogue One and The Mandalorian is trying to bridge the massive divide between the originals and the prequel era. Both are totally “old-school Star Wars”, aesthetically and otherwise, but there are things that connect to other parts of the timeline and small things for prequel fans too.

I’m still so happy we saw weathered, realistic CGI pit droids existing on Tatooine, and it was a particular pleasure to see super battle droids existing in a realistic environment in Season 1. Other than the awful dialogue, my least favourite thing about the prequels is how clinical and plastic everything feels, so having Prequel-era designs displayed with 2020 CGI in real grungy sets is great.

Anchorhead said:
People seem to go back and forth on how (or if) Fett is alive and will be in the series. I’m not up on most EU or any Lucas SE whatever-the-fucks. Is there any real reason to assume he lived beyond ROTJ?

Yeah, the cameo character at the end of the episode was played by Temuera Morrison, who played Jango Fett in Episode 2. In case you’ve cleansed the prequels from your mind: Boba Fett is a clone of Jango Fett, and was raised as Jango’s son for about 10 years, until Mace Windu beheaded Jango in Episode 2 (then in The Clone Wars animated series, we see young Boba attempt to blow up Mace, and generally come into his own as a young bounty hunter.). So there’s a 99% chance that the guy who a) looks just like Jango Fett, b) showed up on the tail of the guy currently in possession of Boba’s armour, and c) is on the planet where we last saw Boba Fett, is Boba Fett. There’s a slim chance it could be one of the million other Jango Fett clones, like Cody or Rex, though.

MMP said:

I can’t understand why so many of you have a problem with Rey being a Palpatine. For me, it’s the only possible explanation why she is so powerful. I like the character of Rey, but in Part 7 & 8 it always bothered me, that she was too strong and powerful. But when it became known that she’s a Palpatine, everything made sense to me.

But why is Palpatine so powerful? If it’s genetic, there’s no reason Rey couldn’t have been born with the same random innate power as young Sheev. If it’s from years of intense Sith training, then Rey wouldn’t have inherited it.

Cinefy said:
new Holiday Special

At last, the true Episode IX.

Just got back from seeing the brand-new Star Wars sequel in the theatres - you know, The Empire Strikes Back? It was fine and all, but I really didn’t understand how Luke got his lightsaber out of the snow. I don’t remember Ben ever saying anything about telekinesis being a force power, so I was very confused. And then Darth Vader used it later in the film to throw stuff at Luke! Why didn’t he throw stuff at Ben when they were fighting in Star Wars? Plot hole! They should’ve gotten me to write the sequel.

On a more relevant note: editing Palps’ lightning to be red when he’s zapping the fleet would require a lot of work, since there’s a few shots of it lingering on the ships, and Exegol’s so blue that you’d have a hard time trying to limit a hue adjustment to just the lightning without doing a bunch of manual masking/rotoing. I chose the shots with Rey for my test since they’re composed such that all the lightning is on one side of the screen and bunched together, making it more straightforward to work with. I am a total amateur though; perhaps some VFX God like Jonh could pull it off.

Palps’ costume change is pretty weird; the rest of his appearance makes sense as him being juiced up on dyad energy, but it’s not addressed why or how the fabric of his robe turns red as a consequence of that. To some extent, this further justifies not needing to explain the red lightning. TROS runs very heavily on ‘rule of cool’ and I think leaning into that with Jonh’s force ghosts, red lightning, fanservice rescores etc. works better than trying to edit around it. You could rather straightforwardly black out the red bits, but it’s not that big of a deal. The opposite - adding red to his earlier costume - would be much more work.

Edit: It has come to my attention that the official Rise of Skywalker teaser poster features red lightning, meaning it is actually more canon than the movie itself, since the poster came out first. /s

I like the red lightning idea just because it breaks up the MAXIMUM BLUE aesthetic of the movie. Here’s a short mockup clip using the very laziest AE hue changing shapes. Obviously that’s just a quick edit; not using any of the luts or Jonh’s edits, but you can see what it might look like if someone did decide to edit in MAXIMUM RED lightning.

I echo the general sentiment that the actual events in the movie are compelling, but the execution, especially the dialogue, doesn’t do justice to the dramatic tragedy the movie is supposed to be depicting. My hot take is that TCW actually makes ROTS worse though.

TCW shows us a far more compelling characterisation of Anakin, fleshes out his grievances with the Jedi, makes him sympathetic and likeable - and even in the final episodes, it goes out of its way to build tension around Anakin’s fall via Ahsoka’s disbelief and Maul’s fear. Then you watch ROTS and enjoy lines like “I would certainly like to!” and “I will discover the truth of all this… 😃” as a lobotomised Anakin fails to have any strong emotional response whatsoever to finding out one of his father figures orchestrated the war he’s been fighting - and has lost many friends in - for essentially his entire adult life. Anakin and Obi-Wan’s legendary TCW bromance concludes with… Obi-Wan shouting about democracy and a robotic Anakin forgetting exactly why he sided with Palpatine in the first place.

By making the audience more engaged in Anakin’s story, TCW makes ROTS all the more disappointing and frustrating as a botched execution of the most pivotal moment in the franchise’s story. I almost feel as if the overall Star Wars saga would be stronger if ROTS was left implied, and you just skip from the Siege of Mandalore to ANH.

It’d be pretty easy to use Nvidia Slowmo or some other AI to extend the duration of that shot, but I suppose you’d have to cut the previous shot(s) a little shorter to maintain music sync.

jonh said:

V2
https://drive.google.com/file/d/18a2L-J2DoSwCi7gJBnv3kTJe0YgQJHPy/view?usp=sharing

That looks fantastic. If I were to nitpick endlessly, I’d suggest the tracking is not quite perfect - he jitters up and down relative to Luke and Leia very slightly - but I know that’s a pain to fix. Also, in a perfect world it’d be nice to slightly reframe the shot, since Ben is all the way on the left, though I wouldn’t even know where to start with making an extended background and tracking it in. But the robe change really covers up where you’ve gotten it from and it fits him well, and the face/hair looks right to me. You’re really doing a lot of great work for this movie (even if redditors don’t credit you for it!).

narth said:
To my understanding, it comes down to resources and rendering times. He does alot of modification to those films, and they take forever to render even just at 720p. 2160p would be just insane.

He discusses a few things in this post from 2012. Now that 4K77/83 exist, the 2006 bonus discs are no longer an issue, and I imagine whatever PC Ady has nowadays is perfectly capable of 1080p compositing. I guess at this point it’s mostly to keep things consistent with ESB:R, especially since AFAIK Ady’s still using the 2011 Bluray sources rather than the recent 4K releases, which are lower detail and so don’t take as much of a hit by being downscaled. Anyway, none of this is relevant to the thread, apologies.

It’s still strange to me that he’s redoing the entire thing to bump it up from 576p to 720p in an era when 2160p sources are available.