towne32

From Empire Magazine:

“It was quite an unusual situation,” Serkis tells us in the new issue of Empire. “I worked specifically with Domhnall Gleeson and with Adam Driver. My first day was basically standing on a 25-foot podium doing Lord Snoke without the faintest idea what he looked like… or in fact who he was! I was very high up, totally on my own, away from everybody else, but acting with them.”

“He is severely damaged. Although he’s a powerful leader, he comes across as vulnerable. Very scarred and disfigured.” But the actor assures us that Snoke is a guaranteed force to be reckoned with: “we used sort of a ‘Kongolizer’ method of having sound come out of speakers to give a sense of scale and distance for the character. So it was very challenging and scary, in fact probably one of my most scary film experiences I’ve ever had.”

Thanks for sharing. Cleanup looks pretty nice on this one. No tramline scratches to worry about, and most of the remaining damage is very small. Lack of flicker is also very nice. Color is certainly watchable, but not there yet compared to some of your previous samples (as is the case for the end of the exterior scene it starts with). Stabilization needs optimization probably? The image doesn’t look as sharp as previous samples, from what I remember. Not sure if it’s just the sample encoding.

Looking forward to the next one.

Color looks great. Worst part of RoTJ, IMO, is Han’s skin tone in some select shots. Have you done the ‘you’re gonna die here you know?’ or the ‘he’s my brother’ scenes yet, to remove his terrible and transient sunburn?

Handman said:

Color shifts and a softer image before optical wipes is perfectly normal. Since the wipes in Jedi were digitally redone, That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Hopefully an expert can shed some light?

I was suggesting that perhaps some weren’t redone. I thought I recalled doubleofive’s image gallery not having 100% of them listed. In any case, it seems not to be what he was talking about here. 😃

joefavs said:

You know, I’ve always wondered about that section in the middle of the ROTJ blu ray where everything goes soft. Do we know what the reason is for that? Releasing a transfer that’s literally out of focus seems too careless even for Lucasfilm.

There are a few points before wipes that go soft and the color shifts. I assumed it’s due to using something downstream of the o neg for a few wipes. The one that comes to mind mainly is wicket and Leia, with a wipe to the death star. Perhaps they didn’t have all the original elements for the latter?

ilovewaterslides said:

Ok first, the “scratched print” is not an LPP

According to the uploader on spleen, it is.

I don’t see any reason to discredit the person with a webpage that looks like it’s from 1999. 😃 Who knows what they have or what it really looks like when scanned properly. One of their images looks neutral. One looks greenish in their imaging attempt, but it doesn’t mean the film has the blanket green timing of the later releases

I agree with that. It’s still the best recolored version out there, IMO. Aside from Harmy’s 1.0, which is excellently balanced but of course lacks all the great bells and whistles of his later releases.

Although I’m not sure which of his three suggested versions I preferred at the time, I now kind of wish the Technicolor versions were used in the end. Love just about everything in the 2.2 releases though, except the skin tones just get too yellow at some points. Also (and I know he addressed this and feels differently), I’d love for the blacks to be dropped a bit lower, especially for ANH. No real complaints for TPM, aside from it being TMP. 😄

Frank your Majesty said:

Where did you dig up that old fossil?

frankly I’d like the 2007 edition to have a scene of him getting dissolved by stomach acids, so that no Expanded Universe garbage could ever get away with resurrecting him.

Never noticed how old this thread was.

edit: MrVess last logged in back in 2007. I guess he got pissed that his 2007 SE never came to be.

I’d like to take a look as well if someone has a link.

It would be too bad if he put all this work into it and doesn’t get a chance to finish it. But maybe others can use some of his ideas.

Doesn’t really look like them, but seems like the same idea. Strange that they would bother having them and training to use them, though. So I wonder if there’s a more prevalent weapon that they’re designed to counter, rather than the few bandits around who managed to keep lightsabers.

Cool. I liked the shot with Han, Leia, 3PO, and Ackbar. Han shooting his blaster. Kylo saying ‘the dark side’ rather than ‘the path of the Sith’ or something obnoxious like that. All of it.

Edit: Wait, is that Billie Lourd in the Ackbar et al. shot, too?

Snoke:

“Supreme Leader Snoke is quite an enigmatic character, and strangely vulnerable at the same time as being quite powerful,” Serkis says. “Obviously he has a huge agenda. He has suffered a lot of damage. As I said, there is a strange vulnerability to him, which belies his true agenda, I suppose.”

While Abrams has emphasized a return to practical effects on The Force Awakens, is Snoke perhaps a character who could have been played by Serkis in make-up?

“No, no,” the actor says. “The scale of him, for instance, is one reason. He is large. He appears tall. And also just the facial design – you couldn’t have gotten there with prosthetics. It’s too extreme. Without giving too much away at this point, he has a very distinctive, idiosyncratic bone structure and facial structure. You could never have done it [in real life.]”
…
If Snoke is a “damaged” character, that raises the question: Did his wounds come from the clash between the Rebellion and the Empire, seen in the original Star Wars trilogy? Serkis hesitates here, but then says he believes Snoke was outside of that conflict.

“No, he’s a new character in this universe. It is very much a newly-introduced character,” Serkis says. “He’s aware of what’s gone on, in the respect that he has been around and is aware of prior events. I think it’d be fair to say that he is aware of the past to a great degree.”

http://www.ew.com/article/2015/11/12/star-wars- andy-serkis-supreme-leader-snoke

imperialscum said:

I think Coruscant was good. Especially in AOTC.

I liked Coruscant in general. The sprawling city, mostly seen from afar, with the 5th Element traffic lanes. Really didn’t care for the ‘night life’ view of it in the AoTC intro scene, though.

Well, especially now that you’ve removed the image, it would be polite for g-force to edit his post.

Maz: “She’s lived over a thousand years. She’s had this watering hole for about a century, and it’s like another bar that you’d find in a corner of the Star Wars universe.”

Her eyes have special meaning and power. “I had some specific ideas about how she would work and what she would do,” Abrams says. “I had this pitch about these goggles that she wore. Her eyes are an important aspect of her character, and you’ll see how it plays out.”

http://www.ew.com/article/2015/11/12/star-wars-force-awakens-lupita-nyongo-maz-kanata

https://youtu.be/bDd9EcJxnb4?t=13s

The Falcon hyperspace shot goes on a few seconds longer here, and we see the planet they arrive at.

Also: Disney has a behind the scenes special on Friday (ABC has a different TFA special tonight, though).

CatBus said:

And here I was afraid I couldn’t get the right tone across on the Internet…

If you got it righter he probably wouldn’t have explained the joke. 😄

Do you really think any of the release prints had the green color timing? I thought the consensus was that it was a change made to DVDs and later. Perhaps if new prints were struck when the second film was being released, they would have the green timing?

Just watched the film. Really great transfer. It’s sad that the trameline scratches are present from start to finish (someone owned the print who presumably didn’t know what they were doing?), but the damage aside from those lines is surprisingly minimal and it plays great as a grindhouse type print.

As for the color, I agree with the notion that it’s generally absurd to claim to have great memory of the color of a film from a viewing 16 years ago (let alone 38 years). Still, I can say that, years ago, the green timing definitely felt brand new watching the second film. I remember thinking that this is a new look that is consistent with the video game, the animatrix, and not the first film. I don’t really recall all the scenes that are so very orange and blue in The Matrix, but I don’t think the scan is wrong (I wasn’t trained to recognize Orange and Blue/Teal the way I am now, either). It is of course worth noting that the experience of this release is probably quite different when projected. I turned down the color saturation by a few clicks and found the result a bit more pleasant.

The strongly yellow colored scenes have generated quite a bit of discussion already. It’s hard to imagine that it’s a fault of the scan, as it is scene dependent (some are blue heavy, others yellow, others natural) and consistent across each reel. Again, it looks perhaps a bit better with reduced saturation. The memory cheats, of course, but mine thinks it was perhaps a little more heterogeneous. But I trust the print and the scan, and it makes for an interesting record. I do wonder what the print-to-print variation is like, or if (as h_h suggests), there were actually ones struck with adjusted timing. What about bootleg dupes? Were those even a thing still in 1999? Someone on spleen posted a shot of a 35mm print that did indeed look different in one of the yellow scenes. Time will tell, I suppose.

Great release, so thanks for all involved.

Regarding Leia:

“She’s referred to as General,” says director and co-writer J.J. Abrams. “But … there’s a moment in the movie where a character sort of slips and calls her ‘Princess.’”

So not much of a surprise on the ‘what is she called’ article today.

Okay, so almost no one calls her that anymore. You’ll have to imagine who slips — and how it goes over.

😃

“The stakes are pretty high in the story for her, so there’s not much goofing around where Leia’s concerned,” Abrams said.

😦 Was looking forward to the goofing.

Spoiler alert: Old Han Solo is not that great at accounting/finance?

http://www.ew.com/gallery/star-wars-force-awakens-exclusive-photos

27 images, some new, with details/captions.

Paquito said:

❤️ Thank you! For the post with the MD5 hash, is that for version 1, or the latest version of Harmy’s ROTJ?

Yes and yes.

TV’s Frink said:

I don’t care what it is, I hate “clever” terms like Liemax.

It’s almost as bad as sheeple.

Fang Zei said:

I can’t stop watching that gif.

They captured the motion blur of the OT’s miniature photography rather well.

Indeed. The lighting and contrast is nice on that one. I was a bit worried about the falcon in the first teaser trailer. It’s not that I wanted/expected them to use models, but it looked just like the 1997 ANH Mos Eisley CGI.

The newer trailers have been more promising, for some shots at least. Really like the one that has the side-on view of the falcon swooping left and right as it did in RoTJ.

Well, yes, re-encoding is always a way to achieve compatibility. Hal9000’s edit is VCD compliant in that regard. 😃