Star Wars: Lazy editing spotted in Revenge of the Sith

'Let the prequel hate flow through you'

Jack Shepherd
Wednesday 06 January 2016 10:31 GMT
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The chances are, if you’re one of the many millions who has gone to see The Force Awakens, you’ve been tempted to revisit the other six Star Wars films.

It appears hundreds of fans are going back and analysing the predecessors, and - as you may suspect - the prequel trilogy is not being looked upon fondly.

One of the many nuances that has recently come to people’s attention is the seriously sloppy editing in those three films.

A GIF currently doing the rounds on social media, of a scene from Revenge of the Sith in which Senator/Emperor Palpatine is explaining to pre-Darth Anakin about the power of the Dark Side, highlights the faults in the film.

anakin_morph

Watching it within the context of the entire film, barely anything is noticeable. However, when the clip is secluded (as seen above), you can see Anakin’s face change as George Lucas morphs two entirely different clips of the Jedi together. Here's the whole scene below (the edit coming in at 1.24).

In another notable example, this time within Attack of the Clones, you can see a floating pear somehow slip into Padme’s mouth, like she’s a lizard using her tongue to take in the fruit (at the 38-second mark).

Within Making Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace you can see Lucas’s morphing skills in action as he tells the editor what he wants (starting 45.40).

In the clip, the director wants to make Captain Panaka and Obi-Wan Kenobi sit down at different times. To do so, they blend two clips, in what Ben Burtt - the film’s co-editor - calls “cyber editing”.

“He loves to change the actors performances, you know,” Kurt says with disdain. “We've gotten into that, over the last two weeks, a habit of not taking anything for granted. If we can split one actor from one take and put him, re-sync him with everyone else. We’re doing lots of that.

“It’s fantastic you can do that but it’s opening up a whole world of, you know, it just multiplies the number of decisions you can make in a cut. Normally you can reject whole shots because just one thing is wrong, but now you can just keep the good things in that shot and throw away the bad.”

This practice has become very common place in modern day films, with new software able to morph shots much easier than when Lucas originally did it. Disney has produced this video, showing just how easy it is to make unsynchronised (and terribly acted) shots morph together.

In other Star Wars ‘news’, a fan theory - related to the above Palpatine/Anakin scene - has shown how the soundtrack to The Force Awakens could prove who Supreme Leader Snoke really is.

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