That’s not a bad idea at all, especially since her force bond with the creature in TotJ barely has any analogue to her present day story - EXCEPT that there could be an implicit link to Morai. I’m not sure if it might pull focus from the core plot of the main episode though, and dilute both. What does everyone think?
Yeah, the siblings shot was a good looking one, but just far too explicit for me, even as a metaphor. And to address the prior comment about moving some of the Mortis content to other places - it’s a nice idea, and throughout the show I did look for places where I could shift good content from avoidable episodes to necessary ones, but ultimately there weren’t many opportunities where totally-removed episodes produced content that actively added value to a kept episode. I think the best example of that actually working was where I took the shots of baby Ahsoka meeting Plo Koon and put them in the Malevolence episode at the point where they’re reaching out to each other using the force. I think that ended up really beautiful.
Anyway, I suppose I should give a little update! I’d promised activity here and haven’t really delivered recently, though in principle this is still very much active. I’m struggling to find time to finish off that last bit of Andor, but once that’s done, I’m back to a bit more targeted polish here and there on this project, and especially the extended episodes.
These last couple of comments about the Mortis episode illustrate the problem with that episode nicely- it’s very divisive. Some people love the force deep dive, and some find it kills the mystery. I’m still broadly satisfied with the solution being to keep the magic whilst making it more inexplicit, as it treads the middle path. And the episode is necessary, due to Morai and further revelations in the Ahsoka show. I will though, as promised, release an extended version sometime!
That’s still in the potentially pile, but I’ve got a feeling there wouldn’t be sufficient value.
Any news on when we’ll see the next version? I’m excited now that TROS:A v4 is out!
NFB, any chance of a full movie version with your new audio, for those coming at this from the opposite direction? 😉
Heck yeah! Bagel’s back, baby! Love those final tweaks to movie 1. Lock 'em in! As someone commented on your AI voice line, I agree that it could be a touch rougher, but it does work.
Looking forward to the rest.
Did you settle on a direction for present-day Boba, Luke’s academy, and season three?
I’ll take a scran! Thanks Spence.
Obviously this is all in flux until the future content comes out, but maybe to shore up the little eight-episode narratives a little better (and accommodate the Loki 2/Ant-Man 3 content), it’d go a little more like this:
And then-
PHASE FIVE: BRAVE NEW WORLDS
This one’s pretty incomplete so it’s mainly my dumping ground for as-yet unconnected items, all mostly showing us new faces and secret societies.
THIRD INTERLUDE: MULTIVERSAL COLLISIONS
Focusing on concluding the outstanding plots and their assumed tie-ins with the MCU. That said, if X-Men '97 and/or Spider-Man: Freshman year become relevant to MCU canon, maybe this splits out into two seperate interludes again.
It then seems like most of the currently announced projects should line up nicely towards the next Avengers movies:
But we still don’t know where the next MCU Spider-Man or Shang-Chi will fall in that, nor Daredevil, Armor Wars and Ironheart, Wakanda, or Vision Quest.
Eh, it’s the one that slows the movie down for me 🤷
I definitely think ‘despair’ is stronger than ‘sorrow’. This is the state of the Galaxy - the loss of the Jedi would be more of an ‘oh fuck, anything bad could happen’ rather than a big ol’ boo hoo. I also think ‘facing extinction’ is stronger than ‘emboldened by absence’ (and the emboldening is implied enough either way). Those first two paragraphs I think Nev is right to have locked in.
That said, I don’t think ‘chaos’ is quite the right move (in the same way that I don’t think ‘overwhelming’ is) for the state of the Republic/Senate. Yes, the First Order have emerged, and they are ‘claiming supremacy’ over space BEYOND the NR, but I don’t think they’re an immediate threat to the NR. That’s why I think it’s valuable to emphasise that the scale of the threat is unknown (potentially huge). The NR doesn’t want to react in a panic, both because this might turn out to be manageable, and because it equally might turn out to be an existential threat - so that’s what’s causing at least a frustrating indecision and political deadlock. My feeling is that the NR would be paralysed by endless debates because (1) they don’t have enough information, and (2) a mis-step could be very costly both in terms of pissing off the FO and causing panic amongst the populace. Thus, our ‘brave’ senators decide that they have to urgently act (and without support), risking exposure and a reaction from the FO, for the sake of gaining hope, and more information.
Perhaps ‘fearing the scale’ could be worded better, but I feel like that concept is right for the third paragraph’s first couple of lines.
If Nev’s shutting this down that’s grand, buuuuuut-
I feel like that new wording implies that the senate itself is being oppressed, and that it’s commissioning the resistance as a direct response to feeling overwhelmed. It’s also kind of implying that it’s only the daring senators who are overwhelmed/oppressed.
I agree that it’s still a better angle than again reinforcing that they want Luke back, but I think those two lines could be put to slightly better use. Thinking about the angle here, we want to distinguish between the state of the Senate and the actions of the ‘brave Senators’. As for the motive, senatorial indecision is a bit bland, and anything too specifically political is a bit dry, but fear of an unknown which could be a huge threat could cover a lot of ground - explaining both why the Republic is hesitant to respond with force and indecisive, and why some want to act in secret.
So, perhaps-
Fearing the scale of this
emerging threat, daring
Senators have secretly
commissioned the pilots
of a brave RESISTANCE
to find the last Jedi and
restore the light of hope
to the darkening stars….
That way, the Republic’s struck by fear of a threat they don’t yet know the size of, but the ‘daring’ ones are acting in spite of that fear, which is nice and dynamic- if implicitly risky and desperate.
It’s coming along! Just needing to find the time- I might have some meaty time to deep dive it a couple of weekends from now. The third movie is an absolute beast- so much prison content, I need to rebuild a lot of audio transitions. But I’m chipping away.
That’s fair - I think “secretly funding” covers that a bit more than directly “commissioned” (or “supporting”), then. And in terms of structure of what’s being explained, I think they should be “secretly funding” the resistance, who have “sent” pilots/a pilot.
“…
Senators have secretly
funded a brave RESISTANCE,
who have sent their most
daring pilot to find
the last Jedi and restore
the light of hope to the
darkening stars…”
I don’t love “commissioned” for pilots, I think “supporting” is stronger.
I’ve been thinking about Attack of the Clones a bit lately. Spence’s recent tightening was really good, but every time I watch or think about this movie I always find the early car chase sequence really off-putting. After the droids in the factory, I find that scene the most egregious.
So why not remove it altogether? Since we already have an attempt on Padmè’s life with her ship being bombed, that gives us enough of a reason for Anakin to be assigned her protector, and I’m sure there’s a way to use voicework to tie the bombing to Obi-Wan’s hunt for Kamino.
I feel like that trimming could really improve the pace, and combined with the usual tightening, the addition of the Anakin/Kenobi training scene early, and the addition of the usual deleted scenes with Padmè’s family, you’d end up with something more focused and interesting.
I could do without the animal fight in the arena but I think that’d be my ideal structure.
I’m making good progress on the third movie. I’ve done a lot of reordering in order to make the timeskips not break B-plot storylines, and am paying a lot of attention to which scenes cover days versus which cover a few scenes in a single day. I’m also paying more attention to the big punchy moments (including their big punchy audio cues) in order to give them room to land.
I’ve merged a couple of scenes into one, and in so doing cut a few shots out, but they’re largely redundant shots of Ulaf struggling when we’ve already been shown that in other shots.
It’s flowing nicely so far…!
Loki season two was excellent, and as you say should sit after Ant-Man 3. But that’s OK, the third interlude can slide back a bit. I’ll see how this shapes up after The Marvel’s and the next few releases up to Deadpool 3.
Ah, fair enough. I’ll get caught up on Loki just now.
Oh yeah, I meant Rekindled too.
Hello again Hal 9000! I don’t know if Ill ever watch the sequel trilogy, Im kinda of going out of my way to ignore everything that happened post Disney, and stick to the old EU, but if I ever do give them a try, I can promise you those will be the ones I watch.
Honestly I’d give those sequel edits a serious try. And you’d probably enjoy moviefied versions of some of the Disney stuff. If you’re game, I bet this community would love to hear the opinions of a first-time viewer who hasn’t even seen the original versions! You’re the “hypothetical first-time viewer” that we often edit for…!
I’ve been thinking a bit more about this, based on the knowledge that Fox Spider-Man and X-Men are becoming increasingly important to the MCU. I also observed that the first three phases, as I have them, break neatly into arcs of eight items each. I still think that anything multiversal should follow from Loki season one and What If, so the concept is clearly explained first (and, in What If, we remix a lot of what came immediately before).
But if we wanted to give Fox X-Men and Spider-Man more breathing space, again with the priority of introducing as little as possible as late as possible, how might that look? After endgame, you could go:
PHASE FOUR: AFTERMATH
Focused solely on what’s next for the main characters and wrapping up existing plots as much as possible before we get into the multiverse:
FIRST INTERLUDE: THE MULTIVERSAL WEB
Focused on introducing the multiverse through the lens of variants of known characters, especially Spider-Man, and lightly sets up Dr. Strange as the MCU’s main multiversal guardian.
(Here, and with other similar phases/interludes, we allow the stories from other universes to be told out of time - until they become relevant to the MCU chronology. What If? was flashbacks, and I think it’s easiest to digest Spider-Man and X-Men content within this context too. You could play this interlude as early as just after Far From Home, or even start this thread right after Endgame but put Far From Home sometime during this, since it does hint at the Multiverse [and if they end up casting Jake Gyllenhaal as Reed Richards as well as Quentin Beck we might end up with a weird multiversal retcon here anyway].)
SECOND INTERLUDE: MULTIVERSAL MUTANTS
Focused on the best core X-Men movies (an interesting group who don’t yet have an MCU analogue), and starts to hint at their future overlap with the MCU.
(As with the previous interlude we’re out of time with our X-Men stories until they start getting pulled into our MCU chronology. And we headcanon that X-Men style time travel basically starts to fuck up the canon of a given timeline, which is rumoured to get paid lip service in Deadpool 3.)
THIRD INTERLUDE: MULTIVERSAL COLLISIONS
Focusing on concluding the outstanding plots and their assumed tie-ins with the MCU.
PHASE FIVE: BRAVE NEW WORLDS
This one’s pretty incomplete so it’s mainly my dumping ground for as-yet unconnected items, all mostly showing us new faces and secret societies.
There are two main schools of thought for the Original Trilogy: Those seeking absolute purity of the original releases, and those seeking modern polish.
For the latter, as Nev has mentioned, you’ve got Adywan’s Star Wars Revisited, which are “the special editions as they should have been”. They’re an absolutely meticulous and painstaking depth of polish.
For the former, you have Harmy’s Despecialised editions, which seek to present a restored version of the movies which you could have reasonably seen in the cinema in 1977. And you also have the 4K series (4K77, 4K80, 4K83 for each of the three OT movies) which seek to present that original vibe carefully upscaled to 4K.
I can’t much speak to prequel trilogy three-in-ones, other than (and due to) a personal belief that you’d always lose something that way, and that there is value in the prequels when a layer of polish is applied, and that supplemental prequel content like Tales of the Jedi and Clone Wars are also valuable both on their own and to recently released content.
As for the sequels, there’s an excellent loose-but-related trilogy comprising TFA Starlight, TLJ Rekindled, and TROS Ascendent, which many hold up as the pinnacle of sequel tightening. TROS Ascendant is probably the single fan edit which gives you the most value-add compared to the original movie, and has been a spectacular multi-disciplinary collaboration.
Others are generally more of a matter of personal taste, but there’s a variety of great TV-to-movie edits of recent Disney TV content, of various lengths based on how much you want to preserve. They’re generally in the first few pages here.
Great feedback buddy, thanks. I agree with you on Maarva’s death- I can’t remember why I flipped the reveal (it’ll have been a technical need) but I’ll see what my options are.
I’ll finish work on movie 3 and give these a little longer for feedback, then see if I can refine them even more. Audio is my weakest skill, but I’m learning…
That’s a perfect suggestion. Love it. Two (long) interludes.