Star Wars - The Reconstruction Project

The Audio

2008-09-09T12:13:00.000-07:00

A few years back, National Public Radio (NPR) did a radio show on Star Wars. It was written by Brian Daley and he expanded a 2 hour movie into a 6 hour radio show. One of the scenes in the radio show NOT in the movie was the scene of Luke at the vaporator. It's got Mark Hamil doing the voice and uses the original music by John Williams. To make this even easier on me, I found a posting on YouTube where some guy had tried to piece all the missing, deleted and moved scenes together - when he included the 'lost cut', he edited the lines from the audio into the B&W footage of the missing scene. I've used an editor to download the piece and converted it to an audio clip - I'm going to use that to add the sound into the scene. Initial work is looking very good. I WANTED to upload the sound clip here, but apparently I can only upload photo and video files,... Work progresses,...

The Beginnings,..

2008-09-07T15:18:00.000-07:00

Well, it took some searching to find shots I needed and pics of the people and such in the right places and poses. Thank GOD for Photoshop or this project would've been a LOT harder. I've placed a comparison of the old and new footage here - give an idea of what it MIGHT look like,..
I need to work on it some more cause it has a slight 'animated' or 'CGI' feel and look to it - and everything there is real - basically a composite of different photographs. Either way - I think it's a good start and have high hopes for the project.

The Lost Cut

2008-09-05T15:54:00.000-07:00

"The Lost Cut" is the name associated to an early prototype of the original Star Wars edited by a man named John Jympson from Britain who also cut together such famed films as Zulu. What he did was take whatever footage was completed at the time (1976) and assemble a rough cut of the film, putting the shots in their proper sequence, to give the filmmakers an idea of the narrative flow of the film. An alternate explanation put out was that George Lucas had originally written the scenes and shot them at the suggestion of his industry friends who thought that audiences wouldn't understand the story strictly being told from a droid's point of view and so we have an early introduction to Luke Skywalker. Upon realizing that the story was really about the droids adventures and it was them leading things to Luke and Obi-Wan, etc.; Lucas took the footage out. There are various scenes: Luke out on the desert flats fixing amoisture vaporator and witnessing the space battle above, some deleted scenes with Luke and Biggs, and an alternate cut of the cantina scenes including more aliens and Han with a girl.
Of these, my project is the first scene: While Luke is working on a machine at the Lars homestead, he uses a set of binoculars to look up into the sky. Seeing two starships exchanging laser fire in space, he decides to go to tell his friends at Tosche Station. When he runs to his landspeeder, one of the moisture parolling droids malfunctions. Luke just rolls his eyes and continues to make his way to Anchorhead. The only footage of this scene is in very grainy black & white and has no sound.
This blog will detail my attempt to reconstruct the footage and add sound - finish a scene that numerous Star Wars fans have been wanting to see for years!