Topher Grace Screens Star Wars Prequel Re-edit

silentbrad writes "/Film (as well as IGN and A.V. Club) reports about Topher Grace's fan re-edit of the Star Wars prequel trilogy into a single, 85-minute film titled Star Wars: Episode III.5: The Editor Strikes Back.' Quoting /Film: 'His idea was to edit the Star Wars prequels into one movie, as they would provide him a lot of footage to work with. He used footage from all three prequels, a couple cuts from the original trilogy, some music from The Clone Wars television series, and even a dialogue bit from Anthony Daniels' (C-3PO) audio book recordings. He even created a new opening text crawl to set up his version of the story.' It continues with what stayed and what was cut. It's just too bad it was a one-time-only screening."

Comments

What, no torrent?

[bill_mcgonigle]

He also seems to want to favor storytelling over merchandising, which is a strange and unusual concept.

Re:Make something new

[Chris Burke]

The goal wasn't to make the prequels not suck. He's learning about editing film, and used the prequels as a medium to do so (and probably make a great test case to show both the potential and limitations of post-production editing).

Calculus and science are great, but I don't think everyone should do that and nobody should do art. Once you accept that the entire concept of movies aren't pointless, then learning about editing is a useful skill.

Re:So what's the point of telling us?

[PCM2]

Why can't he release a detailed list of every edit he made (allowing someone else with a nonlinear editing suite, lots of time on his hands, and fewer qualms about BitTorrent to piece it together)? Surely he kept records, if he's studying to be an editor?

Re:Should do that with Matrix 2 and 3

[Canazza]

There were lots of good "Bits" of 2 and 3. Like the first Smith fight in the park, or the highway chase, or the zion fight. The Hovercraft race-against-time chase down the narrow passage. The Merovingian scenes. They had the potential to be really good. But for some reason they weren't.

The problem is that they spent *far* too long on these bits with nothing to break them up. If they weren't fighting for ages, they were talking your ears off. I remember feeling like my eyes were about to start bleeding during that first Smith fight (partly due to the bad CGI). The Zion fight focused on the mech walkers too much and not enough on the foot soldiers, or the drama behind it. It was all action, for the full duration.

The fight scenes were all fighting, and no plot progression, and plot progression happened in massive info dumps.

Remember in the first film where Neo first takes on two agents on top of the building? That was an awesome scene and lasted one minute. It progressed the plot by making you realise Neo IS the One, and it was pretty awesome to watch. The climactic lobby fight scene was 3 minutes long and showed what exactly was possible in the Matrix. The subway fight was 4 and showed Neo going toe-to-toe with Smith for the first time. Between each of these was somewhat of a breather to let the audience relax. The film was well paced between fights and dialogue.

Now take Reloaded. The mid-film vs Smith scene in lasted over five minutes, was mostly blurry, bad CGI and did sod all to move the plot forward. The Architect on the other hand was EIGHT minutes long, 'moving the plot forward' is an understatement, as it pretty much WAS the plot, and such a large dump of information was boring as fuck. If they weren't relentlessly chaining fights they were droning on and on incessantly.