Star Wars Prequel Fan Edit Mayhem!
Sep. 19th, 2010 12:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccatoriaSo this is my background project, that frankly, is so ridiculously ambitious and quite probably actually impossible, I'm not sure I'll ever finish it. But, since I really miss actually posting here and Fringe hasn't showed up to distract me yet, allow me to walk you through an assortment of scenes from Becka's Ridiculous Take On The Prequels.
I am mostly making them cus it's an editing challenge, cus I'd like to make as radically different a version of them as possible as part of that challenge, and because the idea really, really cheered Kev up one day, cus he took disappointment in the prequels much harder than I did, and I'm using one of the ideas he always had as a kid as a central point in Stuff We're Changing, which is they really ought to have cloned Anakin Skywalker, cus it's called THE CLONE WARS. And like, no one we care about gets cloned! Not even once! Ahem.
So. RANDOM CLIPS AHOY:
So far all of these are from my planned cut of Ep III because it's the harder of the two. So something major you need to be aware of is that the opening crawl explains Anakin Skywalker was expelled from he Order because he allowed the Chancellor to clone him to help with the war effort and he's now the Chancellor's military adviser. So I'm substituting all his dreams of Padme dying with nightmares about the deaths of his clones which is messing him up a bit. This is done using the 3D cartoon. Which, yes, will ultimately probably look slightly odd. Ce la vie. It won't look as odd as the fact my planned cut of Ep II will be half liveaction half 2D cartoon. I'M TOTALLY PRETENDING IT'S A STYLISTIC CHOICE LIKE KILL BILL.
CLONE DEATH #1
The "alien dialogue" (which is actually backwards Dutch) will eventually have subtitles which will underscore the changes made to the story - the pirate will refer to Anakin as "clone" and ask whether he was allowed to keep his lightsaber when they threw him out of the Order, which is when he draws it as proof. He then tells Anakin that he didn't just find one [desired object] he found two. To which Anakin toasts the discovery.
CLONE DEATH #2
I didn't entirely mean for this one to be so lolzy but whatever, he deserves it. Also I had to cut Obi Wan out of the entire fight. Actually I also had to cut him out of the pirate scene above. It was tricksy!
CLONE DEATH #3
This is the last clone death I have so far. I think I need like...two more, maybe three.
MASTER YODA GETS DUBBED
LOOK I MADE MASTER YODA SAY CLONES! It even lipsynchs pretty good! Narratively, an amended scene with Padme will suggest that perhaps the Jedi can help him with his bad dreams (implied: even though he's not one now), so he goes to talk to Yoda. Anyway there are quite a few cuts to the scene to remove stuff that isn't true in the edit anymore.
ANAKIN AND OBI-WAN HAVE A LITTLE CHAT
This happens after he's leaving after his chat with Yoda. It's actually a mashup of audio from two different scenes and also quite a lot is cut where it refers to, or implies Anakin is a Jedi - I originally wanted to have him say "I'm not a Jedi" but my audio editing skillz weren't quite leet enough and it was too jerky so I'll just have to live with probably only ever being explicitly mentioned in the opening crawl. But I did totally steal some footsteps from elsewhere so it sounded proper when they were walking and gave it different background music!
POLITICSES!
So the obvious thing here is that Palpatine refers to Amidala as Anakin's wife because it's not a secret they're married so any little casual mentions will, I figure, help make that seem real. I toyed with not having Anakin refer to her as "Senator Amidala" the second time but decided I liked it because I felt he was trying to be very formal with Palpatine because he was uncomfortable. Also, this was a deleted scene so probably fewer of you are familiar with it, but I cut ACRES of awful dialogue out of this puppy. Also this is one of Amidala's more ridiculous space outfits.
OH MY GOD A PLOT FOR PADME!
This is another deleted scene about her actually forming the Rebellion. It's also horribly rough. I want to cut a few more lines from some of the others present. She's referring to Obi-Wan cus he's still a Jedi while Anakin is not and I hope to imply that Padme's more aware of his political leanings than she's otherwise shown to be, especially since he now works for him. But I don't like the sound clip I have - it's not smooth enough. Hence, rough cut.
DOOKU WITH A PURPLE LIGHTSABER!
He has a purple saber because he's not a Sith in this version of events, just a former Jedi and purple was easiest to scope over the red, even though I would personally have preferred yellow. Also, I've done nothing to this footage except rotoscope the lightsaber. In the finished product (should it ever materialise) a LOT of the dialogue here is getting cut, especially the whiny, angry stuff from Anakin. I just wanted to get the lightsaber stuff done first because it's tricky.
DOOKU WITH A PURPLE LIGHTSABER AND A MUPPET!
Again, this is just the raw footage and I'm neither sure why I let it run on so long after there are no more lightsabers or why I bothered with the whole fight since in my planned cut, Yoda will draw his lightsaber and they'll clash blades just once before Dooku pulls the trick with the giant pillar.
TLDR PLOT SUMMARY (seriously, feel free to skip, I just felt I should put it here for completeness and for the curious)..
Without getting into the minutiae, the first thing I should mention is that I'm gonna be using the cartoons, both the 2D and the 3D. Also that I'm sure half the changes we're making will be things lots of people will be like, "What! You can't change X! It was the one good thing about it!" but partly the point is to make it as different as possible and partly...Kev likes it and this one's for him?
We're not redoing Ep I as noted above, and the idea is that you can either skip it entirely and just go with the cuts of II and III we're doing, or watch the original or a fanedit or whatever. Apart from the ridiculous midichlorian virgin birth bullshit, there really wasn't much in Ep I that trashed the whole universe.
Ep II is gonna use liveaction footage to tell the story of how Obi Wan has been sent to investigate a weird message the Jedi's Clone Army being ready that they received from Kamino, while Anakin is on a leave of absence for his marriage (ignoring the weird no-romance retcon). I decided there was flat out no way I could salvage that "romance" so I'm just going to skip it entirely. Then per the actual movie, Anakin has bad dreams about his mother and heads off to save her (minus the panic about duties), and then gets a signal from Obi Wan about having tracked Jango Fett to Kamino and the final showdown with Dooku (although he's not a Sith anymore, just an ex-Jedi with a good point) happens as read (with many, MANY cuts to try and make Anakin a quiet and skilled hero rather than a whiny impetuous one). So the gigantic OMGS TO WAR finale is actually the middle, at which point the second half of the film will be from the 2D cartoon, telling the story of Anakin getting knighted/having that creepy/cool vision quest while he's saving all those dudes. Since the Anakin in the cartoon is a good deal less creepy, I think it might work quite well, the completely unsolvable problem being that half the movie is liveaction and half of it is in stylised animation. I know Kill Bill pulls it off fine, but I'd still be happier with it if there was a return to liveaction at the end. But oh well, whatever. I do at least have an idea for a strong transition between the two to make it a bit less odd than just One Scene Liveaction Next Scene Animated.
Ep III opens with a crawl explaining that it's years later, the Jedi have withdrawn from the war over concerns about atrocities, although individual Jedi may still hold military rank. Anakin Skywalker has been kicked out of the Jedi Order for letting Palpatine clone him to help with the war effort, and Obi-Wan and Yoda continue to investigate Dooku's phantom Sith Lord they suspect ordered the clone army in the first place (cus seriously, why did no one in those movies ever follow up on that?)
So the entire opening fight is cut and it just opens basically with Anakin slowly destabilising because he keeps feeling all his clones dying in combat. Basically I'm substituting his nightmares about Padme dying with footage from the 3D cartoon that I've manipulated to make it look like Anakin's dying in various ways. Without getting bogged down in boring details, cut scenes help establish that Padme is forming the rebellion behind Anakin's back, and Mace Windu is all gung ho about getting "proof" that Palpatine is a danger so after the start of the edit hopefully building up a sense of deception, pressure and tension, when Anakin walks in on Mace Windu attempting to murder the Chancellor (in this case - again details argh, too long! - Anakin didn't tell him cus he didn't yet know himself), he defends him, kills Windu, pledges allegiance and instead of going off and murdering "younglings" instead accepts the mission to Mustafar to "bring peace" because all the leaders of the opposition are there. The Jedi Temple massacre still occurs sans Anakin, and Obi Wan and Yoda still find evidence of his conversion, and the Emperor still founds the Empire. Padme actually listens to Obi Wan and runs off with him because she doesn't want to be married to an Imperial Sith Lord, but still dies (except I shall dub those dumb robots and subtitle them so they give like an actual freaking MEDICAL REASON other than LOSING THE WILL TO LIVE). Anakin senses this (using the actual nightmares he has, in which Obi Wan is sometimes present) and knows Obi Wan was there, blames him and tracks him down to kill him. Epic fight ensues, Vader created, etc., etc.
There are one or two things I'm not 100% sure how to do yet, but I'm pretty sure most of that's doable in various ways - though how well I pull it off is another matter entirely.
ALL RIGHT ENOUGH OF THAT. BACK TO YOUR BUSINESS. THESE AREN'T THE DROIDS YOU'RE LOOKING FOR.
I am mostly making them cus it's an editing challenge, cus I'd like to make as radically different a version of them as possible as part of that challenge, and because the idea really, really cheered Kev up one day, cus he took disappointment in the prequels much harder than I did, and I'm using one of the ideas he always had as a kid as a central point in Stuff We're Changing, which is they really ought to have cloned Anakin Skywalker, cus it's called THE CLONE WARS. And like, no one we care about gets cloned! Not even once! Ahem.
So. RANDOM CLIPS AHOY:
So far all of these are from my planned cut of Ep III because it's the harder of the two. So something major you need to be aware of is that the opening crawl explains Anakin Skywalker was expelled from he Order because he allowed the Chancellor to clone him to help with the war effort and he's now the Chancellor's military adviser. So I'm substituting all his dreams of Padme dying with nightmares about the deaths of his clones which is messing him up a bit. This is done using the 3D cartoon. Which, yes, will ultimately probably look slightly odd. Ce la vie. It won't look as odd as the fact my planned cut of Ep II will be half liveaction half 2D cartoon. I'M TOTALLY PRETENDING IT'S A STYLISTIC CHOICE LIKE KILL BILL.
CLONE DEATH #1
The "alien dialogue" (which is actually backwards Dutch) will eventually have subtitles which will underscore the changes made to the story - the pirate will refer to Anakin as "clone" and ask whether he was allowed to keep his lightsaber when they threw him out of the Order, which is when he draws it as proof. He then tells Anakin that he didn't just find one [desired object] he found two. To which Anakin toasts the discovery.
CLONE DEATH #2
I didn't entirely mean for this one to be so lolzy but whatever, he deserves it. Also I had to cut Obi Wan out of the entire fight. Actually I also had to cut him out of the pirate scene above. It was tricksy!
CLONE DEATH #3
This is the last clone death I have so far. I think I need like...two more, maybe three.
MASTER YODA GETS DUBBED
LOOK I MADE MASTER YODA SAY CLONES! It even lipsynchs pretty good! Narratively, an amended scene with Padme will suggest that perhaps the Jedi can help him with his bad dreams (implied: even though he's not one now), so he goes to talk to Yoda. Anyway there are quite a few cuts to the scene to remove stuff that isn't true in the edit anymore.
ANAKIN AND OBI-WAN HAVE A LITTLE CHAT
This happens after he's leaving after his chat with Yoda. It's actually a mashup of audio from two different scenes and also quite a lot is cut where it refers to, or implies Anakin is a Jedi - I originally wanted to have him say "I'm not a Jedi" but my audio editing skillz weren't quite leet enough and it was too jerky so I'll just have to live with probably only ever being explicitly mentioned in the opening crawl. But I did totally steal some footsteps from elsewhere so it sounded proper when they were walking and gave it different background music!
POLITICSES!
So the obvious thing here is that Palpatine refers to Amidala as Anakin's wife because it's not a secret they're married so any little casual mentions will, I figure, help make that seem real. I toyed with not having Anakin refer to her as "Senator Amidala" the second time but decided I liked it because I felt he was trying to be very formal with Palpatine because he was uncomfortable. Also, this was a deleted scene so probably fewer of you are familiar with it, but I cut ACRES of awful dialogue out of this puppy. Also this is one of Amidala's more ridiculous space outfits.
OH MY GOD A PLOT FOR PADME!
This is another deleted scene about her actually forming the Rebellion. It's also horribly rough. I want to cut a few more lines from some of the others present. She's referring to Obi-Wan cus he's still a Jedi while Anakin is not and I hope to imply that Padme's more aware of his political leanings than she's otherwise shown to be, especially since he now works for him. But I don't like the sound clip I have - it's not smooth enough. Hence, rough cut.
DOOKU WITH A PURPLE LIGHTSABER!
He has a purple saber because he's not a Sith in this version of events, just a former Jedi and purple was easiest to scope over the red, even though I would personally have preferred yellow. Also, I've done nothing to this footage except rotoscope the lightsaber. In the finished product (should it ever materialise) a LOT of the dialogue here is getting cut, especially the whiny, angry stuff from Anakin. I just wanted to get the lightsaber stuff done first because it's tricky.
DOOKU WITH A PURPLE LIGHTSABER AND A MUPPET!
Again, this is just the raw footage and I'm neither sure why I let it run on so long after there are no more lightsabers or why I bothered with the whole fight since in my planned cut, Yoda will draw his lightsaber and they'll clash blades just once before Dooku pulls the trick with the giant pillar.
TLDR PLOT SUMMARY (seriously, feel free to skip, I just felt I should put it here for completeness and for the curious)..
Without getting into the minutiae, the first thing I should mention is that I'm gonna be using the cartoons, both the 2D and the 3D. Also that I'm sure half the changes we're making will be things lots of people will be like, "What! You can't change X! It was the one good thing about it!" but partly the point is to make it as different as possible and partly...Kev likes it and this one's for him?
We're not redoing Ep I as noted above, and the idea is that you can either skip it entirely and just go with the cuts of II and III we're doing, or watch the original or a fanedit or whatever. Apart from the ridiculous midichlorian virgin birth bullshit, there really wasn't much in Ep I that trashed the whole universe.
Ep II is gonna use liveaction footage to tell the story of how Obi Wan has been sent to investigate a weird message the Jedi's Clone Army being ready that they received from Kamino, while Anakin is on a leave of absence for his marriage (ignoring the weird no-romance retcon). I decided there was flat out no way I could salvage that "romance" so I'm just going to skip it entirely. Then per the actual movie, Anakin has bad dreams about his mother and heads off to save her (minus the panic about duties), and then gets a signal from Obi Wan about having tracked Jango Fett to Kamino and the final showdown with Dooku (although he's not a Sith anymore, just an ex-Jedi with a good point) happens as read (with many, MANY cuts to try and make Anakin a quiet and skilled hero rather than a whiny impetuous one). So the gigantic OMGS TO WAR finale is actually the middle, at which point the second half of the film will be from the 2D cartoon, telling the story of Anakin getting knighted/having that creepy/cool vision quest while he's saving all those dudes. Since the Anakin in the cartoon is a good deal less creepy, I think it might work quite well, the completely unsolvable problem being that half the movie is liveaction and half of it is in stylised animation. I know Kill Bill pulls it off fine, but I'd still be happier with it if there was a return to liveaction at the end. But oh well, whatever. I do at least have an idea for a strong transition between the two to make it a bit less odd than just One Scene Liveaction Next Scene Animated.
Ep III opens with a crawl explaining that it's years later, the Jedi have withdrawn from the war over concerns about atrocities, although individual Jedi may still hold military rank. Anakin Skywalker has been kicked out of the Jedi Order for letting Palpatine clone him to help with the war effort, and Obi-Wan and Yoda continue to investigate Dooku's phantom Sith Lord they suspect ordered the clone army in the first place (cus seriously, why did no one in those movies ever follow up on that?)
So the entire opening fight is cut and it just opens basically with Anakin slowly destabilising because he keeps feeling all his clones dying in combat. Basically I'm substituting his nightmares about Padme dying with footage from the 3D cartoon that I've manipulated to make it look like Anakin's dying in various ways. Without getting bogged down in boring details, cut scenes help establish that Padme is forming the rebellion behind Anakin's back, and Mace Windu is all gung ho about getting "proof" that Palpatine is a danger so after the start of the edit hopefully building up a sense of deception, pressure and tension, when Anakin walks in on Mace Windu attempting to murder the Chancellor (in this case - again details argh, too long! - Anakin didn't tell him cus he didn't yet know himself), he defends him, kills Windu, pledges allegiance and instead of going off and murdering "younglings" instead accepts the mission to Mustafar to "bring peace" because all the leaders of the opposition are there. The Jedi Temple massacre still occurs sans Anakin, and Obi Wan and Yoda still find evidence of his conversion, and the Emperor still founds the Empire. Padme actually listens to Obi Wan and runs off with him because she doesn't want to be married to an Imperial Sith Lord, but still dies (except I shall dub those dumb robots and subtitle them so they give like an actual freaking MEDICAL REASON other than LOSING THE WILL TO LIVE). Anakin senses this (using the actual nightmares he has, in which Obi Wan is sometimes present) and knows Obi Wan was there, blames him and tracks him down to kill him. Epic fight ensues, Vader created, etc., etc.
There are one or two things I'm not 100% sure how to do yet, but I'm pretty sure most of that's doable in various ways - though how well I pull it off is another matter entirely.
ALL RIGHT ENOUGH OF THAT. BACK TO YOUR BUSINESS. THESE AREN'T THE DROIDS YOU'RE LOOKING FOR.
