sonofabinadi

Would love to get a link when you get a chance!

This looks really interesting! I’d love a link when you get a chance!

Would love a link as well when you get the chance!

EddieDean said:
Just a little more work to go to finalise the wrap-up and the very opening, then I can bookend this and get it out the door…

Really excited to see how these refinements improve the episode!

EddieDean said:

The crawl will do some heavy lifting to give context to the simpler start to the episode, establishing that:

• Christophsis produces ray shields (explaining its strategic importance, and since we see them use ray shields later, that moment is now a bit more punchy since it shows their plans worked).
• The newly-knighted Anakin and Obi-Wan are stranded on the planet, barely holding off the Separatists with only a tiny clone force and some heavy cannons defending their base.
• The Separatist blockade has forced the Republic support fleet to retreat to a nearby staging area, which combined with a comms blackout (that the fleet is unaware of) is leading to fears that the Separatists will land a full army and take the planet.
• Anakin and Obi-Wan should be taking preventative steps against invasion, until they detect Assaj Ventress’ signal at the Sep HQ on the dark side of the planet, so they pursue her as a priority mission.

Haven’t been on the forums in a bit due to college starting again, but this looks great! The inclusion of ray shields in the crawl is a smart idea and will focus the episode even further. I’m also in favor of the other changes/refinements to Christophsis. Appreciate all your hard work!

Burbin said:

EddieDean said:

• I don’t know how to present that finale. You could go RotS then SoM to best preserve SoM’s intensity. That’s the easy path. If you wanted to intercut them it’d become a hassle. There’re a lot of edits which combine the two into one super movie, of which I’ve only watched Delpheas’, but I think my preferred option would be to take a chronological intercutting of both and then turn them into ~5 individual episodes. Interested in ideas.

Personally I think the series finale is stronger on its own,

Definitely agree with this ^

This order looks great to me. I agree that Politics of War, though less action-heavy than the Rako Hardeen arc, serves as a better foundation to build the rest of the season on. The thought you continue to put into this project still impresses me, great job!

EddieDean said:

Here’s a preview of TCW:R’s new franchise logos

Looks great! I think the subtle changes you made to the timing of the episode title and Star Wars faces work really well.

I would like a link as well!

EddieDean said:

With that same intention of making the first season as smooth as possible, I’m going to add two scenes from Assassin into our now episode three, the first Mandalore episode.

I think this is a great idea, especially considering that we want Ahsoka in most of the early episodes. Conceptually, it’s a slam dunk. The only concern would be if it feels out of place or breaks the pacing too much. That being said, I’m excited to see it in practice as you do your polish pass!

CaptainFaraday said:

Thanks! I’ll have a look and see what I can do! I didn’t consider Audible because I didn’t realise there was a free trial option like that.

No problem! I didn’t venture too far down the free trial route (it might be conditional on whether or not you already have Amazon Prime). Hope it works out for you!

I know that the Cobalt Squadron audiobook is on Amazon’s service called Audible! I looked and you can pick up to 3 audiobooks as part of your free trial. That might be an avenue you can use to get the audio for what you need!

All of the changes and trims you’re making make perfect sense to me; I’m excited to see how it turns out! I can see how the proposed edits will help to assist the movie in conveying the themes effectively, without having to spell it out for the viewer.

In terms of the things you need help with, I’m not super skilled with editing, but I’ll be happy to help where I can!

I finally was able to finish season one, so here are some thoughts about the last three episodes of season 1. Let me know if anything I say is unclear or if you have questions!

108 - Duchess of Mandalore

In the opening text, the word “is” is duplicated: “Duchess Satine Kryze of Mandalote is is on Coruscant…”

I also can’t help but wonder if there’s a better place in Season 1 to put this episode. I think for me, I would like it an episode or two sooner, maybe before the Battle of Ryloth.

109 - A Strike at the Heart Part 1

Specific advice:

Consider capitalizing Duros. To make the crawl still clear, I would restructure that line as follows:

“One is the Duros bounty hunter Cad Bane, famed for building specialist teams to guarantee success for his employers.”

I would add a comma after “But of late” so it reads: “But of late, the bold Ahsoka has been struggling with obedience…”

Starting at 32:57, Obi-Wan’ mouth starts moving even though there aren’t any lines for him. I think if you can cut out those few frames, it would be an easy fix.

General Thoughts:

I loved the interweaving of the Senate hostage storyline and the Holocron heist. By mixing the two storylines, it highlights Cad Bane’s skills and strategic prowess, while also amping up the action and evening out the pacing. Additionally, it made perfect sense that Cad Bane would target the Senate with a large team as a smokescreen for the real heist at the Jedi Temple.

110 - A Strike at the Heart Part 2

Specific advice:

In the crawl, I would tweak it a little so it says: “The Republic is reeling from the Senate hostage crisis, only to find that it was a distraction to cover a heist at the Jedi Temple.”

I would capitalize Senate, Temple, Force (in Force-sensitive and in general), and Jedi Order.

General thoughts:

I really enjoyed these two episodes, all of the cuts were seamless and flowed well to each other. I don’t really have any advice other than the things I mentioned above. Great job with everything so far! I’m definitely looking forward to getting into the next season this upcoming week!

So I’ve finally gotten the time to pick up watching where I left off, so sorry if I’m a bit behind on things already brought up about certain episodes! Anyways, here are my thoughts for The Blockade of Ryloth:

• In the intro crawl, is King supposed to be capitalized? What about Twi-lek or Jedi Master? If you’ve already addressed this, sorry to bring it up again!
• I felt like this was a great episode to highlight Ashoka’s growth so far, while still showing places where she still has lots to learn.
• at 10:28-10:32, the transition between Anakin saying “Jump to lightspeed” and the battle on the surface felt a little off to me. The audio transition wasn’t the best, but I think the visual transition was what pulled me out of it more. I felt like the transition should have been a wipe, but I could be wrong, I haven’t seen the original episodes in a while! That being said, if this segment was how the original episode was, then don’t worry about it.
• at 31:16-32:12, the audio is out of sync with the video, such that Obi-Wan’ mouth moves for several seconds without the audio of him speaking. I checked both my downloaded file and streaming the file from Google Drive, and they both had the problem.

Overall, I enjoyed the episode! It was a nice one to showcase Ashoka and Anakin’s growth since we saw them last, while also providing a close concise look at some of the stakes of the Clone Wars. Aside from the things I noted above, your cuts were pretty seamless, great job!

Personally, the episodes I’ve seen where I remember the originals are vast improvements over the source material. I think, with TCW: Refocused, you will always have a trade off between having a tight focus and faster pacing or including slightly lesser quality source material to pad out the plot. I personally prefer having a faster pace, with slower parts only being character development oriented. As for whether or not more content could be included to allow the plot to breathe, I think the solution would be to decide on a case by case basis (which we have been doing pretty well with). That way we can avoid extra bloat as much as possible. That being said, that will require a little more effort on our (or at least my) part as viewers to familiarize ourselves with the source content, so we can help more with decisions on what to cut and keep. Just my thoughts on it, hope it makes sense!

EddieDean said:

Ah, YES! I think I’ve cracked this politics episode.

I was having a bit of a problem with two Padmé-Bail conversations, trying to trim them down and combine their audio to streamline the plot a bit, but it was really hard to make that work with matching the lipsync whilst tying it to the geography of the two walking around a room together and keeping the coversation flowing properly. So I decided to take some time to mull this all over, and I think I’ve got the answer:

I realised that, since I’m massively minimising Onaconda in TCW:R, I could reframe him into some other role, in order to emphasise Padmé’s importance and have Dooku recognise her as a very legitimate threat.

Now, instead of being the senator for Rodia, Onaconda becomes Padmé’s liaison with her constituents. Dooku’s hiring of thugs to hassle senators now becomes a specific attack on Padmé’s support network to force her out in the open. They beat up Onaconda, meaning that Padmé now needs to directly spend time talking to her constituents, which lets the thugs catch up with her. I’ll preserve much more of the action scene now to emphasise the physical threat. We drop some of the complexities of the loan etc, and this way the focus is much more on Padmé’s competence as a humanising orator.

This is something I think you do really well; repurposing characters to better serve the plot. I already liked these episodes, but I can’t wait to see how you tie them all together!

Spitballing here, but these are kind of similar to “Return of Maul”:

• Maul’s Revival
• Resurrection of Maul
• The Revenge of Maul

EddieDean said:

I think I definitely want to follow Ahsoka’s fall with my Scipio episode, because I’m going to be making changes to that episode which make it more of a response to Ahsoka’s loss. But I’m thinking I could pull O66/Yoda possibly as early even as season 3.

Gotcha, I forgot about that! That’ll be exciting to see with the new context you’re adding.

In terms of the Order 66 Arc, the only thing you’d have to consider is Fives is in the Umbara Arc, but besides that I really think you could put the Order 66 Arc anywhere you want to break up the action with slower intrigue. Just an idea, but would it work as a “season premiere” for your Season 5? One reason that might work well is after Ahsoka leaves the Jedi Order it would slow down a bit to set up the dominoes for the last few arcs (which tie everything together) and then escalate to the finish line. Another alternative is to make it in Season 4 before Ashoka’s Fall which would fit with the theme of deception (things aren’t always what they seem) and betrayal that we see. That would make Season 4 kind of clone heavy though.

I agree with Darth, Pursuit of Peace is a pretty good one. I also liked the one that happens before it; I think it was called Heroes on Both Sides? Arguably the episode isn’t the best when it comes to plot, but the humanization of the actual people on the Separatists’ side was a nice touch for me. That episode really helped to sell that one, the Separatists aren’t just the droid army and Count Dooku, and two, I think it highlights the level and power of manipulation Palpatine has on both sides. I think out of all of the Padme episodes, those ones were the most memorable for me, but as to how or where they should fit in the larger context, I’m not too sure. Just some thoughts.

Just watched the 501st Legion episode, so here are my thoughts:

Loved the carry over from Malevolence that they’re still looking for Grevious, and the Rishi system is where Grevious is hiding. With that added context, it helps propel the plot forward in a natural way and helps tie the Rishi base plot to the Malevolence episode and the assault on Kamino. Everything was well paced and the transitions between episodes felt natural. Even though the Kamino battle is from a later season (and has better animation), it never felt out of place. The only place where something felt off was during the scene on the bridge between the clones being rescued on Rishi Station and the assault on Kamino. Specifically, 26:48-27:15 is where the audio seems a hair our of sync (Rex starts talking a hair too soon), was noticable with Rex’s first line and Obi-Wans line “The Separatists are taking quite the chance, considering this.” Overall though, it worked wonderfullly pacing-wise and plot-wise.

EddieDean said:

Thanks Hal. In fact, apologies folks, but I think I’m going to take a mental health day today. I was intending to spend this weekend fixing up the polish backlog but yesterday I had some unpleasant personal stuff happen and it needs a little processing and then a bit more of a descent into comfort for the rest of the day. All relatively minor, and it’s nothing that’ll impact this project in the long term, but right now it’ll just slow me down by a week or so more than expected.

Condolences for whatever you’re going through. Hope that it’ll all work out well!

Thoughts about Malevolence

Disclaimer: I watched the original episodes a while back, but I don’t remember these ones well at all. So if any problem points below are in the regular episode, sorry! Also, apologies if any of this has been said before!

I like that there’s still tension between Anakin and Ahsoka, her outburst and Anakin’s chastening after feels right, especially with having this episode pretty early on. The pacing worked well for me, I liked that it was faster. I also liked the humanizing moments of the clones and how that contrasted with the general opinion that clones are “expendable”.

The cut between Anakin and Ahsoka rescuing Plo Koon and the Malevolence coming out of hyperspace at 16:46 felt abrupt to me. I don’t have a surefire way to fix this, but if there are any establishing shots of the Republic ship to bridge the gap that might help. Otherwise, letting it fade to black in between and allowing a couple seconds to breathe in between would also work.

Scratch that, the whole section (up until 17:33) feels a bit wonky. I wasn’t sure when the cuts to the other Republic ship were taking place chronologically (are they flashbacks or happening simultaneously?) And the iris transition after Ahsoka says “I’m sorry Master Plo” also had a split second where the shot with Ahsoka and Plo Koon reversed? Other than that center section, everything else flowed well and was paced perfectly!

EDIT: I just finished looking at the most recent version of The New Padawan, and I think having the Clone Wars logo just appear adds that extra bit of punch which feels great. The added Bail Organa shot definitely helps to sell his inserted line to Anakin too.

Wow, lots has happened since I last checked the forum! Been absent due to school but I’m going to make time today to catch up on some of the episodes and post thoughts on them. Hope it’s not too late for feedback on some of the earlier ones!