ArcherEdits

Back after the holiday season and dealing with some things and getting them sorted – some good, some bad – them’s the breaks. This is the latest in me reconsolidating past works to try and produce a higher quality result, whilst hopefully coming in a smaller file size, and smoother transitions, audio especially, between different blocks of stories through techniques I’ve taught myself in the last few weeks and months.

When refining my previous ‘Tales’ work, I took it upon myself to improve things with my ‘Stark Mirror’ crossover chapter I invented, like timeline discrepancies and a missing chapter beforehand I simply didn’t think about at the time, completing the set. This new version is now the definitive cut of the crossover story and hopefully works better than previous ones before.
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Because of the techniques I incorporated for better audio blending between episodes – and portions of the same episode if the opening titles are now excised – the runtimes of the new versions are slightly different in a few places. Either a few seconds shorter or longer, but hopefully sounding better either way.

Total size of everything was 49.04GB, and was still larger then the new collective size when only the smaller version of the special crossover was selected (44.94GB new total). So, there are some marginal differences with the file size in most places – usually like my other reconsolidations like ‘What If’, ‘House of M’, ‘The Hobbit’, ‘Andor’ and such, where it goes from a few hundred MB per file to the better part of 1GB shaved off each time.

Some are actually slightly larger, but hopefully it’s reflected and excused in the better quality of the finished export and the smaller size of the group’s sum total.
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‘Tales of the Jedi’ – Ahsoka; The First Steps
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All 3 of the Ahsoka episodes in the series, better audio blending, slight audio reverb for the flash-forward to the end of Season 7 from the middle episode’s POV.
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File size of the old version is 3.26GB and the new is 3.30GB
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‘Tales of the Jedi’ – Dooku; The Lost Faith
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All 3 Dooku episodes from the series, better audio blending again.
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File size of the old version is 3.33GB and the new is 3.40GB
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‘Tales of the Empire’ – Barriss; The Wrong Path
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All 3 Barriss episodes from ToTE, smoother blending between.
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File size of the old version is 4.64GB and the new is 4.66GB
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‘Tales of the Empire’ – Elsbeth; The Iron Fist
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All 3 Morgan Elsbeth episodes from the series, smoother blending between the episodes and now-redundant title card gaps again.
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File size of the old version is 4.73 and the new is 4.47GB
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Special 1a;- Dooku; TLF [Shortened]
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The first two Dooku episodes from ToTJ only, with the third being saved for later, smoother audio blending then the previous version.
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File size of the old version is 2.33GB and the new is 2.26GB
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Special 1b;- Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace [1999 Theatrical+ToTJ Cut]
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My 1999 theatrical cut of TPM with the last Dooku episode. “The Sith Lord”, incorporated. While working on this again, I took the opportunity to even out the audio between the blu-ray source that made up most of the film and the 35mm film reel source that made up the original transition from the Coruscant landing pad to Palpatine’s apartment and the puppet Yoda scenes.
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File size of the old version is 11.62GB and the new is 11.26GB
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Special 2a;- ToTJ Ahsoka; TFS [Shortened]
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The first two Ahsoka episodes from the series, from babyhood to the end of the Clone Wars, with added reverb audio on the flashforward section.
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Created just for this latest version of the ‘Tales’ project, to effectively complete the story around the crossover I created. File size at 2.09GB.
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Special 2b;- ToTJ Special; The Stark Mirror [V3]
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The definitive version of the crossover story I created. This one has clearer timings at the beginning which correspond with the original episodes, smoother audio blending between stories and a timeline prompt establishing the second half of the story.
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File size of the old version is 2.82GB[V1] & 2.68GB[V2] and the new is 2.72GB
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Special 2c;- ToTE Barriss; TWP [Shortened]
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As before, a shortened version of Barriss’ story on the last two episodes to complete the story, smoother blending between this time.
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File size of the old version is 3.38GB and the new is 3.20GB
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Special 3a;- The Clone Wars 4x19 – “Massacre” [Morgan Elsbeth at the Battle of Dathomir]
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Onto my more experimental ideas from last time. This one luckily has a lot of size now trimmed off. As before, it’s still just the first half of Morgan Elsbeth’s first episode, as “Massacre”, the rest of the last season 4 arc, and the events that led up to the Battle of Dathomir through CWS3 is Ventress’ story through-and-through. So, keeping the focus on her, big and small, is best. By all means include this to deepen the story of the battle itself, but not so much of this new(er) person’s story that you end up suddenly derailing the main focus from where it ought to be.
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File size of the old version is 2.40GB and the new is 1.87GB
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Special 3b;- The Clone Wars ‘’Darth Maul Returns’’ Arc [Morgan Elsbeth at the Battle of Dathomir]
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Another one with a lot of meat now missing from the size, but hopefully no visible quality difference on screen and three lots of better audio transitioning. This is also a good indicator as to how a ‘Clone Wars arcs’ re-do might shake out in the future with sizes of everything.
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(I do want to, because I imagine it could end up trimming off 100+GB across the whole project if it all goes well and I’m lucky – and that would be great – but there are so many of them it’s just a lot of work to build up to, so I’ll get to it when I’ll get to it).
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File size of the old version is 7.84GB and the new is 5.71GB
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Lastly, I decided to get even more experimental this time.
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I decided to take the full version of Dooku’s story I just reworked and improved, and added a longer audio segue in the third episode’s story. In place of the third episode’s ToTJ titles and episode card, it fades into the audio of Qui-Gon’s death and Obi-Wan’s reaction from The Phantom Menace itself – with audio reverb like my standard technique for dealing with flashback/forwards.
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Going from Qui-Gon’s meeting with Dooku and Yaddle in the temple corridors after discovering Darth Maul on Tatooine, to the Sith Lord killing him on Naboo, to the aftermath with Dooku and Yaddle on Coruscant after the council leaves for the funeral hopefully packs a lot of punch in the story.
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There are two versions for two reasons – one without the Phantom Menace’s corresponding visuals, and one with. The one without keeps the entire story 3D animated, so it’s visually consistent all the way, so that works well. The one with mixes the visual mediums, which may not be the best for some people, but I tried to mitigate that by having the usual colour saturation and vignette techniques for anachronisms as well as bringing the opacity down very low. This way, you can still see the visuals of what happens, so it’s not just 13 seconds of a plain black screen, but because it’s not fully right in your face, hopefully it’s less subliminally jarring to have 30 minutes animation, 13 seconds crisp live action and then back again for 10 minutes.
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Both are created just for this version of this project and come to 3.4GB each.
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Footnote: I am merely a self-taught editor and VFX artist here. As such, some areas might be visibly mostly good – as I have to be realistic with the footage in front of me and what I can do with it, of course. If you do have any particular notes and feedback, feel free to give me your thoughts, but please be constructive and don’t be an ass about it.

Another reconsolidation from this month to not only bring the overall size down, but also to fix some issues I noticed with the export of my first version. [https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Marvel-Studios-House-of-M/id/120681#1601295]

Like my ‘What If…?’ projects I remade and re-exported in October, the size difference was relatively small per episode – ranging from 200Mb to 700MB each, give or take. But when that leads to the season as a whole going from 23.3GB down to 20.6GB, it’s a more noticeable difference overall with hopefully no drop-off in quality.
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The problem with the exports last time specifically was, even though I was working and exporting in my usual 1080p size and resolution, the finished product wasn’t as crisp and sharp as my other projects – even though I was still using my normal settings.

I assume that was a matter of the source files chosen, because the ones I chose this time around with the new visual codec were just as easy to work with as the others before, and the exports definitely looked sharper and cleaner when I compared the two versions of each episode side by side.
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The only difference in the episodes this time around is the runtime. With the custom titles I created for the series, I lengthened them very slightly to get more out of the theme music underneath, and also give the audience more time to absorb the text amongst the other visuals after they fade in and before they fade out again.

The series still follows the same formula as my first version of the edit with rearranging the episodes to focus on real-world first until a natural stopping point, custom series titles, Hex second until a natural stopping point, then WandaVision titles. This was all to keep the “TV within TV” motif the series always had, and keep the references to the sitcoms each episode in the Hex took inspiration from – amongst everything else. As before: the ‘ankle bracelet’ deleted scene is included, the Photon/Skrull mid-credits scene is replaced by Wanda in Sokovia, and a Wanda-centred cut & custom ‘Multiverse of Madness’ trailer I put in, is at the end of the finale.
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As before, the first three episodes were very greatly helped along by the editor ‘Joshuabri’ and his ~102 minute chronological edit “WandaVision Part 1” he allowed me to use last time, and I held onto because it’s a good quality piece of work – so credit where it’s due once again.

The poster I made for this edit was based on a textless WandaVision artwork by artist ‘KahlanAmnelle’, so a big thank you to them for their permission to use this poster in my own work.
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Footnote: I am merely a self-taught editor and VFX artist here, as such, some areas might be visibly mostly good – as I have to be realistic with the footage in front of me and what I can do with it, of course. If you do have any particular notes and feedback, feel free to give me your thoughts, but please be constructive and don’t be an ass about it.

A project over the last week continuing my latest venture reconfiguring old works in a way that decreases file size while hopefully having no corresponding drop-off in smoothness or quality.

This was one of the first projects I wanted to go back into and reconsolidate because the exports were always very large at ~20GB EACH with how big the original M4 source file was on my first venture with this back in mid-‘22. [https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/The-Hobbit-M4-Book-Edit-Augment/id/114711/page/1#1577234]
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Luckily, I found an updated version of the M4 edit that was dated this year. It was noticeably smaller than the previous ~24GB source version from 2021, but around 50 seconds longer – totalling at 4hrs 18mins. When I looked into how this was different and why it was longer, it was simply some scenes here and there having some extra frames to help things flow better from one shot to the next – so that wasn’t an issue at all.

I essentially rebuilt both of my original films – “A Long Journey” and “There and Back Again” – from scratch and followed the same formula for both of what to include, what to bring back from the studio films, and where to cut the M4 edit in half and why. I also used more recent audio blending techniques I taught myself to ease the transition between studio segments and M4 segments, hopefully creating a smoother experience.
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Part 01. A Long Journey – formerly 19.90GB/2hrs 33mins 30secs, now 13.7GB/2hrs 34mins 15secs
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Still opens with a mix of the theatrical and extended Erebor opening. Film’s title notice overlaying the scene with Bilbo meeting Gandalf is shortened slightly. Still continues with the M4 edit until Bilbo and the Dwarves are camping at night by the fire. The Moria flashback to put a face to a name with Azog for character development’s sake and bridge things to the LoTR films for overall cohesion is still there.
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The M4 edit continues on until the intermission section where I made my only other change – before, in the gap between the end of AUJ and TDoS, I had a simple black screen for a few seconds to show the passage of time from day to evening – now there’s an annotation card explaining it is actually 6 hours later, as it is in the story, which feels better than a plain black screen of silent nothingness.
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The M4 edit carries on as normal again until the Dwarves are captured by the Elves like my previous version, the gates to the Mirkwood realm heavily swing shut and it fades to black on a cliffhanger and the extended AUJ credits play as before.
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Part 02. There and Back Again – formerly 18.00GB/2hrs 10mins 1sec, now 13.1GB/2hrs 9mins 57secs
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Still opens with the TDoS opening, title card is slightly shortened from before, as above.
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M4 edit plays out as normal right until the end credits from the extended cut of TBotFA.
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Total differences are: old versions 37.90GB together with a 4hr 43mins 22secs runtime – and new versions are at 26.8GB together with a 4hr 44min 12secs runtime. So definitely a noticeable chunk missing from the file sizes, but with hopefully no proportionate loss in quality. I checked multiple frames across the different versions in the editor at granular detail and saw extremely little changes all the way through – so hopefully when viewed on a TV across the room, it’s all but invisible. Like wearing a certain piece of gold jewellery, very ironically.
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Footnote: I am merely a self-taught editor and VFX artist here, as such, some areas might be visibly mostly good – as I have to be realistic with the footage in front of me and what I can do with it, of course. If you do have any particular notes and feedback, feel free to give me your thoughts, but please be constructive and don’t be an ass about it.

A small fun romp as a bit of a segue while I’m in the middle of sorting out my reconsolidation and reworking of my take on ‘The Hobbit’. One M4 Augment film is already done and noticeably smaller with extremely little differences in quality, and the other will probably be started today or tomorrow – depending on my schedule outside of work.

I finally got around to watching the miniseries this week and, like a few other people I’ve noticed, thought it would have been better and more straightforward if they just released it as a full-length film from the beginning in the first place – so that’s what I’ve done.

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I used some of the techniques I incorporated into my recent “Andor” arcs reconsolidation project to smooth the transition between the episodes, especially where the audio is concerned, so hopefully that works well.

The episodes had the same ‘Clone Wars’ transition into credits to work around, but a lot of episodes ended on a scene that could be feasibly picked up in the next chapter by just getting rid of scenes in the middle, like transitions to planets and such.

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I enjoyed it overall and appreciated the fresh twist on a lot of things, and was a little surprised at the amount of new models vs the amount of actual sets they commercially released. Also, as someone who grew up with the prequels (I still remember watching ‘The Phantom Menace’ in the cinema when I was almost 5 years old) it was good seeing Darth-Jar, Jedi Bob from the 2002 Republic Gunship set I always wanted when I was young but never got (partly for himself, partly for the grey torso to make a custom Cin Drallig fig after playing the RoTS game on PS2).

If they do do another series later on, I’ll be interested in seeing where that goes on the creativity side, and will probably do a similar project to this – since it’s very straightforward. Maybe I’ll make another custom poster for the project like the one I decided to make for this one, elevating it further.

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Footnote: I am merely a self-taught editor and VFX artist here, as such, some areas might be visibly mostly good – as I have to be realistic with the footage in front of me and what I can do with it, of course. If you do have any particular notes and feedback, feel free to give me your thoughts, but please be constructive and don’t be an ass about it.

An edit of one of my most popular projects - from this time two years ago - that I’ve been working on for the last two weeks after making 2 discoveries around this time last month. Firstly, I discovered if I reconsolidate the video codec of the source files I use, but work on and export them the same way inside the editor I use, the finished product can arrive at a smaller file size but looks practically visually identical to the first version and plays just as well.

Specifically, the current size of the 4 ‘mega-sodes’ of this series is now 26.38GB total, whereas the size of my initial project in late 2022 was a much larger 43.12GB, so there’s a noticeable difference in size with a negligible (if any) difference in quality, so I’m very happy with that.
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Secondly, I discovered a new way of transitioning between episodes that hopefully comes off as smoother. Before, the episodes started black before getting into things, and then ended black before getting into the credits, and I would merge those two blocks of footage to create the transition between the two – specifically to try and blend the audio at the end of one and the start of another as smoothly as possible.

Now, I have it so the blocks are side-by-side, not merged, so black goes into black still and it’s still as visually smooth as before, but each one has the audio of the other underlying for 3 seconds slowly fading in/out – which, to my ear, sounds like an easier changeover and a better blend of sounds as one ends and another begins.
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On top of these new source reconsolidating and episode blending techniques I’ve discovered and implemented, I’ve also taken some inspiration from my own Marvel’s “What If…?” projects and added a proper edit notice in the credits. Like them, I put a proper edit notice between the main bulk with only one or two lines of cast names and the rest where it’s more paragraph format for the unsung heroes behind-the-scenes and technical staff.

These new edit cards of mine give the show name, name the ‘mega-sodes’ in the episode themselves (now renamed as ‘chapters’ rather than just ‘arc’s), and seamlessly carry on the audio from the credits without interruption – just like my “WI?” work.
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Chapter 1: The Man from Kenari
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a- New and improved opening titles, implementing the same logo as before as I still prefer the announcement logo for the series rather than the one we got for later trailers and posters.
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b- Timestamp given for the dream/flashback on Kenari and an annotation for the year it takes place in, which ties into the time just before ‘Attack of The Clones’ when it’s set.
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c- Ends with the new chapter card after the first batch of credits.
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Chapter 2: The First Mission
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a- New and hopefully improved opening titles based on my previous version.
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b- Story is the same as before, with hopefully smoother blending between the individual episodes. The only changes are the edit card at the end of the first block of credits, and Luthen’s shop is now officially annotated – it’s a very important and recurring location, so labelling it feels appropriate.
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c- I used the same font and colour as the custom annotation I also made for the Frezno moon after Aldhani before, based on the annotations that already appear in the episodes themselves, for consistency.
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d- Ends with the new chapter card after the first batch of credits.
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Chapter 3: The Sentence
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a- New and hopefully improved opening titles based on my previous version once again, with episode 8’s opening theme.
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b- Flashback to the Imperial Clones on Ferrix has been changed into my usual style for anachronisms with colour and sound. Also there’s a timestamp with an annotation that ties right into the first arc of my ‘Bad Batch’ edit. A little later, the same applies for the conversation between Cassian and Maarva, with Clem hanging and Kassa charging at the Imperial Clones – because it goes between past and present with the voices adjacent to it, I did a little audio mixing to hopefully smooth the line between sharp present dialogue and reverberating past dialogue.
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c- The story is slightly changed as before with the conversation between Syril Karn and Dedra Meero outside the ISB headquarters. More focussed on just Cassian Andor and Justice – less him going into creepy stalker and/or (yes, pun intended) obvious mother issues projection vibes. And finally, the end of their conversation is slightly trimmed this time, so it’s a bit neater and cleaner than when I did it before.
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d- Ends with the new chapter card after the first batch of credits.
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Chapter 4: The Rebellion
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a- New and hopefully improved opening titles based on my previous version for a final time, with episode 12’s opening theme.
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b- Episodes hopefully blending more seamlessly between 10 & 11, and likewise with 11 & 12.
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c- Flashback to Clem and Cassian done in my usual style. It’s too short and too unclear to warrant its own timestamp so it feels too minor and I just left it alone with that.
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d- Ends with the new chapter card after the first batch of credits, and audio carries on as usual before the post-credits scene with the Narkina 5 apparatus being put to use over Scarif.
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Going forward, I would like to reconsolidate more of my past projects like this to get more file size back on online storage and on my own personal HDD I hook up to my TV. I’ve already done so for my ‘SW Rebels’ & ‘What If’ and seen good results – even with both seasons of the latter, it only frees up 400-600MB extra per episode I re-export, but that all adds up and makes a noticeable difference with the whole completed season, so it still feels good and like it’s worth doing.

I did mention at the start that it CAN make a difference, because it doesn’t always, unfortunately. I also tried this new experiment with my DC projects for “World’s Finest” and ZSJL, since they’re all quite chunky files each, but the results were the same as my first project – if not a little larger. So it seems to be very good when it works, but seems like it’s very hit and miss in the meantime.

My projects relating to “The Hobbit” and the projects of recreating the Theatrical and 1997SE Star Wars films from my childhood are all quite large each – coming to 10GB at the smallest sometimes at 20GB at the biggest EACH. So, those projects are the ones I’ll probably re-tackle first, because it will probably make the most difference if it works. After that, the projects I did for the ‘Clone Wars’ and the ‘Bad Batch’ are very similar in nature to this, and contain so many arc files the two folders both come to a very large total file size, so those are definitely on the cards too.
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Footnote: I am merely a self-taught editor and VFX artist here, as such, some areas might be visibly mostly good – as I have to be realistic with the footage in front of me and what I can do with it, of course. If you do have any particular notes and feedback, feel free to give me your thoughts, but please be constructive and don’t be an ass about it.

An edit I essentially did concurrently along the second burst of my work on the first season this July-September, when I could actually find it in me to work on anything in my spare time this Summer.
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For the titles in this season, which is the point of the whole edit, there’s a promo from Season 1 involving the Sacred Timeline that splits off into a kind of ‘tree’ look, so I thought about having that at the start of each episode in a way that blends into the Multiversal Yggdrasil from the end of the second season of “Loki”. I attached this to the opening of all episodes of the second season of “What If” – so this way, the second season feels more like another ‘spiritual successor’ of sorts to the corresponding season of “Loki” – like how the TVA promos for season 1 made it feel like that for Loki season 1.

Also for WIS2, I like the opening titles they did for the finale episode where it’s like a cel shaded animation version of the Marvel Studios opening they’ve had in live action projects for a few years now. Since I noticed most of the drawn characters and scenes shown in these opening titles seem to be from the first season, I thought about maybe applying these opening titles to the entire second season.

There are 8 drawn characters before Captain Carter’s shield toss setting off the rest, and it’s about an even split of 4 from the first season and 4 from the second. After that, it’s more like 15 in S1 to 5 in S2 (yes, I actually bothered to count). This way, you do have the titles showing events that haven’t happened yet in Season 2 if you’re watching from the start, so it does break the rules of the live action titles only having past projects appear, but hopefully it’s only minor here since it very heavily shows scenes from Season 1 more than anything else.
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Season 2:
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I did more work in changing things around this season, because some of the choices in writing seemed to be a little iffy, and the writing for this season seems to be generally less solid compared to the first one. Mostly revolving around Peggy and how she seems to be taking up too much focus in a show that’s meant to be about infinite versions of infinite characters.

The writing around CC specifically seems to be too central, convenient and over-powered at times – also Kahhori to a degree in her episode, but not nearly as much, so I’ve left that alone. I’ve seen a lot of people say that this series seems to be slowly turning into the ‘Captain Carter show’, which I find slight difficult not to agree with to a point, and I’m not really a fan of. Because surely having one character being the main focus of a show that emphasises ‘infinite’ so much doesn’t work because it goes against the show’s nature? And, building on that, if you ARE going to have one focal character in a show like this, should it not be The Watcher before any of the Guardians of the Multiverse, or anyone else in between? Because surely that’s the whole point of him and his duty in observing and safeguarding the entire Multiverse in the first place?

Specifically there are 3 things. Firstly, she is the focus of 3 episodes/a third of the whole season on her own. Second, she’s the starting point of both season finales now, and probably the biggest driving force of this one. Third, there’s her being able to hear and speak to The Watcher at will – if all the other Guardians of the Multiverse have that same affinity for the same reason after meeting The Watcher in person, then that’s fine and makes sense – but since it’s just her so far, on top of all these other plot points, it feels like cutting it is better.
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2x01-03
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Only changes made was inserting the old first season promo, and the opening titles from the second season finale.
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2x04 – What If… The Red Guardian and Winter Soldier Teamed Up?
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I’m sure others are aware that we were supposed to get an episode in the second season featuring these two characters, with an appearance from Bill Foster also. As this episode slot is now free since Sakaarian Iron Man has been pushed to the first season where that belongs, I’m keeping this slot open for this episode when it airs with the rest.
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If the episodes of season 3 do come with a different opening title sequence than the logo from the original 2x09, I’ll probably put the second season finale’s one at the start. To match the rest of my edited second season properly, so it’s all consistent of course, and in the same vein as me putting the first season’s ‘Prism’ opening titles on the Grandmaster episode too, so the whole first season is consistent now, also.
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2x05 – What If… Captain Carter Fought the HYDRA Stomper?
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Because of what I already mentioned regarding Carter/Watcher, when she’s suddenly pulled to the 1602 Universe, she doesn’t call out to him.
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2x06-07
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Only real change was the addition of the first season’s old promo and the second season finale’s opening titles again.
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This is where my work on this season moves up a notch.
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2x08 – What If… The Avengers Assembled in 1602?
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On top of the new opening sequences, I made some changes to this episode to improve the writing and add some character consistency.
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Firstly, when King Thor sends his troops after Peggy, I removed his line about saying she’s cursed – so now it’s just frustration at her lack of progress in helping with the problem she was summoned there for, which has now it’s taken someone close to him too. It just feels neater.
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Secondly, Peggy’s talk with the Watcher on the rooftops has been removed – and without that exposition about the two time periods merging, the 1602 world feels more self-contained anyway, which I think I prefer.
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Thirdly, her corresponding conversation with The Watcher in the Tower of London is cut too – it’s an interesting chat which raises some interesting points, but still, too much going on with just one character in a show that’s meant to be about infinite people in infinite places. So now she’s shown to be imprisoned, she breaks herself out and that’s it.
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Lastly, her talk in the tavern at the end is trimmed. She sits, Monster Strange shows up, no mention of The Watcher from either of them, directly or rhetorically. If we do see other Guardians from Season One again, and they all show this same affinity, then I’ll put these conversations with him and Peggy back no problem.
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I think I would rewrite this episode if I could tbh, with getting rid of the ‘Forerunner’ element entirely and driving the plot with Tony Stark and the anti-magical metal “Mysterium” from the comics amongst Carter’s quest to clear her name instead. I made a separate post on the ‘WhatIfMarvel’ subreddit rather than type it all out here – and it turns out some people seem to like the idea, so that’s good.
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Also, as far as this episode’s general logic goes, there’s the question of if this Scarlet Witch could pull someone from another universe into theirs for whatever reason, why did E199999 Wanda not have the ability to do the same and had to ‘Dreamwalk’ in the Illuminati’s universe instead in the first place? But hey – different Wandas learning different spells for different reasons in different universes, I assume.
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Lastly, I would like to see more of this themed world, so I would not say no to a dedicated self-contained miniseries about this universe, a la the Marvel Zombies spinoff we’re supposed to get some point in the future. See what’s different and how, see what’s the same and how, what’s a feasible equivalent, introduce more of the other 1602 heroes. Like minstrel/archer Daredevil, Peter Parquagh’s Spider-Man, Black Widow to sharply contrast between the 21st century one Peggy’s used to and this new one – maybe the Royal Court’s chief assassin or something – perhaps Lady Sif and the Warriors Three can be Thor’s bodyguards/elite fighters, I don’t know. (Maybe the latter will actually get some proper development before they’re killed this time….).
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2x09
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After the new ‘tree’ title sequences again, I changed this episode more heavily and restructured a lot of parts strongly, because there were quite a few things with the fights and writing logic and such that really seemed to not add up with what we’ve seen before - and I’ve seen a few other people make remarks about this kind of thing too, so I know it’s not just me.
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1- I got rid of the exposition about Peggy from The Watcher at the start of the episode, because we’ve all been watching the series – so we already know the details of her story. (The same kind of recap from the ‘Winter Widow’ episode earlier is fine, because that was the first we saw of her since last season.) Secondly, by having all this for her, it seems to be putting a lot of emphasis on just one character again – which, I think, goes against the spirit and “point” of the show which is supposed to be focusing on an infinite number of people in an infinite number of places, as I’ve mentioned before.
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I do think if this flashback was at the start of a season as a refresher, and not at the end when we already know this because we’ve just watched it weekly, I would probably mind it a lot less, but eh. I did include the exposition for Monster Strange though, it’s been far longer since we last saw him (and this is CC’s third episode in the season where she’s the main focus) and he’s the villain of this episode, so it’s not like writing him off as unimportant feels like it’s appropriate.
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2- One of the villains mentioned in the Sanctum Infinitum is Infinity Ultron, but he was destroyed & cannibalised by Zola and Infini-Monger took his place – so how did Strange wrangle them both safely all by himself when the two of them were locked in a pocket dimension with all 6 stones in play? And you can suggest he spent more time absorbing more creatures’ power, but if that was the case – and he could handle Ultron with all 6 stones by himself – surely he would be strong enough to re-capture Kahhori in an instant and stop Peggy interfering? Thus, the climactic fight against both of them would be over in 1 second? It just doesn’t work.
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(Also, what other creatures are there in a dead universe and how did he even leave his own universe in the first place when that was impossible without The Watcher’s help at all? But, I digress.)
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3- Following on from episode 8 with Peggy and the Watcher, their conversation is trimmed away for continuity’s sake. Now, he just exposits how that universe is different from the others while he and she look at Mount Skull-more together and he’s seen next to her from the back, but that’s it – no direct communication between the two of them either way.
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This means the other conversation they have is gone too – where they discuss Strange and him ‘getting involved’, unlike The Watcher. So now it goes from Peggy looking up at Mount Skull-more and then Kahhori coming up behind her, triggering their encounter.
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4- Once the Sanctum prison riot breaks out, the fight logic with Peggy vs Wanda’s zombies feels like it could be improved. Like allowing herself to be surrounded, rather than attacking first to maybe keep them spread out and distant, and seeming to have slow movements and reactions to their attacks and things. So I took out some small bits and shortened others, so it’s now more trimmed and a little bit leaner and tighter.
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5- Thanos from Rogers Hood’s original 21st century timeline getting dusted in the corridor when CC and Kahhori escape the Sanctum ‘prison riot’. He was wiped away by Infini-Monger using the stones, and the stones are the only thing that can destroy the stones, I get that, that’s not a problem. Except the stones on his gauntlet were glowing like they were active, and he was using them (or about to) – so surely the stones, and the being wielding, would be much more inherently resilient AGAINST the stones? Instead of just melting like a pile of dry leaves pretty much straight away? Even 2023 Thanos crippled half his body and almost died when they were destroyed but he still survived.
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This Thanos has now been removed, so Peggy and Kahhori now stop in the corridor with the dust cloud with Infini-Monger walking out of it in front of them instead. It’s quite jarring, unfortunately, but there isn’t much I can do about that.
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6- Kahhori and Infini-Monger: she should not have gotten him out of his armour like that – she has the power of one stone flowing through her, he has the power of six (glowing active again), you do the maths. If they’re glowing like they’re in use, they would surely be strong enough to naturally defend against the power of just one, even if it’s the armour with the power, not their wearer? To this end, I took out the shot of the stones powering up, to remove that aspect – now they’re just glowing because that’s what the stones do – it’s not perfect but it feels like it takes that edge off.
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Also, I shortened the stare-down between the two of them, because it really feels like the longer it’s drawn out, the more anticlimactic and too-easy the solution feels – plus I don’t REALLY buy that Erik wouldn’t immediately attack first, given his personality. Now it’s like he’s taken out of the armour before he can react rather than standing there like a sitting duck and kind of bringing it on himself by not striking first.
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The encounter still isn’t perfect, because the default was very poorly handled in my opinion – but her having the stones is unavoidable as far as the rest of the episode goes (hence why he’s still there when Infinity Ultron was removed, as well), and I can buy that a mortal super soldier can’t hope to defeat a (pseudo)immortal sorcerer without them – so….fine, it’s whatever. It’s still definitely not perfect, but it still feels like it takes a bit of an edge off at least.
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7- After this, I took a lot of time restructuring the main fight scene, because it felt like a lot wasn’t as good or logical as it could – or should – have been. First thing first: when CC and Kahhori first arrive at the forge, Strange tries to drop everyone in straight away (because why DIDN’T he just do that in the first place?). Only half of the women’s reaction is used, Kahhori immediately counters it, and the falling heroes and villains are returned back through the portals to their places in the Sanctum’s other rooms. Then the two heroes immediately start attacking Monster Strange, essentially busying him so much he can’t try to sacrifice everyone again.
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8- Next is Peggy knowing how to use the stones as soon as she has them – not to nitpick with a too-fine comb or anything, but how is that so? Just like her suddenly being able to see and hear the Watcher on her own will, like in 1602 and this episode – it’s this kind of thing that gives the impression that the season’s writing is being purposefully skewed in one person’s favour.
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To help with this, I removed her first shield toss at Monster Strange imbued with the Power Stone – so now he reminds her he defeated that armour once before, he tries and fails to sacrifice everyone immediately, Carter and Kahhori both attack straight away and he absorbs it and shrugs it off – actually making him seem more formidable. Also, I removed her reply to Monster Strange saying he defeated that armour once before – and before it didn’t have her in it: she hasn’t worn it before, so I doubt even SHE knows her full capabilities while wearing it – also, what’s wrong with a little humility?
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Finally, before she uses that power beam from her armour’s chest, I added a flashback from the previous finale where Ultron uses the Power Stone, essentially reminding/inspiring her to use it herself – making her suddenly using that ability a bit more feasible. I used my usual style for flashbacks/forwards with this – but the colour saturation is at 33% rather than 0% this time, to make the colour of the power Ultron’s using that visible purple to communicate it to the audience properly.
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Ideally I’d like to remove her suddenly being able to stop and destroy the 3 dragons with the PS (feels too powerful too quickly), but the duel can’t progress without it, so that’s that. Plus, Strange’s comment after about her figuring the armour out does set the stage for the rest of the fight, so there’s that too.
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9- Next was her using the Space Stone to get her shield back straight away and even attacks him from behind with it – I changed it so she throws it, Strange dodges, goes to attack before Kahhori cuts him off, and THEN Peggy gets her shield back while he’s distracted. Again, it feels more realistic for her to not know how to do that immediately, and that idea occurring to her more gradually is better since she’s never worn the stones before.
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10- Following that, I changed it so that after the uses the PS to drag Monster Strange down out of the air, there’s no drag and kick. He just lands, then gets up, then deals with the energy beams on both sides until he creates dopples of himself. Again, just to make him seem a little more formidable and less like a punching bag.
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11- When CC clones herself with the Reality Stone to match Monster Strange’s duplicates, the ensuing fight is cut significantly. Now, the first part with the Carter Clones assembling happens, some Strange cuts are restructured, it goes right into Strange telling her it doesn’t have to end this way and trying to dissuade her, and it goes right into CC leaping at Strange before he turns her clones into butterflies and quickly gains the upper hand once more. This actually works better shot-wise, because before the Strange dopples swoop in and the fight ensues, then when CC leaps at him before her clones are all disintegrated it shows them standing still and not fighting. The audio was a little tricky to get right with how things are restructured, but hopefully it’s okay.
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Again, I’m trying to make MS seem more threatening, foreboding and capable, rather than having him regularly trounced at every turn. Especially after he’s trained and mastered his abilities for centuries next to opponents who does have infinite power – but little to no knowledge or training in it – and someone with 1 stone’s power flowing through her for however many months/few years from her episode to now.
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12- After Carter breaks from Strange’s trick from the ‘Project Rebirth’ room, he tries sacrificing everyone again – with the other half of the heroes’ reaction – and missing things like the surprise of the heroes and villains from the other rooms as they fall through the portals (because why would they be stood on the same spot twice after what happened before?). The shots of them coming through has been mirrored, and them falling towards the forge has been flipped entirely, for variety from earlier use of that same footage.
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13- Two things back-to-back. Firstly, before CC uses the Time Stone to freeze the prisoners, there’s a small flashback (in my normal style reduced to 33% again) to that same move from Infinity Ultron against the Guardians of the Multiverse. This is now something CC does logically know how to do with the Infinity suit, because she’s seen it done before and is just replicating it now – and it’s good to tie it into the previous finale like this. Also, the same happens with Strange undoing it now, linking with him fighting Ultron doing the same thing last season.
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Secondly, Monster Strange now just says his world must be reborn – nothing about other worlds perishing. So now he’s more singularly focused, and there’s less generic supervillain doom, especially from someone who started as a hero and was meant to be back towards that track after destroying everything.
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14- When the sacrificed heroes and villains fall into the forge, CC and Kahhori getting all the multiple gear-ups is the absolute definition of “overpowered”, so I don’t like it much and never have. But on the other hand, what can I do about it given how the rest of the fight works out? Kind of a tricky spot.
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I trimmed the fight down as best I feasibly could – still trying to make MS look as strong as possible instead of being easily beaten at every turn – and sort of trying to minimise him getting battered around constantly before he starts to deform to his Monster guise. Cut mention of Christine again once he’s deformed, trying to minimise him not learning his lesson from last season as much as possible.
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15- One thing I would have changed is CC finishing Strange off with the Infini-punch. It feels like the best way to break through Strange’s many layers of magic and forms, so I get it, but still – Peter Quill was half-Celestial (as in, half-GOD) and he couldn’t touch one stone by himself without it starting to immediately kill him. To say nothing of all of them killing Tony, wounding Hulk one of them openly deforming and damaging 2014 Thanos just by touching one and punching CM with it – and a Titan like him is openly stronger and more powerful than any super-soldier.
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But, again, what can I realistically do with how things work out?
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One thing I did change right at the end was Strange’s admission that he can’t shut the forge down because his grief is too strong, as I’m trying to soften the blow of him not learning his lesson from last season again. Now it goes from him just saying he can’t, to CC saying Christine wouldn’t want this (before the monster pops up).
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16- The last thing. When the Watcher and CC are in MS’s rebooted universe, their conversation is trimmed slightly, because I’m torn on something. I excised the Watcher saying he didn’t need to intervene because she did – as it feels like he’s putting her up to his level with things, again putting too much importance and focus on a single person in a show that’s meant to focus on the infinite. (Especially an even enhanced regular individual, and not an actually ‘natural multiversal’ being like him).
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They talk on the bridge, about Strange conquering his demons in spite of himself, they talk about almost losing everything but they didn’t, and then that’s it. After that, finally, the episode carries on to the end.
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I would have liked to have done more with the Season 2 finale, and maybe rewritten it if I could have. Mostly to address the undoing of Monster Strange’s arc from season 1, possibly bringing in Incursions (or the aftermath of one) to tie into live-action again, and a whole new Strange variant from that – maybe one that could tie into the events of ‘Multiverse of Madness’. Again, I wrote that out in the actual ‘WhatIfMarvel’ sub rather than spelling it all out here.
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Honestly, I’m still not a fan of the Season 2 finale, because of the disservice it did to Monster Strange and his character arc from the first season on a lot of levels. But hopefully with these edits in the finale episode, the story we got – for better or worse – makes more sense, runs more smoothly, has more forgivable logic with the characters we’ve seen before, and is easier to swallow overall.
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This same episode feels like it could work better as an overall series finale for the whole show, rather than just the end of a standard season. Because most of it feels like Cameo & Easter Egg Porn like Deadpool 3 (it did it well, so I’m not complaining), it feels like it’s a more fitting end for everything and everyone in the sense of giving them one final appearance together before they’re never seen again. Maybe if the finale for the third and final season is underwhelming, especially for the show as a whole, I can reconfigure and structure this episode to be a finale for that instead with the opening titles and such.
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Footnote: I am merely a self-taught editor and VFX artist here, as such, some areas might be visibly mostly good – as I have to be realistic with the footage in front of me and what I can do with it, of course. If you do have any particular notes and feedback, feel free to give me your thoughts, but please be constructive and don’t be an ass about it.

An edit I’ve put some time into on and off for quite a while this year, and late Spring ‘22, because I’ve always had a very specific vision and idea of what I want to do, but my ability to pull it off is very limited because of certain things not being available properly from Marvel themselves.

Specifically: I remember all the individual episode promos on social media for the first season that were very clearly TVA-themed. I always really liked this idea because those teasers, with The Watcher’s voice and a clear diagram of a branching timeline, made it look like a very clear “successor-series” of sorts to ‘Loki’ Season 1 and very neatly bound them together (especially with how much the Sacred Timeline splits and branches off as soon as He Who Remains is killed).

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The problem is: most of the promos DO exist and are easy to find, but only in that social media viewing format where the scale and resolution is clearly designed to be viewed in portrait mode on a phone screen, rather than widescreen on a TV.

I’ve managed to do all the episodes of Season 1, but less than half of them have the widescreen promo, unfortunately – and the rest have the 4:3ish ratio instead – so that kind of sucks. However, I can always come back and update this later if I do find more of the widescreen versions, and maybe even a viewer of this post knows where I can find the rest properly and help point me in the right direction – so who knows?

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Episodes 1x01-03

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For these episodes, I put the 4:3 ratio TVA promo at the start of the episode, an edit notice at the end and no story changes. The promos themselves have audio from the episode coming in before the visuals change, so I cut the sound off at that point and faded it out gradually to ease the transition before the visuals changed – hopefully it still works.

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1x04 – What If… Iron Man Crashed Into the Grandmaster?

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This episode was originally going to be a part of Season 1 before it was delayed and pushed back by the studio, as I’m sure most people know by now – so I worked on putting it back where it belonged.

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To this end, I got rid of the Watcher’s exposition about Multiverse Guardian Gamora’s story and put one of Season 1’s episodes’ opening credits in place at the start, so it matches the rest of that season. The opening credits from Monster Strange’s episode were the least contradictory based on the appearing names, so that’s the one I went with – Gamora’s voice actress, Cynthia McWilliams, is unfortunately cut off, but let’s credit her here instead.

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I put this episode in this slot because of the order The Watcher assembles The Guardians out of their respective universes in the original finale. He assembles them after retreating to Monster Strange’s universe from Ultron first, and from there they all appear in episode order – with Sakaarian Iron Man and Gamora appearing between T’Char-Lord in the original Episode 2 and Infini-Monger in the original Episode 6 – and 4 is in the middle of that, so why not?

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Episodes 1x05-7

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Now with the Gamora episode re-inserted, the following episodes are pushed back one in the sequence, with Monster Strange appearing in episode 1x05 to the Guardians of the Multiverse in 1x10.

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The TVA promos here are still in the only available, 4:3, ratio.

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1x08 – What If… Thor Were an Only Child?

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The only change I made was the TVA-themed teaser for this episode – thankfully the widescreen version this time, and an edit notice at the end of the credits, hopefully they both work well.

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1x09 – What If… Ultron Won?

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As with above, those were the only changes I felt necessary, so those were the only ones I made - and another widescreen promo thankfully.

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1x10 – What If… The Watcher Broke His Oath?

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As above in widescreen at the beginning of the episode, but also a small change at the end. When The Watcher put Nuclear Natasha in another world that lost its Widow, I put in a small flashback to episode 1x03, in my usual visual style. This ties them together strongly, and also that episode feels like it ends with a clear set-up for a sequel – but The Watcher says he doesn’t normally DO sequels (and the ‘Winter Widow’ episode was probably a one-off because of that), so maybe this kind of follow-up to that story is all we’re going to get, unfortunately.

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Ideally I would love to continue with the first season and finish the rest of the episodes in the proper widescreen format, ‘completing the set’ as it were, but that really depends on what I can find online as far as the TVA promos are concerned. Hopefully I can find more another time and pick this back up again later, but we’ll see of course.

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Footnote: I am merely a self-taught editor and VFX artist here, as such, some areas might be visibly mostly good – as I have to be realistic with the footage in front of me and what I can do with it, of course. If you do have any particular notes and feedback, feel free to give me your thoughts, but please be constructive and don’t be an ass about it.

A small but hopefully effective fix, to the previous respective edit projects I’ve done, rather than a whole new edit in itself. [https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/The-Astonishing-Ant-Man/id/116776] -&- [https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/The-Astonishing-Ant-Man-Ghosts-of-The-Past/id/116849].

I found on rewatching these two films myself this week that when it came to scenes where the theatrical footage and audio goes into the extra/deleted scenes and vice versa, the audio itself is quite jarring and that isn’t good.
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This was especially noticeable in scenes where the theatrical and deleted goes back and forth throughout an entire scene, like Darren Cross’ presentation in his “Futures Lab” or Hank Pym explaining the real history of the Ant-Man and Mitch Carson in the old days of SHIELD in his basement – both in the first film.

I also found across both films that the deleted scenes’ audio not only had some background music or ambient noise that wasn’t in the theatrical footage, but the volume itself was also louder, sometimes very noticeably. I got around this by using audio blends and fades at the borders of each segment of footage where it went from theatrical to deleted and vice versa – hopefully softening the blow as the sound transitions between one and the other in the background throughout the whole scene. Lastly, I used a ‘gain/volume’ filter on the deleted footage to bring it down enough DB to match the theatrical footage by ear as best I could, so hopefully the level of sound itself is more consistent in that way too.
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I did also make some minor story changes with both, but only very small ones.
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In Ant-Man 2015, I added to the version I already did with the deleted scene in the Pym Residence’s basement when Hank and Hope are discussing Scott learning to use the suit, how he managed to break into the house and how maybe he’s an idiot savant (or just an idiot). This is around 47/48 minutes in.
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They discuss how Scott broke past a security system that refreshes it’s passcode every 1.5 seconds and how Scott was able to read the pattern and predict the code that would come next. I realised this is a bit of an empty statement, because it’s not referring to anything clearly specific, so I added a change to lend context to it and hopefully make it deeper with more meaning. Between Hank stating what Scott did and Hope’s immediate reaction questioning how, I put the footage from his break-in earlier in the film where he disables the alarm box outside the house near the roof – in my usual style for things being a flashback/forward. Now you have the line in the deleted scene showing Scott’s capability and prowess, and an example of that prowess from him in action to back it up – whether that’s what was being specifically referred to in that line of dialogue or not. (I think it was probably related to a different deleted scene I didn’t include because I didn’t like it as much).
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Aside from that, the only thing I changed is new title graphics reflecting this is the second version of the project – with the exact same growing and shrinking effects through use of size filters and footage keyframes.
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For the second film – speaking for both versions with and without the school sequence – on top of the same audio blending and volume fixes with the deleted scenes like the first film, I made more changes this time. Firstly, there was a portion of the extended deleted opening in Argentina that I did not mirror properly the first time around, so now it’s the right way round like it should be.
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Secondly, between the Buenos Aires flashback and the ‘present day’ parts in 2018, when Hank is talking to Hope about that mission and the plans to build the Quantum Tunnel in the meantime, I added another timestamp. It takes place in Aug ’15 about a month after Ant-Man 1 ends, so I clarified that, and in the same font and text placement as my timestamp card for that film too with Scott’s goodbye ritual from San Quentin Penitentiary – for consistency.
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Thirdly, the deleted scene I added with Burch and Uzman slowly closing the net on the lab and the Pyms and Scott in the bookstore. This time I added a proper visual transition to make going in and out of the scene better and easier. I do still think that deleted scene is a good one to include because it sets up their visit to Luis’ office with the “truth serum” later, making it less jarring, and it conveys the passage of time better with the Ant Gang in the meantime I think.
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What I mean by that is: in the theatrical film itself, it goes from Scott, Hope and Hank escaping Ava Starr and Bill Foster in that creepy mansion right to the Quantum Lab at full scale. In other words: first they only just escape from a place in the dark in the woods – then they’re suddenly inside of the now fully-grown lab, also in the dark in the woods – so how far away did they go exactly to escape and get set up again, but this time undisturbed and unseen? It does feel like having this segue into a different sequence – which in turn helps to set up ‘another’ sequence ‘much better’ – sort of covers their escape from Ghost and Foster much better, and makes it more excusable for them to get away farther and stealthier in the time NOT seen.
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Lastly, with the film’s final titles at the end of the plastic toy-like credits. Initially, I overlaid the custom title over a shot from the Quantum Realm that seemed to match the background and overall shape of the original shot very well, but was blurred to obscure the photorealism after a whole sequence of waxy action figure visuals.
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I changed it this time because there was a shot from the credits sequence that did this better – same kind of environment and shapes, but with the same look as the rest of the credits so it fits in a lot better. The new title card is the same as the old, save for the new V2 notice, and follows the same growing and shrinking movements again.
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While watching ‘GoTP’ this week, I did finally figure out why this film never clicked in my head as well as the first: there’s a lot of false starts throughout the film that keeps delaying the main goal or objective – usually with the lab being taken (or RE-taken) or someone being captured or arrested.
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But truthfully, I don’t have it in me to put a lot of thought and time into seeing what I can do with fixing or restructuring that if I can, because it sounds like a big thing. The last two months or so, I really just haven’t had the headspace to do a lot of work outside of job and family and such, so a small patchy fix to my old version feels like all I can manage right now. There’s still the project pipeline I’ve mentioned before with ~10 things on it, but I’ve only been tackling a handful, and only a little bit at a time, and only on a day where I feel like I actually have the bandwidth for it mentally. So, maybe things will pick up again, hopefully soonish, maybe not – I think a lot of it depends on how some things shake out for me personally in some areas, so we’ll see.
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Sidenote - is there any update on me tackling ‘Quantumania’? Sort of, but mostly no. In my first attempt at it right after I did and published the first two in April, I did do some basics like timestamping, some scene restructuring to hopefully improve pacing and throwing a few project names around.
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But the main thing was having some clear ideas on what I wanted to accomplish with changing the story and hopefully improving some characters, but not being sure HOW to make those ideas come to life with the actual changes to make. Like what scenes to restructure, or what dialogue to cut, or anything else – and it being much easier to throw myself into other projects and do those, sometimes start to finish, instead of actually sitting down and mentally tackling this for the last 5 months.
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Also, after watching ‘GoTP’ this week and thinking about where things could have gone from there but didn’t, ‘Quantumania’ feels much more like a ‘Kang Dynasty’ film than an actual Ant-Man film in a big sense. A lot of Scott’s world from the first two films we’re used to (San Fran, the Wombats, Maggie & Paxton, Ghost and Bill Foster & the Quantum ‘healing particles’ business etc) are suddenly only there for 15 minutes in SF’s case (yes, I counted), or just not there at all with no explanation for the rest (not even a quick cameo from any of them at Cassie’s birthday party at the end or something - which would have been better than nothing!).
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I think this isn’t really a good thing because we’re used to Scott’s world and his little corner of the universe, we like it, we’re familiar with it, so to have it so hollow so suddenly feels very jarring (at least to me). So, if I do end up tackling the film in the end and publishing it like the first two, would I actually publish it as an Ant-Man film or a Kang film? I’m honestly not sure at the moment.
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I’ve uploaded the new versions to the same ‘Ant-Man’ folder as before, and left the V1’s there - as usual, so you can pick and choose which one is right for you and your collection. If you like the new idea and think it’s better, great - if you thought the first draft was perfectly good on its own then also great - I’m leaving it in your hands.
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Footnote: I am merely a self-taught editor and VFX artist here, as such, some areas might be visibly mostly good – as I have to be realistic with the footage in front of me and what I can do with it, of course. If you do have any particular notes and feedback, feel free to give me your thoughts, but please be constructive and don’t be an ass about it.

An edit I’ve been working on a little over the last two months around my Star Wars Episode III.I edit, which has been stuck on 99% for ages, with the only thing left being getting a bespoke opening crawl done at the same film-grade quality (ideally for free). I started it last July and worked on it for 2 weeks before hitting a bad wall, but my second burst from the end of this May was much stronger. The most recent brick wall I hit was at the start of this month, but none of the solutions to create a crawl seem to work right, and I haven’t really touched it since.
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Also, I’ve been working on the “What If…?” series lately, but I’m limited by what’s available to create the vision I had in mind for the whole first season’s episodes, sadly. I might just upload what I’ve done for the sake of it, but who knows?
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Aside from that, I have about 10 other projects currently in my mental pipeline, including Marvel’s Echo & X-Men, a sort of ‘Phase 2’ giant overhaul of the Mandoverse based on my own projects I’ve already done, and another DC comics series project I’ve already gotten one episode sorted on.
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These are all at one degree of completion or another, it’s just finding the time and energy to work on that project on that day around everything else I’ve got going on. Also, this month has been quite heavy and difficult for me on a personal level, so there’s that – and why I haven’t been posting or publishing much of anything – but I’m dealing with it properly and have these projects as a productive and creative distraction on the days I feel I CAN work, so that’s good.
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Now, onto THIS project. The first 3 episodes were greatly helped along by the editor ‘Joshuabri’, who gave me permission to use his 720p chronological edit of “WandaVision” that takes the first 4 episodes, puts them in a neat order, and trims some of the extra fat. This way you get episode 4 working neatly around episodes 1-3 in a single large feature-length story of about 100mins – so credit and thanks to them for this.
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By reworking the series as I did with the help of their work, and being able to turn 4 episodes into 3, I was able to make the whole season an 8-episode story – which fits very well with the original “House of M” run of comics from 2005, which is also in 8 parts. With that in mind, I’ve named each episode an “Issue” instead, to tie it to the comics that little bit more.
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For each episode, I devised a formula to put the events in order, have my custom title sequence (with a red filter over the Marvel Studios intro for a Scarlet Witch Motif), and even keep the original ‘WandaVision’ titles in the respective episodes too. Each “Issue” would start in the real world, get to a natural stopping point, have my custom titles for the show, then go into the Hex until it reached a similar natural stopping point and have the appropriate WV titles. This way, each episode is consistent and works along the same lines, and the whole “TV show within a TV show” motif of the original series remains – with the ‘WandaVision’ sitcom Darcy and Jimmy watch being a part of the ‘WandaVision’ mystery series WE watch on D+.
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The custom intro I made was the result of me seriously lucking out. I found a YT channel with plenty of royalty free background videos, and inside – somehow against whatever great odds – was a video of a red mist (Wanda) and a yellow circuitry/figure background (Vision). I used them blended together for the background on the initial “House of M” logo I found (another good find on Pin like the Manticore medallion in my linear edit of The Witcher S1).
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For the background of the ‘Issue’ and episode name screen, there was even a purple smoke background animation that actually had a crackling embers motif with it (like not just Agatha, but also the stake at Salem) – and underneath it all, was the beginning of the series’ theme music in the start of the credits – so overall, I think it all worked great. All of the edit text with this, the ‘issue’ names and the series name at the end of the credits, is in the same text and style as the previous WV edit I did and published of just episodes 5&9, for consistency, which in turn was quite close to the original font of the series.
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“Issue #1: Living The Dream”
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The first episode, in the 1950s black & white aesthetic, on the ‘welcome to the neighbourhood’ dinner party, being introduced to “Agnes” and such.
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Working the release episodes around the chronological edit from ‘Joshuabri’ was very straightforward. All I really needed to do was put the custom series titles in between Monica Rambeau at the hospital and Monica at S.W.O.R.D and put the first episode’s credits on the end seamlessly. Lastly, with the blurriness at the end of the credits where the final ‘WandaVision’ titles appears, I replaced that with my own ‘House of M’ titles.
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The name is fairly straightforward: Wanda is immersed in a dreamworld, whether she consciously realises it yet or not.
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“Issue #2: Swinging Sorcery”
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The second episode in the next time period setting, with finding the mysterious small red and yellow helicopter, partaking in the Westview talent show, Wanda meeting the town newbie “Geraldine”, and so on.
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I needed to adjust things a little with the chronological edit to make things work with the formula I devised. It begins in episode 4’s footage with Jimmy briefing Darcy and the team about finding out what they can about Monica inside the Hex, and identifying the other ‘characters’/Westview residents. After Darcy and Jimmy see Monica in the “sitcom”, and Darcy talks says she has an ‘idea’ [to reach Rambeau] that feels like a good natural stopping point, so the reddened Marvel Studios logo plays out with my custom ‘House of M’ titles following. After that begins the next chunk of ‘Joshuabri’s chronological edit.

The episode’s story inside the Hex begins, with Wanda and Vision in their beds in the 60’s time period. They converse, the ‘Wandavision’ opening credits from that episode play, and Vision practices his magic routine, Wanda discovers the mysterious small red helicopter and so on. The only change I made to the chronological edit was at the end, when the Hex goes from black & white to colour inside it was very easy of me to put the original second episode’s ending and credits on – with my own project name at the end of them of course.
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The name of this episode is a spin on the decade it’s set in – being a 60’s era setting and theme, and obviously the magic therein.
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“Issue #3: Twins and Trouble”
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The episode from the 70s setting of the show, and this time I needed to adjust the episode and chronological edit quite a bit to match the formula I created for the whole series. This was a little tricky given how conversations and scenes flow in what I needed to change, but since this is the only episode that needed a big restructure to get around the limits of what’s there with real world/hex world, hopefully it was done well enough

It begins in the real world with the SWORD personnel setting up old chunky TV sets, before cutting to Darcy and Jimmy watching with the former asking why it switches time periods (the first half of that statement is saved for later). She and Woo discuss Wanda’s pregnancy – revealed at the end of the last episode so it’s consistent with the old episode and the new formula – and when Woo misunderstands her kids question and takes one of the crisps she’s offering, it’s really the only natural stopping point in the real world’s events before you get into the meat of things inside the Hex with Wanda and the twins being born.

After my custom opening titles, it begins with the original starting point of the streamed episode with the Westview doctor paying the Vision residence a visit to check up on Wanda’s pregnancy. That plays out as normal with the doctor leaving, the neighbour Herb cutting through the wall, and Wanda ballooning when Vision comes back in the house. Then, instead of the transition from Wanda & Vision talking about the fruit to Wanda using magic to assemble the baby’s room, I’ve put the original episode’s opening credits there instead – so the “TV show within a TV show” motif is present again.

Following that – Wanda nests, Vision reads up on things, and the neighbourhood glitches. When the house sprinklers go off, I put the original episode back in with Wanda drying everything – which was cut from the chronological edit because it appears on background screens in the real world instead, so it IS still present and in the right order, just not in the foreground.

Vision runs out of the house for help when the baby(s) start kicking, it briefly goes back to the real world with Darcy and Jimmy watching – the scene we just saw with Wanda asking Vision to get help is on one of their TV screens, and she remarks about the change in time periods from the 50s-70s – so they are still watching and paying attention in the real world and keeping track of things.

It cuts back to the chronological edit in the Hex with Wanda on her own before “Geraldine” shows up who helps her deliver the baby(s!), while it cuts back to real world as Darcy and Jimmy keep sharing the bag of crisps and watch her help Wanda with the delivery and they watch the twins being born.

The chronological edit continues as normal until Wanda talks to “Geraldine” about being a twin herself, here I added some extra material to make the scene deeper. After Wanda mentions Pietro by name, there are two very brief flashbacks to “Age of Ultron” back-to-back for a few seconds – colour saturation at 0, border vignette added, in my usual style, but also a slight reverb for the audio too, making it as “flashback”y as possible. I tried obscuring Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s face as much as possible to make things as consistent with “Pietro” in the hex as I could, so seeing Quicksilver run through the Ultron sentries in Sokovia and pick up Wanda next to Hawkeye (who now makes a brief cameo in this edit) hopefully stays as smooth as it can be.

After it cuts back to “Geraldine”, everything plays out in the chronological edit the way it comes for the rest of the episode/”Issue” until my own title at the end of the credits as usual. From there, I only work with the released episodes with creating this new story across the other “Issue”s, so the work of editor ‘Joshuabri’ comes to a comfortable close here, and I’m once again thankful for their permission to use their work in this project.
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The title comes from the very famous phrase associated with Witches from the Shakespearean tragedy “Macbeth”. I initially wanted to do the whole title: “Double, Double Twins and Trouble” – since twins are double of course and Billy & Tommy Maximoff are born in this episode, but it was too similar to the title of the following ‘Issue’ episode, so I cut it back and think it works just as well anyway.
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“Issue #4: Double-Edged S.W.O.R.D”
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This episode is mostly identical to the “episode 5” edit from my previous WandaVision project, where I just adjusted episodes 5 & 9 to cut down on the Wanda apologism and also restructure the finale’s ending to better lead and tie into other things.

I made some adjustments this time around to fit into the formula I devised for all episodes of the series. Now, it starts in the real world, has the adjusted SWORD briefing I changed before, then afterwards when Darcy, Jimmy and Monica are watching the Hex’s broadcast and the former wonders aloud what happens with Vision when he learns the truth [about how he’s alive and why] that feels like a good stopping point, so the series’ custom titles roll.

From there, it starts with the beginning of the streamed episode, in the Hex with Wanda and Vision trying to calm the twins. It plays out as normal, after the twins suddenly age up 5 years, the episode’s WV opening credits roll. Once they finish, it quickly cuts back to the real world briefly, with Darcy, Jimmy and Monica in the same place watching the same screen, which has the same frame from the end of the episode’s titles on it, so they’re still up to date with everything and going back into the Hex from there feels simple.

From there, with Billy and Tommy washing Sparky the dog in the kitchen sink, the rest of the released episode plays out as normal until the end of the credits where I have my custom end titles as usual.
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The name comes from Hayward trying to see what’s going on inside the Hex and then immediately trying to kill Wanda with the drone with no warning, even to his own personnel. Following this, when she emerges from the Hex to confront him, she turns his own squad against him as she leaves – so there’s kind of a lot of ‘double-crossing’ in one way or another.
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“Issue #5: Hex of Horrors”
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I had to restructure this episode again to meet the requirements of the ‘formula’ I set up with everything, but not too much, luckily.

It begins at the S.W.O.R.D base outside Westview where they’re examining the drone they used to attack Wanda with, talking about the aftermath of Hayward’s attempt on her life. After Rambeau, Darcy and Woo are led away but beat their escort and adopt disguises, it goes into the custom titles for the series.

Following that, the story in the Hex starts, with Billy in his comics “Wiccan” costume talking to the camera. That sequence plays out until ‘Pietro’ offers to take the boys for Halloween instead of Vision, and after it’s agreed and everyone’s in their costumes, it goes from Wanda telling everyone, especially Quicksilver and Speed to be on their best behaviour or she’ll turn him into a pickled herring, into the original Wandavision episode credits – keeping the ‘TV within TV’ trope again.

From there, it’s the episode playing out as normal like the streamed release. From trick-or-treating in the street to discovering Tommy has speed powers too like his uncle, to “Agnes” and Vision on the outskirts of the Hex, Billy’s telepathic powers coming in too, and the Hex expanding to save Vision’s life, also enveloping Darcy.
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The name is relevant to the Halloween theme of the episode, like a play on words for the famous “House of Horrors” and such.
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“Issue #6: Technical Difficulties, Please Stand By”
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Again, I had to do some small restructuring to meet my formula for the series. This time the episode starts at the SWORD retreat and after a short conversation where Hayward confirms they’re launching today, the series’ custom titles begin, after only 30 or so seconds out in the real world in fact.

After that, we go into the Hex with Wanda waking up in her costume from the night before. Once that continues as normal and it goes into the regular episode titles after a glitchy breakfast, we finally meet Vision, outside by the new circus of what used to be SWORD agents.

That continues as normal and the rest of the episode plays out unchanged from the original version. We see Wanda again, “Agnes” takes the twins, we heard about “Project Cataract” Monica gets her armoured rover vehicle, tries and fails to penetrate the Hex with it before doing it herself on her own, Darcy and Vision try getting back to town before meeting some convenient “distractions”, finally Wanda goes down into “Agnes”’ basement and meets Agatha Harkness for the first time.
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The name comes from the real-world phenomenon with TVs once the signal or reception gets bad and glitchy. To the point where for the custom titles for the series, and the new series’ title at the end of the credits, I actually added a glitch filter when editing – to make it as authentic to the title as possible, just for this episode.
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“Issue #7: Previously On….”
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I had to restructure and format this quite a bit, despite the fact this entire episode takes place inside the Hex. One of the ways I did this was not only shifting the episode’s original footage around in the story, but by adding flashbacks to deepen some lines and scenes, like in “Issue #3”, hopefully to great effect. I was always a little let down and annoyed at this episode for not going as far as it could have in quite a lot of areas where expositing details and background depth could have gone, so hopefully this fixes that.
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This “Issue” starts off with Agatha in Salem back in 1693, then after that sequence is done, it goes into the Marvel Studio titles, fading from my enhanced red to purple the entire time, before picking up in Agatha’s basement in Westview in November 2023.
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The episode continues as normal until the flashback gets to when Wanda and Pietro have their apartment building in Sokovia shelled by a Stark Industries missile. When Agatha says the only way forward is back and she makes a door to Baron Wolfgang Von Strucker’s lab appear, I put in a reverbed audio flashback from the post-credits scene of ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’, where you can hear Strucker say to Doctor List that this is “The age of miracles”. When Wanda steps through that door, the audio flashback continues, echoing with Strucker saying “There’s nothing more horrifying than a miracle….”.
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Next, when Agatha asks about the Maximoffs joining HYDRA and Wanda saying [she and Pietro] wanted to change the world, there’s a brief flashback to the Maximoffs in the first ‘Age of Ultron’ trailer in a civilian protest before they got their powers – zoomed in slightly to obscure most of .A.T-J.’s face so it doesn’t conflict with Evan-Moff in this series, as I did before with “Issue #3”.
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Next was probably my biggest change. I was always really quite irritated with this episode because it felt like such a huge missed opportunity to introduce at least the IDEA of mutation into the MCU with it. Even just having Strucker’s HYDRA doctors say out loud that it’s possible Wanda and Pietro were the only ones to survive the experiments because of an aberration in their blood/DNA or whatever would have been a great start to get that ball rolling in my opinion. Now, after the Mind Stone explodes out of its blue casing as part of Loki’s sceptre and its yellow energy engulfs the room, it goes into a black & white echoing short version of the title sequence of “X-Men: Days of Future Past” with the cells dividing and forming the DNA helix.
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Ironic that that was the only X-Men film to have that specific kind of thing in its opening sequence, given the Maximoff twins both appear in that film too, with Peters being that ‘Quicksilver’ for real, of course. This way, in the “Issue”’s story, you see Wanda hit by the energy cloud and you at least see the implication of how the process is changing her from the inside, affecting HER cells and changing HER DNA. With this either mutating her, or allowing the changes to happen safely when it was lethal for the other volunteers, because she already had some kind of mutation there the others didn’t. Personally, I prefer the latter.
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Following this, there’s a small change as Wanda looks into the energy cloud, before you can see the ethereal being reflected in her eye. I added Charles Xavier’s echoing voice in the background uttering the word “Mutation….” from the opening of X-Men 1 in 2000 to really hammer the point home. It might be a little bit much, but it felt like having it on top of the DoFP visuals was definitely too much at once, and hopefully this way it keeps even casual viewers abreast of what’s actually going on now in this new edited take on the story.
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After Wanda collapses and is said to be taken away to isolation, more of the post-credits scene from CA:TWS is shown, with the twins in their small side-by-side rooms showing their respective powers. Strucker’s echoing voice can be heard saying ‘sooner or later [the Avengers] will meet the twins.
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After that the rest of the episode plays out as normal, making it to the end in and out of The Hex with White Vision being activated with the only other change of mine being the edit’s new title at the end of the credits, like the other “Issue”s/episodes.
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This episode is the only one that shares the name of the released episode, only with some ellipses added because it’s always a very leading statement at the start of a TV episode
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“Issue #8: No More Magic”
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This episode is the only one that doesn’t take my series formula into account. Because it’s the finale and the episode that deals with everything the season has built up to so far, including an immediate cliffhanger from “Issue #7”, it feels like getting the opening Marvel logos and custom titles out of the way straight away so everything plays out beginning-to-end completely uninterrupted is much better.
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The story of this episode is the same as my previous edit of the ‘WandaVision’ series where I changed and restructured the episode’s ending. Now, Monica’s sacrifice line to Wanda is still cut out, but a deleted scene has been added which finally explains the “missing persons” thing which drew Jimmy Woo to Westview in the first place where he discovered everything with the Hex after he already arrived. The Photon/Skrull set-up is still removed, and had the mid-credits scene Wanda in the cabin with the Darkhold in Sokovia, finishing with the post-credits scene being a very Wanda-centric version of the teaser trailer for “Multiverse of Madness”.
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The name comes from the famous “No more Mutants” line from the end of the original ‘House of M’ run of comics in 2005. But this time, it comes from Wanda finally doing the right thing and taking the Hex down and setting everybody in Westview free – and also stripping Agatha of her powers after beating her and imprisoning her in her dream-sona. Building on that, the series having a magical focus more than anything else, even with my pushing the Mutants angle in “Issue #7”, means the title of the whole series could stand for “House of Magic” in this case. Alternatively, because of the TV focus, it could also be “House of Media”, but probably not – ‘Magic’ makes more sense so I’m sticking with that.
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Footnote: I am merely a self-taught editor and VFX artist here, as such, some areas might be visibly mostly good – as I have to be realistic with the footage in front of me and what I can do with it, of course. If you do have any particular notes and feedback, feel free to give me your thoughts, but please be constructive and don’t be an ass about it.

I’d love some details on this if it’s not yet completed

A project from this mid-late April of this year that follows the same vein as my edits of Star Wars’ “The Book of Boba Fett” and Marvel’s “The Eternals” with consolidating events more neatly to tell a more cohesive and well-ordered story.

This project is split into two halves. First there is this ‘One-shot’ I’ve created, and the main meat of the project is a re-cut taking the present-day portions of each episode, after the events of the “Hawkeye” series, and putting it into a single theatrical-length film: “Echo: The King’s Shadow”, which is not yet complete.
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Truthfully, I only did this project over 2 days because I was stuck for something productive to do in my spare time that week.

The big and complex project I (re)started early March this year, which I mentioned in other publish documents around April-ish, feels like it’s stalled and ran out of steam a little, and working on it feels it’s getting a little draining and like it’s not a good dopamine farm anymore. As such, I’m probably taking a break from it for a little while – but I’ve invested a lot of effort into it, so I’d like to pick it up again some time again, hopefully soon.

That being said, it’s the kind of project that will hopefully be very pleasantly surprising, so I’ll be keeping all the details under wraps until the official release – whenever that happens to be. Anyway, onto the actual project at hand here….
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“Marvel One-Shot – Echo: The Prodigal Daughter” (40 mins)
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With this project, I relegated the flashback portions of each episode to a single episode that tells Maya’s story through her youth, to a member of Kingpin’s organisation, even as his “Niece” when they get closer personally over time. The only added changes for the most part was clearing up some of the timestamps where necessary, so the events across the episodes are more solid – and since the events of “Hawkeye” are included in this, needless to say spoilers if you still haven’t watched that yet somehow.
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It starts with Maya, her mother and the wounded bird she hits with her slingshot, from episode 5. Then the main introduction of episode 1 in 2007, on the fateful night Maya suffers great loss and the aftermath with her father in the same episode. Following this is the flashbacks from episode 4 in 2008 with the Kingpin from the show’s trailer beating on the ice cream vendor who treats Maya dismissively. Afterwards is back in episode 1 with Maya at the gym as a child, her father as a member of the Tracksuits, and Fisk watching over her – growing up into a young woman in the same sequence on the fighting mat. This same episode 1 portion continues with The Ronin slaughtering the tracksuits during The Blip – marked at 2020 by me – and all the things Maya does afterwards to process her grief: pushing her family away by not responding to Bonnie’s texts at her father’s graveside, getting herself into motorcycle trouble in NYC and being used as part of Kingpin’s organisation – she confronts The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen and exceeds her “Uncle”’s expectations. Next is her ‘final lesson’ from episode 4 in 2021 when she and Fisk are the only ones the other can trust, and his interpreter is “dismissed” during Sunday night dinner. Finally, everything is back to episode 1 again as it all catches up with “Hawkeye” in December 2024 – the year stamped on one of the shots by me – all culminating in Maya trying to leave New York when Ronin tells her the truth about her father’s death – but not before she hunts for Fisk herself first….After she deals her justice to him, the series’ credits roll.
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Since episode 1 of the released episodes is essentially a giant “previously on….” for the most part as it is, that’s the bulk of this reformatted ‘One-Shot’, and the rest mostly comes from the same order of the released episodes. The exception being episode 5, since that’s the only one Maya has both legs all the way through, so it’s the default first one chronologically. This way, the Choctaw people are mentioned and referenced, then seen shortly afterward as their history is recounted properly like the beginning of episode 1, so it runs smoothly regardless of being out of release order.
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It’s a longer length than some of the episodes themselves, so calling it a “One-Shot” is pretty ironic, but compared to the film re-cut and its length, it’s more apt.
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Film re-cut: “Echo – The King’s Shadow” (currently ~2hrs 24mins)
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This was mostly a simple threading-together of all the present-day portions of the five released episodes, but there are a few story changes to improve things or remove some contradictions on the cards.
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I did do the threading-together back in mid-late April at the same time as putting together the “One-Shot” – but I just couldn’t get into doing the project properly. I had a few ideas about things I could cut or change or whatever to try and improve the story, but with half a dozen ideas across, I kept hitting my head against the walls I kept running into because the story seemed to keep fighting back, annoyingly.
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For example; I was thinking about changing a certain character’s motivation about a big event, so it’s something more logical and understandable, but the direct consequences of the event play off the first motivation strongly, even if that motivation seems to come out of left field and kind of sucks – for lack of a better descriptor.

Also, I was thinking about changing the formula of the climax so it made more overall sense but pulling that off in a way that’s realistic amongst the other components in that same scene is difficult, because the scene would be improved, but there are glaring reasons why the improvement wouldn’t work in that situation, so it’s tricky. Furthermore, taking those tricky elements out to sidestep the issue entirely isn’t an option, because further important elements hinge on THOSE tricky elements, so it’s just a hassle….
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The story of ‘Echo’ overall is still not the best written in the last few years, but – now hopefully – the way in which the story is delivered would be noticeably improved, so that ought to be something at least.

I’m not sure when I’ll actually find it in me to get back on this project and give it another whirl, since I’ve already let it lie for two months as it is. I suppose when inspiration strikes me to work through each of the feature-length story changes and try to find workable solutions to the issues I faced before. It’s honestly like creative juices just will not flow on this project when I try and tackle the main bulk of it, unlike others – even writing this documentation, everything’s just kind of “bleh” and my brain isn’t really engaging properly, unlike the others.
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To get out in the way of a big question that may present itself off the back of revealing this project: now I’ve done this, does that mean I’m planning on doing cinematic re-cuts of the other MCU miniseries’ too? In a word – no.

Tackling this cinematic recut was easier than doing the theory of the others – because it was 5 episodes released, not 6, and 1 episode of that was essentially set in the past as it is – so relegating a big part of the total story to its own smaller self-contained thing was very simple and straightforward. Then, with the remaining 4 episodes, the total runtime was ~2hrs 30, which is a hefty feature-length as it is, before the changes I was thinking of making.

As I mentioned before; a dedicated “Kang Dynasty” saga of films would be good, but doing a recut of ‘Loki’ seasons 1 & 2 to make parts 1 & 3 (Quantumania being part 2, of course) is still not on the table for now. All because those stories are all more consistently contained with timeline and themes, so it’s probably going to be much more work re-cutting them than this, both times – to say nothing of Moon Knight, TFaTWS and Hawkeye.
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Footnote: I am merely a self-taught editor and VFX artist, so some areas may well be visibly mostly good, as I have to be realistic with the footage in front of me and what I can do with it. If you do have any particular notes and feedback, feel free to give me your thoughts, but please be constructive and don’t be an ass about it.

Very interested 😃

[Update from my previous post on here about this from 6 months ago]

I took it upon myself to reclaim some of my childhood somewhat by getting back the specific versions of the original two Star Wars trilogies I used to watch again and again on VHS and some DVD. Though finding them myself online in any measure of good quality always seemed to be very difficult, so I admittedly had a bit of a Thanos moment and said “Fine, I’ll do it myself”.
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I saw ‘The Phantom Menace’ in the cinema when I was nearly 5 years old (I still remember the weird “Midichlorian count” line visual glitch) and used to watch it on its VHS release, ‘Attack of the Clones’ on VHS and DVD shortly afterwards, ‘Revenge of the Sith’ in cinema and DVD, and the Original Trilogy in the 1997 special edition VHS tapes in the special gold and black box.
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I did this because I’ve viewed all the subsequent releases as kind of the same: some of the changes were better than others, and others did feel more warranted than others in all fairness. But, despite that, I always found myself barely watching them on DVD or Blu-Ray because it just wasn’t the same, and they just weren’t clicking in my head the same way as before when I used to watch and really enjoy them when I was younger.
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I used the Blu-Ray as a source for the prequels, and the ‘Despecialized’ editions for the Originals. These were opposite ends of the spectrum; the Blu-Ray had changes added to it from itself and carried over from the DVD before so I had a lot of things to take away to get it right – and the Despecialized’s had no changes at all post-1983, so I had a lot of things to add to get it right.
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July/August 2022 – Episode 1: 2hrs13mins. The droideka encounter screen with the Viceroy and ‘Force-Speed’ effects are in their old state, the podrace and starting grid sequence is shortened to its original length, I took away the air taxi on Coruscant so it’s back to the original skyscraper transition from the landing platform to Palpatine’s apartment, puppet Yoda returns in the temple and Naboo, the chants of “Vote Now!” in the senate after Padmé moves for a vote of no confidence in Chancellor Valorum.
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January 2023 – Episode 2: 2hrs23mins. I rearranged the scene through the power couplings during the Zam Wessell chase on Coruscant, took Shmi’s lines out of Anakin’s nightmare (actually a shame, it does feel like it adds things and makes it better), and corrected the drawn out scenes on Geonosis with Dooku escaping – both visually and in that scene’s music.
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January 2023 – Episode 3: 2hrs20mins. Thankfully very few changes this time. I changed the transition from Obi-Wan pensive after Mustafar to Anakin’s remaining hand clawing himself up on the lava shore and knew I needed to change the appearance of the hut structure on Kashyyyk where Yoda has his long-range briefing with the Jedi Council about General Grievous on Utapau. But finding a high-res clip of the structure as it appeared before the Blu-Ray was very difficult, so I kind of had to leave the DVD clip in – it’s not perfect but thankfully it only lasts a few seconds, so it’s a good placeholder until a better-quality clip of the same hut scene emerges and I can insert that later.
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December 2022 – Episode 4: 2hrs5mins. Using the despecialised version of the film as the base, I added special effects from the Blu-Ray that were in the 1997 editions (mostly the scenes with lots of VFX throughout, like those in space), but not all of them to make sure I omitted the ones from the 2004 special edition DVD and the Blu-Ray ones that most people felt were just unnecessary. Greedo shoots first (sorry), ugly Jabba appears (sorry), audio is updated from the Blu-Ray version and imposed over the despecialised footage in some places like the Tusken attack, Obi-Wan’s dragon call, movement in the trash compactor etc.
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Episode 5: 2hrs7mins. I didn’t do anything with this as this is not mine – this is actually the fan restoration that was completed by the editor “Adywan” that I was lucky enough to find Spring last year, so all credit there goes to them and not me as it’s all their good work.
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December 2022 – Episode 6: 2hrs15mins. Principle of this was the same as the ‘New Hope’ project with it having the despecialised version as the base and the cutting and pasting different sources in certain scenes, usually in the VFX-heavy space scenes. The Sarlaac has a beak again, the lightsaber blades cross into each other when Luke tries to kill the Emperor, the ending celebration doesn’t include Theed or the old Jedi Temple or Senate Office Building on Coruscant, Sebastian Shaw’s Anakin ghost appears.
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[Update: mid-June ‘24]
Hi everyone. Just a quick and minor update. Firstly, I put back in one of the Sarlaac shots when one of Jabba’s henchmen falls in for the first time, which I missed before.
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Secondly, I’ve never been very satisfied with the way the final ending for RoTJ came out in my edit the first time around: the footage from the original 1997 galactic celebration wasn’t the best quality when I found it and the options were very limited. So the one I ended up using turned out to be very juddery in the export, and just didn’t look very good because it wasn’t very smooth at all. Luckily, I found a new one to use – in much better visual quality this time – and implemented that instead, which makes the exported version much smoother as I’m very thankful for.
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Thirdly, I left the Endor party as the Blu-Ray version pretty much all the way through the first time – I think the dopamine farm was running out on the project, so I was ending it a little short and tired. Now with the new and improved version of the galactic celebration, it’s followed up by the Endor party done properly this time. I took all the parts from the ‘Despecialized Edition’ source and put them in place of the Blu-Ray shots, keeping the audio for consistency. Because the Endor party was different from the theatrical version to the ones afterwards, I had to granularly match everything from the original as close to the Blu-Ray shots as possible frame-by-frame – but it was straightforward enough, so that’s good.
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Hopefully now the end of the film looks better, and by extension the saga can have a smoother and higher-quality send-off to the story and characters we all love so much.

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As with my work on ‘Andor’ season 1, the size and source quality of the original files means the file size of each of my exports are all on the larger side. Especially with the ‘Despecialized’ versions of the Original Trilogy films being around 20GB each in their own right, each film I’ve put out here is around 10-18GB – just to consider before you download.
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Footnote: I am merely a self-taught editor or VFX artist here, so some areas may be visibly mostly good, as I have to be realistic with the footage in front of me and what I can do with it. If you do have any particular notes and feedback, feel free to give me your thoughts, but please be constructive and don’t be an ass about it.

What’s the total size of this project at the full feature length?

Definitely sounds better than what we got - I’d love a link if there is one still

A companion piece of sorts to my re-cut of ‘Zack Snyder’s Justice League’ from the end of last month. This time I took the Ultimate Edition of ‘Batman v Superman’ and split it into two parts – roughly 90 minutes apiece.

As with last month’s DC project, the runtime was more or less the only thing about it I found untenable. So after looking for an edit that already met the middle of runtime/ quality of BvS’ theatrical runtime and ultimate’s depth and not finding something that ticked all the boxes I was hoping for, I had one of my Thanos’ “fine, I’ll do it myself” moments and made this.
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The project name comes from “World’s Finest Comics” from the early ‘40s to the mid ‘80s, where Batman and Superman were the leading heroes of almost every issue ever printed – and Wonder Woman was a consistently recurring character also, especially in the ‘70s run.
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The names of each part are mainly inspired by the first teaser trailer released for BvS, way back in April 2015, where Superman is spoken about as a figure of controversy – and the reactions to his existence, and presence on Earth – the good and the bad. I’ve always enjoyed that trailer very much and thought it was a fantastic way of setting the stage for the film and where everyone stands at the very beginning.
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I did keep the style consistent with my ZSJL edit as a deliberate bridge between the two projects – with the text fonts and even the same project re-cut notice from the other film. To that end, I did try to avoid redundancy by not recycling words in the title, from both projects.
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Part 1: “False Hope” – 1hr 40mins
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The film begins the usual way, with the film’s original title in the opening credits omitted, and continues through the Metropolis sequence from “Man of Steel” until after Bruce’s reaction to his wrecked Wayne Financial building. There, instead of just cutting to the ‘18 months later’, it goes to a custom title card of the two heroes’ symbols merged together, and the “World’s Finest” title – underscored by a small repeating note, intended to subtly evoke the Kryptonian world engine.
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Following that, the film continues as normal, with the Capitol Hill trial/hearing of the Metropolis incident against General Zod, Faora and the others being the ‘climax’ of sorts.
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After the Capitol Hill explosion, when it cuts to black from Bruce’s expression, instead of going into the next scene, it cuts to a ‘To Be Continued….” card instead, with the film’s end credits playing out. At the end, though, instead of the film’s original title and edition label there’s a custom title card with the heroes’ joined symbols – similar to the films’ WF title card – but with a plain background and the film part’s title laid out instead.
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I chose this name for the first half because I’ve always loved the shot in the trailer when all the voices build up before cutting out at the vandalised Metropolis attack memorial. It comes into play a lot in the first half and continuing threads from ‘Man of Steel’, in two big ways especially. First, Superman is supposed to bring and exemplify hope, but all he’s done so far is inspire anger and dread – even through very limited fault of his own. Secondly, there’s Lex’s attitude towards Superman and what he believes to be false about the power he has, goodness he intends, and how those two things go together – given his experiences with his own father.
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Part 2: “God VS Man” – 1hr 33mins
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It starts out a little bit behind, with Wally’s wheelchair exploding and everything up to Bruce’s reaction as he reads the message in the newspaper while watching the Capitol Hill situation unfold on the TV. Following that is the same Warner Bros and such opening titles from Part 1 for consistency between the two shorter films, all framed in my usual visual style for flashbacks/forwards, with 0 colour saturation and a border vignette.
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Once it catches up to that, there’s the same custom “World’s Finest” logo and title card for I made, with the same musical cue as before attempting to evoke the noise of the World Engine from the Metropolis incident very subtly.
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Following that, it picks up with the aftermath on Capitol Hill, now in colour, and the rest of the film plays out as normal until the end. Then, like Part 1, at the end of the credits, instead of the film’s original title and edition label there’s a custom title card with the heroes’ joined symbol, but this time it lingers a little longer and morphs into a different version. This one incorporates Wonder Woman’s symbol in it too, showing the trinity’s union, before fading out again.
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I chose the name for this half, right from Lex’s line I’ve always liked in the first teaser trailer, because that’s what the second half of the film is increasingly about. First Metropolis and then Capitol Hill, public opinion on Superhumans gets drastically worse - then, also, everything to do with Lex Luthor pitting BvS against one another, and him violating and tampering with nature to create the inhuman monster Doomsday through his ‘playing God’ and meddling in everything Krytonian biology.
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Footnote: I am merely a self-taught editor and VFX artist here, as such, some areas might be visibly mostly good – as I have to be realistic with the footage in front of me and what I can do with it, of course. If you do have any particular notes and feedback, feel free to give me your thoughts, but please be constructive and don’t be an ass about it.

also interested

Is this whole thing still alive? A lot of links here have expired 😕

The '97SE vhs tapes are the Star Wars OT I grew up on, but I’ve rally struggled finding a good quality version of them since, really bums me out 😕

I’m aware of Adywan’s ESB reconstruction, and it’s very good - are there any for ANH and RoTJ available?

[Hopefully a week and a half is enough to let everyone catch up, so I can talk about all the episodes here without spoiling them for anyone]

The third and final edit of this show, and I’m sad to see it end. Like the others, I’ve grouped the season’s episodes by what feel like the most appropriate story arcs, and made two versions of each to accommodate the individual season’s alternate logo – as I like to differentiate, like my work with ‘The Mandalorian’.

There are a few surprises in this season though, I’ve found opportunities to link the three seasons together through flashbacks from archive footage that I’ve created to tether the show together as a whole. Like other flashbacks/flashforwards I’ve put in other projects, I’ve made the anachronism as visually distinct as possible from the rest of the story there, with having zero colour saturation and a vignette filter.

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For clarification: the arcs numbers here are based on, and following on from, the edits of the first 2 seasons I’ve done– 7 from Season 1, and 9 from Season 2 with the arcs themselves and the standalone episodes I added the alternate logo to. Those episodes came with the “[V2]” label of course, as will be the case here too for the same reasons.

The colour of the alternate logo this time around is more off-white – but more like a very light gold colour, since just the off-white was a little too close to the original grey to be actually visually distinct, especially from across the room.

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Arc 17: “A Fresh Start”. Episodes 1 “Confined”, 2 “Paths Unknown” and 3 “Shadows of Tantiss” all grouped together. They were all released together and worked perfectly well together (probably by design), so having them as the first arc was very easy and made a lot of sense.

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The name has a few valid references in the 3 episodes: Omega adjusting to Tantiss, what Project Necromancer could mean if it’s ever successful, Hunter and Wrecker’s search, the Clone Cadets they rescued from the jungle planet Setron – and Crosshair and Omega’s escape & what it could spell for them going forward.

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Finally, in the second episode, when H+W are walking through the jungle with the cadets they’ve found, there’s a small flashback all the way back to the end of Season 1, which I think works well and ties things together in a good way.

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Arc 18: “Cross-Purposes” – episodes 4 “A Different Approach” and 5 “The Return”.

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I slightly changed the chain of events in episode 4 to, I think, improve the story somewhat. A fair bit of episode 4 feels like it’s bulked out by people going out of their way to be self-centred assholes and – I don’t know if it’s just lingering frustration from Season 2 with all the Cid missions that always yielded no results – but can the good guys just win UNconditionally for once??

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Now, after Omega wins the money gambling, Imperial Captain Mann doesn’t fleece them, undoing their progress – he just gets the transmission about the shuttle crash and leaves to investigate immediately. Secondly, when the duo discover Batcher’s been kidnapped, the street urchin now tries to bribe the information out of them, but Crosshair intimidates him and he immediately relents, telling them where the Imperials went. I think ideally, I would cut the kidnapping out if I could because the captain’s just being an annoying sore loser and it bloats and segues the plot when the duo already have a shuttle they can bribe themselves onto. But that doesn’t match the vessel they eventually steal and escape with, and the background doesn’t match the commercial shuttle depot, so I can’t “invent” a firefight there instead and kind of must keep the kidnapping and such for consistency reasons.

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Later, on Barton IV, there are 3 very brief flashbacks to the episode “The Outpost”. This is very much deliberate because this is a site of a major event in Crosshair’s arc in the last season, it makes sense that when he returns there, it would be stuck heavily in his head every second he’s there – hopefully this conveys that effectively.

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It does feel like the first 4 episodes work well as one giant story instead, but that comes to 1 hour 40+, even with the last episode slightly shortened somewhat. This feels very long – especially with the show already having 1 “mega-arc” already with the first 3 episodes of Season 1. So having this duo instead feels like it works better as a more Crosshair-themed story – as with the name: “Cross-purposes”.

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To be specific, “Cross-purposes” is an expression where 2 or more people are at odds and have different goals/methods concerning the same thing. This feels very apt for CROSShair and Omega having to work together after their shuttle crash, and Crosshair with the squad on Barton IV learning to work together again and getting to the bottom of things between Crosshair and The Empire. In the latter episode, there are some flashbacks to the previous season – they’re very short, but hopefully with the way I’ve crafted them, they each have a big impact in making the shot/scene deeper.

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Arc 19 is split into two versions: a four-episode story from episodes 6-9, and two self-contained two-parters, because I find the four episodes actually work very well in both formats. As usual, you download and view whichever you agree with the most and works well with the rest of your collection. Also, just having the former could apply here if you like the latter half, but disagree with the choice to muddy the waters with how the ‘Dark Disciple’ novel left things on the Ventress front, so excising the latter half works better for you.

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The four episode arc: “All That Counts” is all of E6 “Infiltration”, E7 “Extraction”, E8 “Bad Territory” and E9 “The Harbinger” as one long sequence. There’s a brief flashback to Season 2 when ‘M-Count Targets’ are being discussed with Phee from Pabu, and that’s where the connection across all 4 episodes comes from, as it’s a consistent thread through them all.

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The name “All That Counts” is a play on the M-Count aspect of course, but it also as other meanings it can apply to in the four episodes. The Clone Assassin has to silence his own brother for silence’s sake and recover Omega for Hemlock – that’s all that counts, no matter the setback or the injuries. Wolffe has a clear change of heart when he meets Rex again, hears his story, and the reality of his orders sinks in: hunting a child – being loyal to his brothers, doing the right thing, and letting the target go as a show of both is all that counts, no matter the consequences. When Hunter and Wrecker meet Fennec Shand again after Pantora, the past doesn’t matter, only the present and them needing each other’s help does: the mutual benefit, especially for Omega’s sake, is all that counts. Lastly, when Ventress appears on Pabu, there’s a lot of distrust for obvious reasons, but the squad need answers and help and she’s the only one who can give it to them – all that counts is that they trust her and let her do what she needs to do.

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The first two-parter: 19a – “Teths of Patience” is just E6 “Infiltration” and E7 “Extraction” back to back, no flashbacks. The name is another play on words, because in these two episodes we see a few characters going through TESTS of patience of one kind or another at the old ruined B’Omarr Monk Monastery. Mostly the members of Rex’s Clone Underground trusting Crosshair in their presence, and the Clone Assassin trying to complete his objective despite some setbacks and injuries.

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The second two-parter: 19b – “New Allies and New Information” is just E8 “Bad Territory” in Space-Florida, and E9 “The Harbinger” with Ventress back to back, containing a short flashback in the former. The name ties into the first two-part story featuring Fennec back in season 1 “More Enemies and More Opportunities” as a kind of deliberate mirror. The allies (even just situationally) and information are both pretty self-evident with Fennec & Ventress, and everything they need to learn about this ‘M-Count’ phenomenon that’s presented itself.

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For the remaining episodes of the season: numbers 10-15 essentially create one long unbroken chain of events where each episode leads very comfortably right into the next. But this obviously creates one giant story that has a very dragging runtime of at least 2h40m, which is a huge story for a series which was made for TV and not film, and was designed to fit into ~22 minute chunks from the start.

To this end, I broke things up into smaller stories – à la The ‘Liberation of Lothal’ in my “Rebels” edit – to make the home stretch of the season, and show, much more easily digestible.

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Arc 20 begins with E10 “Identity Crisis” and goes right into E11 “Point of No Return”, and continues with E12 “Juggernaut”, before finishing with E13 “Into the Breach”.

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Conveniently, I’ve found the episode title ‘Into The Breach’ actually works very well for the entire arc for one reason or another. First, we see the moral ground Emerie finds herself on with the subjects that arrive at Tantiss, and the fact that they’re just children. Secondly, there’s the TK’s mobilising and disembarking on Pabu and the subsequent fighting and recapture of Omega after that small battle. Third, there’s a stealth-op with The Squad and Phee going to a secure Imperial world to recover a former Imperial asset, with very few options left on either side at that point. Finally, there’s going to Coruscant at the heart of The Empire to get Wayland’s co-ordinates.

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As stated above, episode 10 onwards is just 1 giant chain that runs unbroken, so having a self-contained Tantiss trilogy right at the end to keep everything very grounded and straightforward was good, and these 4 episodes before fill the gap well by proxy, so it all works out well.

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Arc 21: “Ground Zero”. The last of the show, consisting of E14 “Flash Strike” and the double-length E15 “The Cavalry Has Arrived”. It’s named as such because it’s the last trilogy’s worth of episodes self-contained to Tantiss itself and the last mission, which I think is a very fitting name.

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There’s only 1 version of this arc, since the all-grey logo from the finale, to reflect the paint-blasted armour they adorn themselves with from E13 onwards, looked great and felt greatly relevant to include. Including this for the final arc felt like a no-brainer.

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This arc does include the epilogue attached to the end this time. This is because it doesn’t contradict anything that chronologically comes afterwards in animation terms, as far as I know at least. The Rebellion pretty much began as soon as Saw Gerrera disagreed with The Empire on the very day of its founding, which we saw in the very first episode of TBB, which obviously precedes Rebels and Andor by a way, so there’s plenty of wiggle room for where the epilogue can fit in the timeline with everything else.

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Footnote: I’m merely a self-taught or VFX artist here, so some areas are visibly mostly good as I have to be realistic with the footage in front of me and what I can do with it. If you do have any particular notes and feedback, feel free to give me your thoughts, but please be constructive and don’t be an ass about it.

[Updated on 15/05/2024]

A project I’ve definitely been looking forward to, and I’m glad to finally get it all done.

Like my project of ‘Tales of the Jedi’ from 2022, I’ve organised the 6 episodes into a two-episode structure, self-contained to each respective character, giving both a longer length and more straightforward story. Also, I’ve taken the liberty of annotating each of the 6 time periods by year, anchoring the story further – as I also did with ToTJ before.
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“Barriss: The Wrong Path”
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The episodes ‘Devoted’, ‘Realization’ and ‘The Way Out’ all stitched together. Truthfully, when I first read the season’s episode titles, I was a little surprised and confused. The episode titles for Morgan Elsbeth felt like they were much more appropriate for Barriss and her story instead – that and her deep involvement in the “Wrong Jedi” arc in The Clone Wars season 5 made it an easy title to come up with.
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‘Devoted’ takes place around the fall of The Jedi and Order 66, making it BBY-19. ‘Realization’ takes place in an unclear time, but in the trend of why I planted the last Elsbeth episode where I did year-wise, 7 years again could work. Therefore, having it in BBY-12, 7 years after Order 66, would be viable (not like there’s anything there at the moment anyway). Lastly, ‘The Way Out’ has to be between the Obi-Wan series in BBY-9 and the time the Inquisitors are dissolved and redundant as a result of their own success in around BBY-0 or so. Continuing the trend of 7’s, sticking it at BBY-7 to mirror the second Morgan episode fits well enough to work.
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“Elsbeth: The Iron Fist”
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The episodes “The Path of Fear”, “TPo Anger” and “TPo Hate” knitted in the correct timeline sequence. The name has different meanings in each of the Elsbeth episodes, so it works well. In “Fear”, it’s pretty literal in the sense of General Grievous himself, in “Anger” it refers to The Empire itself which Morgan now joins properly in an official partnership with Admiral Thrawn, and in “Hate” it’s related to Elsbeth’s grip on Corvus, and how the system suffers under her rule.
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“Fear” takes place during the Battle of Dathomir in the Clone Wars (season 4, episode 19) so finding out that was BBY-20 was easy. “Anger” was a little tricky because of the Venators above Coruscant, but that and the Imperial Star Destroyer makes it around or following the end of ‘The Bad Batch’ season 3 at least. But Thrawn was first promoted to Admiral in BBY 3 after the Battle at Lasend Twenty-Six in the canon comic ‘Thrawn 4’ – and he only just becomes a Grand Admiral right before “Rebels” season 3 starts in BBY-2, so putting the episode in BBY-3 works. Also, Venators were still canonically in service by BBY-2 under Admiral Ahr in the ‘Age of Rebellion – Darth Vader 1’ comic from 2019, so that all checks out fine. Lastly, the episode “Hate” happens between the Battle of Jakku in ABY-5 and the arrival of Din Djarin in ABY- 9 – I haven’t put anything in ABY-7 yet in any of my relevant projects like ‘The Book of Boba Fett’ and the epilogue of ‘Rebels’, so why not just put it there by proxy?
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“Special: The Stark Mirror”
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I came up with a crossover episode blending the Barriss episode “Devoted” and the Ahsoka episode “Resolve” into one story that pendulum swings between both characters, hopefully to good effect. I had this idea more or less as soon as they announced the series and that Barriss was going to be one of the central characters, especially around the time of the Fall of The Republic, like ‘Resolve’ years prior.
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Since these two characters were friends, to the point of working closely together in the past to mutual goals, seeing them juxtaposed like this and the contrast between them that creates an interesting story. In both cases, you see the young woman starting in a low place amidst the chaos of the new regime change, going through her own trials of sorts (socially, fighting, possible discovery and moral crises). All before seemingly accepting her new destiny – at least for the time being: the agent and the fugitive – or, more precisely and aptly: the hunter and the hunted.
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Now, after this I admit I got a little carried away. Specifically I put the Morgan Elsbeth portion of the Battle of Dathomir into the Clone Wars episode “Massacre” and my own arc project “Darth Maul returns” – simply just to add depth to that story, and connect that older one to this newer one.

If you like it and see the point of it, great – if not, no foul, I did really just do it for the sake of doing it for the most part.
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Update 1: Mid-May
I checked my uploads and realised the title card for the crossover special was the one for the Barriss arc, so I promptly changed, re-exported and re-uploaded that so it’s fixed now. Also, to clear up a detail I forgot to mention; the crossover is framed as a ‘Jedi’ story, not an ‘Empire’ story, because it focusses 2 former Jedi finding their feet in the new regime – on opposite ends of the spectrum. Also the fact they were both friends when they were Jedi padawans in the Clone Wars too has a big impact.

Secondly, I noticed that I didn’t upload the shorter version of Barriss’s arc that accommodates the first story being inside the crossover episode, so I promptly uploaded that too.
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Update 2: Early June
I looked back on the special crossover episode. While I did do it initially with the story focus swinging back and forth between the two characters of Ahsoka and Barriss, I found when rewatching it properly that that method doesn’t always keep the pacing of each story and focus on each main character as well-tuned as I hoped it would when I was first doing the project, so I created a second version. This time, it begins like before: starting off with Barriss in Prison before segueing to Ahsoka on Naboo – then comes the title card – then comes all of Barriss’ story on Nur in one go with the Grand Inquisitor, Marrok and Vader – then all of Ahsoka’s story on the farm, culminating with the inflatable Grim Reaper-esque Inquisitor from Barriss’ story finding her (and failing dismally).

I think this one works well in its own right as well as the first draft: keeping everything self-contained means the stories stand together in their own ways side by side, and in a way that’s a little more straightforward on both ends, as there are no interruptions in a story you’re otherwise familiar with this time.

Me being me, I did keep the original there in the same online folder, and clearly labelled the updated version – so if you prefer the original, you can still keep it – if you prefer the new version, you can replace it with that instead – it’s all good either way. I’ve also changed the names of some of the things in the ‘Tales’ folder I have – now the specials are grouped together more neatly: The shortened version of Dooku’s TotJ story is Special 1a, while the cut of ‘The Phantom Menace’ with the last Dooku episode is listed as Special 1b for example.
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Footnote: I am merely a self-taught editor and VFX artist here, so some areas might be visibly mostly good, as I have to be realistic with the footage in front of me and what I can do with it. If you do have any particular notes and feedback, feel free to give me your thoughts, but please be constructive and don’t be an ass about it.

A project that was actually the very second one I ever considered back when I was only just starting to get into editing work back at the start of 2022 – second only to ‘The Book of Boba Fett’ with splitting the past and present properly and removing Grogu from the finale.

Now I’ve finally got to it and was able to actually bash it out in a single day this week, it’s number 52 on my total projects’ list, so that worked out very appropriately in the end actually.
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This project specifically is just splitting the large Director’s Cut into the 7 chapters it came in – with the same ‘Warner Bros.’ logo at the start and the same credits at the end of each of them. Just for the sake of consistency and to make sure they’re compartmentalised into proper chapters as neatly as possible.

There are no story changes made in this regard, it’s just the story being broken up into more digestible pieces. That said, a Heard-less version of the film would be great, same with Aquaman (2019) if even possible, with a different face faked on and voice dubbed over – probably never going to happen, but a person can dream.
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Part 1: “Don’t count on it, Batman” – 46 mins total
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Part 2: “The Age of Heroes” – 42 mins total
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Part 3: "Beloved Mother, Beloved Son” – 53 mins total
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Part 4: "Change Machine” – 40 mins total
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Part 5: "All the King’s Horses” – 41 mins total
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Part 6: “Something Darker” – 51 mins total
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Part 7: “Epilogue” – 29 mins total
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I have considered a plan of Zack Snyder’s Watchmen too, and have made moves on turning that into a series also, but I’ve ran into a few hurdles I’m not sure how to meander over.

Which version of the 2009 film to do, including ‘Tales of The Black Freighter’ or not, when it’s split into 12 chapters do I move things back/forward to more closely resemble things on the page – or leave them alone so the film flows better as a FILM etc….
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Footnote: I am merely a self-taught editor and VFX artist, so some areas are visibly mostly good as I have to be realistic with the footage in front of me and what I can do with it. If you do have any particular notes and feedback, feel free to give me your thoughts, but please be constructive and don’t be an ass about it.

The second in the trilogy of projects from this March, and my 50th overall from the last two years of video projects.

The edit of this film from 2018 is quite straightforward again, luckily – it’s mostly putting deleted scenes back in, though there are two versions of this film up for grabs, for reasons I’ll get into later.
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The first change is another extended opener sequence like the first films. This time it’s Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne on mission together in Argentina (Buenos Aires) back in 1987, acting as the first ‘Ant-Man and The Wasp’ dynamic duo together. This was an original opening sequence the studio changed, and luckily I was able to find it online and in decent quality and only have to make a few changes to it, like colour grading and adding a mirror filter to one shot that’s clearly the wrong way round as you can see by a “Stop” sign appearing backwards. It’s good to put this sequence back in, because it revolves around Elihas Starr’s lab trying to harness the Quantum Realm’s powers after stealing Hank Pym and Bill Foster’s work, before things go badly wrong.
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The second change, again, is replacing the “Present Day” annotation with the one where Scott Lang is playing with Cassie in the house while he’s under confinement – this takes place in April 2018 in the story, so that’s what the new PNG overlay states.
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The third change is at nearly 42 minutes in, and is where the film splits into two versions. In one of them, the detour into Cassie’s school to retrieve the older Ant-Man suit is left in – in the other, it’s removed. It’s certainly an amusing sequence, but it’s definitely very sidequest-y in an otherwise very straightforward part in the film. Without it, Scott and Co. see Bill Foster and get some info about the past and answers about the present – and then they go right into applying those things on the old Ant-Man suit Scott says he has, and was safe, anyway – so it’s all just more straightforward.
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At fourth change is at 51 minutes in with no school or 55 minutes in with the school sequence. Another deleted scene is put in where Sonny Burch and his men are narrowing down where the lab is and starts asking questions about who Scott is in the CCTV footage they watch of the lab shrinking. There’s no clear place in the film where the deleted scene goes before the 52 minute mark in the theatrical release where Burch shows up at Luis’ office with the “truth serum”, but it feels appropriate where I put it for two reasons.

Firstly, it leads into the office scene a few minutes later much better than him showing up there out of the blue, and the place I put it goes between Scott and Co. escaping Ghost and Foster and then suddenly being in the enlarged lab in the forest. It’s a very abrupt cut in the theatrical release between the two scenes that doesn’t really carry well, so hopefully this works better. It’s also a little better for Burch’s character to see him in this scene – we get some information why he’s after the lab in the first place: tech, money, personal relevance etc – so there’s actual development and motivation there, not just having the character as someone who shows up randomly, wants the lab for unknown reasons and keeps talking about his restaurant when nobody really asks.
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Another deleted scene plays at 1hr 38mins in (1hr 34mins with the school sequence removed) – after Hank and Janey finally reunite in the Quantum Realm and she tells him about what it’s really like down there. This deleted scene ties into “Quantumania” very well, as Janet explains that the place is bigger than they imagined, to the point of entire worlds and civilisations being down there*. Also that she knows how to communicate with the quantum creatures down there, makes sense as she seems to have domesticated two of them in her time at her little spherical homestead in the past.

Also, the footage from the scene right after that, where Hank asks how Janet how she stopped the Quantum Realm messing with his head, is the same footage from the start of this deleted scene. So, to avoid repetition, I used the cut of the two of them getting into the Quantum Vehicle, but greatly slowed, to essentially paper over the cracks as best I could with the footage that was there. It’s not perfect, but hey ho
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At the very end of the film, the new title card I made is overlaid some of the footage of the film – since the theatrical title card left no room for me to overlay and then replace it, like with others. At the 1:55:15/1:51:30 mark, depending on which version you watch, I used the footage of Hank emerging from the Quantum Vehicle, because the arch-like structure in the background is reasonably similar to the theatrical ‘toy-like’ environment in that shot. Building on that, I reversed the footage to match the motion at the end of the theatrical cut, added a Gaussian Blur filter to really take the photorealistic edge off, so it’s not so jarring against the end credits in the waxworky toy style. Lastly, I made the custom title card follow the same motion as in the film: starting distant, enlarging on the screen and then continuing to enlarge very slowly until the scene cuts – with some 3D text effects this time to match the theatrical again.
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Finally, the post-credit scene involving the drumming ant has been changed, because it feels like unnecessary levity in a moment that should probably remain dire and serious for obvious reasons. Now, you see the empty Lang house with the constant blare of the emergency TV broadcast, but instead of seeing and hearing the giant ant on the electric drumkit, it cuts to aerial shots of San Francisco and keeps the blaring noise the entire time, clearly implying the entire city is in the same boat – that is to say: at least just that one city.
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To answer “Quantumania” questions that might present themselves next; the plans for that film recut are still very much up in the air and still just plans at the moment. I know what I want to do with the film ideally, and what ideas I want to put in motion with what I would change and why, but there is the big project I’ve been doing slowly for the last month that I mentioned previously. Ideally, I would knuckle down and just bash that out and finally get it done before moving onto another project in a big way.
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Footnote: I am merely a self-taught video editor and VFX artist here, so some areas may be visibly mostly good, as I have to be realistic with the footage in front of me and what I can do with it. If you do have any particular notes and feedback, feel free to give me your thoughts, but please be constructive and don’t be an ass about it.

The first in a trilogy of projects from this March, that’s actually the 50th on my list from the last two years of video projects – the complete, the unfinished or potential ideas, and the multiple versions of projects that have gradually improved over time alongside my skills as an editor.

Honestly, it’s still a coin-flip between the titles “The Astonishing Ant-Man” and “Ant-Man – The Astonishing Cut”, because I really do like them both. But ultimately, the former works best as a group title, especially with the second film sharing the name with a new subtitle added to differentiate it as the sequel.
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The edit of the first film from 2015 is quite straightforward. Mostly the addition of deleted scenes that add good things for one reason or another, though this meant I didn’t include all of them for that same reason.
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The first change is adding the extended opening scene from 1989. After Hank Pym resigns from SHIELD when discovering Howard Stark and Mitch Carson’s work behind his back, he storms out and leaves the original Ant-Man suit in the vault in his basement, literally and figuratively closing the door on that part of his life.
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The second change is replacing the “Present Day” annotation when Scott Lang gets out of San Quentin Penitentiary – he gets released in July 2015, so that’s what the new PNG overlay states.
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The third change is around 11 minutes in, when another deleted/extended scene plays out when Darren Cross shows investors the ‘Futures Lab’, which I colour graded to match the theatrical scene as best I could. The new scene goes into more detail explaining the other uses of the Pym Particle if it were used properly: global freight shipping, biomedical surgery and waste disposal – all valid points. Another main reason for including this, is you get a lot of good shots of one of the Yellowjacket buyers from later in the film: man in a blue shirt and pinstripe suit with a Ten Rings tattoo visible on is neck. It’s a good way of tying things together universally and move it past just HYDRA wanting the tech in Phase 2 (allegedy A.I.M. was there too to buy the Yellowjacket tech, but that was never confirmed.
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At nearly 19 minutes in, another deleted scene plays at Cassie’s birthday party, where Scott talks to her properly and she says she misses him and wants to see her more. It’s a good moment that adds more weight to the father side of Scott’s character, not just the thief. Colour graded to the theatrical release best I could again.
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Another deleted scene plays at 44 minutes in – where Bill Paxton and his partner Nile start narrowing down who Scott’s “Lawyer” was before he disappeared and how there’s no record of this man. It better sets up the breakfast scene about 2 minutes later when Cassie says she hopes [Bill] doesn’t find [Scott].

Speaking of the breakfast scene, I put another deleted scene after it, where Hank and Hope talk about Scott and teaching him how to use the Ant-Man suit (and how he might be an idiot savant – or just an idiot). This is after Hank shows Scott the basement and explains the Pym Particle research, Darren Cross’ relation to him, how Hank got ousted from his own company, and where Scott agrees to help Hank. I put it here because it seemed to be the only place where it could realistically belong, as there’s no clear indicator of its position in the film, but they’re just talking about Scott learning the suit and he needs Hope’s help, so having it before he gets started with the keyhole jump sequence makes sense. Luckily I didn’t need to colour grade anything for this scene.
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Shortly afterwards, once Cross successfully shrinks a lamb without killing it, there’s an extended and colour graded scene in Hank’s basement. In the original release, Hank talks about Mitch Carson and how unless they swipe the Yellowjacket suit and erase all the data on it, Darren Cross will unleash chaos on the world – this new scene is much more detailed. Hank goes deeper into his tenure as the original Ant-Man working for SHIELD for decades around the world, and how Darren Cross succeeded where Howard Stark and Mitch Carson failed in replicating the Pym Particle work. It adds more to tie it to the wider universe again, and makes the character of Hank deeper with details of his original work, and makes Cross seem smarter and more dangerous with managing to succeed in reproducing and weaponising Hank’s buried work.
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The rest of the film plays out as normal until around 1hr 50 where there’s a new title card for the film, reflecting my work.
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The sequel has been nearly finished for almost a month, but I haven’t been into uploading much lately because I’ve been busy chipping away at another project, which has been much larger and more complex than a cinematic trilogy recut. That’s hence why I completed this over a month ago but I’m only just getting to publishing it now also.
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The only real things stopping me from uploading “The Astonishing Ant-Man: Ghosts of The Past” are some issue with one deleted scene that seems a little tricky in its precise placement, whether or not I might cut out a different (kind of sidequesty) sequence to accommodate it, and the custom title card at the end. The final point is especially tricky since the original title is hard-layered onto the background, and is obviously different from the title I’ve chosen.
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I’ve got ‘Quantumania’ plans on the go in my head too – but it’s finding the time to do it, taking the time to properly plan and execute the things I want to, and how it’s going to stand on its own next to a different version of the film that belongs to a different collection of films I’m planning.
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Specifically: I’m thinking about a “Kang Dynasty” Saga of films, to the point of already having names for the instalments thought up – but it’s all is still very much in the planning stage and I haven’t committed to it properly on any level, since it will require cinematic recuts of the Loki series’, and I just don’t know if I have that in me. Sounds like an F-ton of work.
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Footnote: I am merely a self-taught video editor and VFX artist here, so some areas may be visibly mostly good, as I have to be realistic with the footage in front of me and what I can do with it. If you do have any particular notes and feedback, feel free to give me your thoughts, but please be constructive and don’t be an ass about it.