EyeShotFirst

I’m quite fond of my 1993 Star Wars Soundtrack Anthology. It’s from that era in my childhood, when Star Wars was these 3 incredible films and all you could really do to get more of that is to play games, read novels, comics, etc. The case is simple, the original Jung poster showcased in this large rectangular box. That era when Lucasfilm was proud of the poster art that accompanied their films.

Imgur

Imgur

I didn’t have the fortune of having this box-set as a child. The closest thing I had was that Sony disc with John Williams conducting excerpts from the Trilogy.

I’ve looked into a lot of the advancing technology, and it does indeed bode well for the future of fan edits.

I myself, had an idea of restoring cut scenes from ‘The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly’ with deepfakes of the original actors’ voices.

I recall seeing something recently that was for use in the context of “dubbed” films; essentially allowing the new dubbed voice to change the on-screen character/actor’s mouth and expressions (to an extent) to flow better with the dialogue. It was quite intriguing. That could go back to something like a Spaghetti Western to sync and adjust the mouth movements (though I quite like the charm of those films, it almost seems sacrilegious to “fix” them).

The limitations (at the moment) seem to be the extremes. Once the expressions of the face go beyond that of the original actor, it starts to look off. Like the video example above. De Niro goes from looking quite believable to doing that Mummy face.

The really exciting part of all of this, is that a lot of the very convincing technology is available to regular people.

DoikkNaats said:

EyeShotFirst said:

Well, it took a long time, but I’m happy with the work. I’m still planning Rogue One and Solo cases if I can get the art the way I like it first. Enjoy!!

I got inspired by these and wanted to finish out the trilogy. Thought I’d use quarantine as an excuse to learn PhotoShop. Here’s my take on a Rise of Skywalker VHS-style cover:

This is the first cover I’ve done, so it’s not perfect. I tried to age the poster art I found to match the classic looks of the OT covers, but it might’ve gotten a little too grainy.

Thanks to EyeShotFirst for the inspiration!

Nicely done. I had plans to cap off the trilogy before I saw Rise, which pretty much put me on a Star Wars hiatus. I’ve actually got the roughed version of my Rouge One somewhere in the bowels of my hard drive.

This is by no means an announcement for a project, but rather a discussion on AI voice deepfaking. I’ve seen and heard some really great audio Deepfake work done recently and it got me to thinking about the international cut scenes in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

The performances are all there, but the voices are either aged too much, or in the case of Lee Van Cleef,replaced completely.

I’d like to try my hand at messing with this technology. I mean we have quite a lot of recordings of all three actors speaking from this era, so it should be feasible.

Has anyone else considered this?

Forget my last post in the v.2 thread, I’m really excited for this!

Watched v.1 on Archive, was quite thrilling to hear and see it more or less how I remembered it. Any chance for a PM for V.2?

I’m glad to see someone taking on such a project. I had started one of my own a ways back, but I simply didn’t have the skillset or the resources to do it properly. I don’t think at the time, I realized just how much work this film needed. Anyway, my hat’s off to you.

I don’t like that Luke literally had no surviving followers left. Kylo Ren seemed too inept to have wiped them out. Maybe if we’d have seen some of his final followers being murdered, or perhaps destroyed by Starkiller base. Something to indicate that Kylo wasn’t all that was left. Or perhaps the place with all the sith could’ve been filled with former followers turned evil. It just seemed like such an empty universe, and that’s always been my problem with the main saga.

FreezingTNT2 said:

Peter Pan said:

Looking at how Rose character was handled in TROS to please those people that hated on her, including these that sent Kelly Marie Tran death threats I was thinking about offending those f*ckers a stitch more:
Why not cut the Fin Rose romance from 8 and retcon Paige from being Rose sister to being her wife and turn their amulet into some sort of wedding ring.

jaw drops Why make Rose lesbian?

I’m of the Taika Waititi camp, that if it doesn’t serve the story, a scene hinting at sexual orientation is just useless. If we’re trying to normalize things, we should treat those characters as people. I never had to see who Luke wanted to sleep with, to follow his story.

I just don’t know how you could pull that off, without a lot of work.

It’s a bit of an uphill battle, just to offend some people who probably wouldn’t see the cut anyway. I would love to see a gay Star Wars character…but I want there to be more substance to that character, besides their orientation. The Mandalorian would still be a good show, if the protagonist ended up gay, because there’s more to them than that. It’s just a problem I see with Disney at times, where the political statement is more important than the story.

Rise of Skywalker feels like a 10 episode season, edited down into a 2.5 hour movie. I just wonder if the trilogy could be cut down into one really long movie, or maybe a 2 parter. You could keep the introduction stuff from TFA, cut out the fat from TLJ and ROS and have a mostly solid story, without the stupidity.

I for one don’t care about the Rey Palpatine thing. Hell, I expect it at this point from Star Wars. Everybody ends up related. It’s been a dumb concept since Return of the Jedi. The only time it was ever a cool character arc, was when Vader revealed that he was Luke’s father. Everything else has just been trying to recapture that moment, and it falls flat. It is stylistically a neat concept, but as I said, it’s played out in Star Wars lore to the point it doesn’t even annoy me.

Well, TLJ had a lot I hated and a few things I liked. This film was the opposite. I’d like to let it settle in my mind a little bit and perhaps see it again on video when the time comes.

I only hope, as stated by others, that the deleted scenes will add more to the film. It just feels like too many climaxes, which causes the film to be quite tiring at times. I don’t like how jumpy it is, but that is JJ’s style.

Visually, it’s the most impressive of the 3. I liked the visuals of the Death Star ruins on Endor. Palpy’s evil fortress was quite…appropriate. It’s the kind of lore that has always been in the EU and in some of the games. These beacons of evil where the Sith reside. I loved finally seeing that on the screen.

I think it is Palpatine who really does save the film. The trilogy has lacked a real villain. Snoke was derivative of Palpatine. Kylo had a lot of rage and was an interesting character, but you never really felt he was a true villain. Palpatine comes in and is just bathing in pure evil, with a grin on his face. Even as far back as the prequels, his scenes really elevated the work. I’d argue that Return of the Jedi is saved by his sections in the film.

Seeing the AT-ST scene made me think of how neat it would be if that kind of stuff could be incorporated into ROTJ. Maybe have part of the forest battle, take place before dawn and progress from there. It would add some interest, to an overall blandly shot battle sequence…but that’s for another thread LOL.

I think once we have the Kenobi series, we might start considering most of ROTS to be the middle act of a prequel trilogy cut.

It’s just too bad it wasn’t Hayden from the start, albeit with a better script. I think he certainly had the look. People give Hayden a lot of crap, but I’ve seen him in stuff outside of Star Wars, and he’s pretty good when he’s got the right dialogue.

I always felt that George’s problem in writing the Prequels was introducing Anakin too late, and too young. I know he wanted to get them Spielberg feels going and give kids something to latch onto. With an adult Anakin, or hell at least teenaged Anakin, he’d have been closer to Kenobi’s age, and you could’ve had them bond more. You could’ve seen them being “good friends”. Then the tension in AOTC would’ve been a little less jarring. Both just come across as bitter assholes right out of the gate in AOTC.

Yeah, I remember being mad, because I had TPM and AOTC on VHS and ROTS never came out on VHS.

Thanks for the recommendation, I updated it above. The picture quality is marvelous on a CRT. I had a wave of nostalgia and wanted to watch some VHSs, but my VCR crapped out on me, and the closest thing I had was this copy. I was quite surprised with how well it looked and sounded. I’m mostly happy to have this copy as it’s special to me. Amadeus is my favorite film ever, and this was the copy in which I first saw the film. It poured gas on the flame in me for a love of music.

Doing some deeper looking at the DVD I made, I made it in 2005 on one of those VHS to DVD machines, so take that nugget of knowledge anyway you please. I’ll be leaving everything as it is all the VIDEO_TS, as I wouldn’t want to degrade it anymore by converting it to another file type. For preservation sake, I think it’s probably wisest if I don’t mess with it too much.

Here are some screengrabs. Ignore the aspect ratio, I was putting them on a grid. I forgot just how washed out some of the scenes looked, looking back I remember being wowed by how vibrant the DVD release was.

See below

Yes, it is NTSC. I don’t know of any obvious changes to the VHS tape compared to the theatrical release, as I’ve never had the fortune of seeing the theatrical print. I can imagine there were changes, even before Milos made his later cut.

paja said:

Another test.

A bit off topic, but in regards to this post, I’d love to see what you could do with Indy 4. I think you could really bring life to that glowy yet muted film.

Thank you very much! I’ve been doing some preparations for Solo and Rogue One covers, I’m not 100% happy with the Solo one, but Rogue One had some really great poster art that I’m incorporating. IX depends strongly on whether it has good posters. Last Jedi took a lot of work to get it’s poster work to match the style of the earlier films, and it was only because I lucked out that Hugh Fleming made something somewhat retro. I really would love if someone made some retro prequel posters. As much as I love Drew Struzan as an artist, his Star Wars posters always felt too empty and relied too heavily on being 1 of 6 parts, as opposed to holding up on their own.

I made a copy of my Lumiere/Replublic Pictures (1993?) VHS release of Amadeus years ago, and was wondering if anyone would be interested in such a thing. The picture, while being a Pan and Scan VHS from 3 decades ago, isn’t bad. The audio is excellent, being a stereo release. It’s quite punchy, and not distorted or buzzy.

I’m unable to do any kind of de-interlacing, stabilization, upscaling, etc; so this release would be a raw capture.

I don’t know what the interest in such a thing would be, as there are better releases available and I don’t know if it’s 100% the theatrical cut. It runs 158 minutes where the theatrical is 161 minutes. I think it would appeal as more of a novelty or something for us that grew up with VHSs to get a bit of nostalgia.

It looks great on a CRT television, part of what made me rediscover I had made this copy so many years ago.

Just want to know what you folks think, if anyone would think it worth the upload, or not. I could post some raw screengrabs, if you like…at the moment I don’t feel like bothering with the markdown coding out of pure laziness.

(sorry to derail) I think it all kind of cements Luke as being the fulfilled hope to the Jedi. Yoda has insight, and can see the possibilities that Luke will turn like Vader did. But Yoda also said it’s hard to determine if the visions are showing what is going to happen or could happen. Even when Luke rushed to save his friends, Yoda thought he was vulnerable and wouldn’t be able to resist that temptation. Luke seemed to despise the evil, instead of being tempted by it. To see this evil man, claim that he was his father, just pushed Luke over the edge (pun intended). Luke would’ve rather dropped to his death than face that truth.

I always considered his letting go, and falling as a suicide attempt. Might’ve been the will of the force that caused him to be pulled into the ventilation system, or pure luck. I don’t think Luke had anything to do with it. That moment where he was rescued by the crew of the falcon, he seems to have slowly accepted the truth. Even speaking to Vader, and then Ben through the force. This was a major turning point for Luke.

He’s wiser by ROTJ, but still has his final test ahead of him, with Vader and the Emperor. Luke might’ve came close during the Jedi duel, but I think he realized what his rage was turning him to. The symbolism between his mechanical hand, and Vader’s now severed mechanical hand.

That shot with Amidala is just gorgeous. I didn’t think I’d be talking about how gorgeous TPM is, but it looks like one of those 50s epics.