Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker General Movie Discussion

Welcome back, @Jayson! You have been missed.

 

Thanks!

I'll be off and on as busy time comes and goes, as I now have a job in the movie industry.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Sweeeeeet! Congrats! What do you do?

 

I can't spill the details due to an NDA (actually, multiple NDAs, lol), but abstractly, I'll say, "logistics".

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Sounds very familiar, this story does.


Great points all around, @Jayson !! -
Just as Carrie Fisher was the patron saint of Script Doctoring, Marcia Lucas is the fairy godmother of Film Editing.

#STARWARSLADIESDOEVERYTHINGBETTTER​

 

For the record, as the future unfolds and Hollywood 6.0* develops, the editor will stop having that solo time as a standard flow.
This is not a bad thing. It's just simply a change.

It was a rough issue on TROS only because the support for that wasn't in place and it happened unplanned with a very tight and rushed deadline (considering they also had to do a page 1 re-write of the screenplay as well...

Let me break that down. We're talking a major picture with a ton of VFX (and no, lol, VFX is not a button push and poof it's done - it's a mountain of labor hours thrown at it...it's like saying your car can go 130 mph...yes, it can...it shouldn't, but it can).
This movie was released in Dec. 2019.
Post-production (read: VFX mad scramble) wrapped in Nov. 2019.
Principle photography (not counting any reshoots) wrapped in Feb. 2019.
Principle photography began in Aug. 2018.
Abrams and Terrio started brainstorming a first draft of the screenplay somewhere around Dec. 2017 (which ended up being a screenplay which Terrio says wins the most rewrites in his career).
According to Terrio, Abrams and Terrio started researching for the rewrite around Sep. 2017.

That means they did a reboot on Development and Preproduction in basically one year (not an unusual time frame), and then through principle photography in about 180 days, and then wrapped post-production in a bit over 250 days.

I cannot explain how fast that is any better than to say that's about 50ish days faster than average with a reboot.

Keep in mind the following....

"The average production lasted 871 days from announcement to release".
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adrien...cript-to-screen-in-hollywood/?sh=3064d7f72fbe

Which TROS is approximately on par with if we're counting Abrams's start time.
But here's the thing, if you count what was originally planned for the movie with Trevorrow, they expected 1,300 some odd days (counting to the original May release).
If you count the date of Trevorrow's first draft completion, from that point until release is EQUAL to the time that Abrams's production team had to research, write, plan logistics, build, shoot, CGI, edit and deliver.

Trevorrow's same length of time was without research and writing added to that list (or at the very least, very nearly - had things not gone off the rails).

It's an insane speed - especially for a movie of this scale. That "average" length is for the "average" movie...which, a Marvel or Star Wars saga movie are absolutely not.

I'd point out that Endgame spent 15 months in post-production! Almost twice the time TROS had.
I'd also point out that Endgame made its previsualization (rough animated version of the movie) three years before the movie came out!

I just cannot explain the insanity of TROS' production speed.​

Now, back on point.
So for TROS it was rough, but it was rough for a myriad of reasons that had nothing to do with the method of in-production/on-set editing as an approach in and of itself.

Hell, if anything, the approach is what saved the movie from blowing up completely and just not happening (i.e. getting shut down and having to wait years for it to financially return back - and nuking the studio's bank and stock in the process).

This is the same thing that happens. A shift happens, and it's bumpy for a while until folks get used to the new approach. Editors went through this before when shuffling between the Studio Era and the New Hollywood Era as Rosenblum vents over in his book from 1979 where he screams bloody murder over the new "era of the Director".

Yet that shuffle didn't bring about garbage as a change of process. It just took time to adjust to.
Same thing will happen now.

Editors will get used to not being alone in a room twiddling around with footage peacefully zoned in on a periodic time crunch and instead be right up on the front lines taking hits like everyone else and needing to split their attention in new ways than before.

In the end, it'll be great. For a while, it'll get dicey some times.


So, don't take my note about the editing approach as the thing that was a problem. The problem was always the total time allotted for a complete restart on a picture of this scale. The mention of the editing approach was to highlight how they saved it, and yet also, because it was unfamiliar, how it was somewhat problematic in some ways while simultaneously being amazing in others (Brandon said she loved it and wants to design her workflow around it that way going forward).


*Note: "Hollywood 6.0" = Silent 1.0, Sound 2.0, Studio Era 3.0, "New Hollywood" 4.0, CGI 5.0, Streaming 6.0.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

The obvious ruination of this movie during editing still hurts my heart.. it had so much potential

 

I would disagree on this. If we have to pick anything, other than being short changed on timeline, it would most definitely be the over-zealous dive into trying to cram in every possible nickle and dime of anything ever not used or wrapped up in any prior movie in the entire saga. They bit off way too much because they got too excited about the giant pile of star wars boxes left in the attic full of cool stuff. And because it was the 'final film' in the saga, they just went nuts trying to cram everything in.

It's a very understandable problem. I doubt there's really very many who wouldn't feel the pressure to cram as much into the final movie. Heck, even if not that, just sitting amongst the warehouse of unused material from past movies and picking what candy to take when it's all free is anything but simple.

Everyone will be convinced they could do it better, or has the solution for what should have been done, but not even Lucas, who wouldn't be drooling over all the spare material, could have pulled off a universally approved 9th end-cap (given the history of how people have reacted to his choices in the past in every movie since the first).

Cheers,
Jayson