First Test-Screening of the Prequel Edit
I visited my parents this weekend, the official reason being to deposit my winter tires with them and also to get some service done on my car. Unofficially, I hadn't seen them in a while, and I had just completed the first draft of my Episode III edit, and wanted to get some feedback. I knew going into it that trying to get honest feedback from my parents would be a tenuous notion, but hey, why not?
In watching the first draft for myself for the first time (I hadn't actually had a chance to watch this draft yet; I finished encoding it the morning I was going to drive to my parents, and was busy at work all day), I noticed several things that I wanted to go in and fix. A lot of the early editing work I did now feels a bit sloppy in comparison to the later stuff, and there are still a few glitches in the cuts here and there. The audio needs a heavy revisiting, but I already knew that that was an issue.
I screened it with my parents twice -- first, with just my dad, and then second with both of them. The overall reaction was...frustrating, I think sums up my feelings the best. They wanted to focus on the "good job" I had done, rather than the underlying question I was looking to answer: does the edited version of the movie now hold together well as a good movie on its own accolades? Ultimately, their answer was yes, though they had a lot of "clarity" issues.
For my dad's part, he has worse hearing than I do, and stuff that's easy for me to hear is hard for him to understand. As such, he has a very difficult time understanding dialog that isn't spoken with the utmost clarity. Consequently, he ends up missing a good chunk of the lines, and in turn blames his missing these lines on the actors -- he can hear some of them, so clearly when he can't, it's the actor's fault. I've tried to convince him that in many cases, the line is in fact spoken clearly enough, and he's just a cranky old man. Sometimes he believes me.
However, he did say that when watching Episode III originally, he never really felt engaged in the story. He felt lost, as if he were simply being pulled from one disconnected scene to the next, so he ended up just simply tuning out and watching the visual display. He said of the edit that he could now follow the story, and considered that a major mark of progress. He continually brought up, however, such notions like, "Well, if you had access to the source material..." or "Well, if you had been able to rearrange the storyboards..." and such things. Whenever he would say such things, though I'm sure he didn't intend it, it would always feel a little disheartening. Yes, I'm sure I could have had a larger impact had I, y'know, been some kind of high-level producer in the project. That's a pipe dream that doesn't approach reality, though.
Ultimately, I read his reaction as feeling as though the edited version is a significant improvement on the original, but that underlying story flaws carried across the prequels in general drag it down for him.
My mom is an entirely different case. Part of the problem is that she has a very difficult time putting scenes together. Frequently during FarScape, she would protest when characters would resolve whatever the episode's climax was, and then end up back on Moya. "How'd they get back there?!" she'd ask my dad and I, who would look at her and say, "Why does it matter? It's not important to the story; they just did." She had similar issues with the edit (though the places where she had issues were not as a result of the edit itself) and in places that I would never have imagined someone having a problem.
Mom is also not one for sitting back and analyzing something from a story point-of-view. She felt a bit slighted, I think, that the bad guys won in this movie, even though that's the entire point of the prequels -- how the bad guys end up taking over. She's not a fan of dark things in general, and Episode III is without a doubt a tragedy -- a point even more strongly emphasized in the edit, which removes much of the (silly) joviality that existed in the movie originally.
Overall, I'm not really sure how to assess its current level of achievement based on their reactions. There are too many things at play influencing their thoughts -- in particular, they are almost entirely reliant on subtitles to understand dialog in any movie, and the first draft's lack of those I think significantly impaired their understanding of the movie. I think in general, though, I still have some work to do. Some of that doesn't surprise me, as I knew it wasn't entirely polished yet. Some of it did.
It wasn't the stellar reception I was hoping for, but I guess it's hard to tell people "forget the predecessors to this movie happened, and just accept it as a standalone prequel to the original trilogy."
In watching the first draft for myself for the first time (I hadn't actually had a chance to watch this draft yet; I finished encoding it the morning I was going to drive to my parents, and was busy at work all day), I noticed several things that I wanted to go in and fix. A lot of the early editing work I did now feels a bit sloppy in comparison to the later stuff, and there are still a few glitches in the cuts here and there. The audio needs a heavy revisiting, but I already knew that that was an issue.
I screened it with my parents twice -- first, with just my dad, and then second with both of them. The overall reaction was...frustrating, I think sums up my feelings the best. They wanted to focus on the "good job" I had done, rather than the underlying question I was looking to answer: does the edited version of the movie now hold together well as a good movie on its own accolades? Ultimately, their answer was yes, though they had a lot of "clarity" issues.
For my dad's part, he has worse hearing than I do, and stuff that's easy for me to hear is hard for him to understand. As such, he has a very difficult time understanding dialog that isn't spoken with the utmost clarity. Consequently, he ends up missing a good chunk of the lines, and in turn blames his missing these lines on the actors -- he can hear some of them, so clearly when he can't, it's the actor's fault. I've tried to convince him that in many cases, the line is in fact spoken clearly enough, and he's just a cranky old man. Sometimes he believes me.
However, he did say that when watching Episode III originally, he never really felt engaged in the story. He felt lost, as if he were simply being pulled from one disconnected scene to the next, so he ended up just simply tuning out and watching the visual display. He said of the edit that he could now follow the story, and considered that a major mark of progress. He continually brought up, however, such notions like, "Well, if you had access to the source material..." or "Well, if you had been able to rearrange the storyboards..." and such things. Whenever he would say such things, though I'm sure he didn't intend it, it would always feel a little disheartening. Yes, I'm sure I could have had a larger impact had I, y'know, been some kind of high-level producer in the project. That's a pipe dream that doesn't approach reality, though.
Ultimately, I read his reaction as feeling as though the edited version is a significant improvement on the original, but that underlying story flaws carried across the prequels in general drag it down for him.
My mom is an entirely different case. Part of the problem is that she has a very difficult time putting scenes together. Frequently during FarScape, she would protest when characters would resolve whatever the episode's climax was, and then end up back on Moya. "How'd they get back there?!" she'd ask my dad and I, who would look at her and say, "Why does it matter? It's not important to the story; they just did." She had similar issues with the edit (though the places where she had issues were not as a result of the edit itself) and in places that I would never have imagined someone having a problem.
Mom is also not one for sitting back and analyzing something from a story point-of-view. She felt a bit slighted, I think, that the bad guys won in this movie, even though that's the entire point of the prequels -- how the bad guys end up taking over. She's not a fan of dark things in general, and Episode III is without a doubt a tragedy -- a point even more strongly emphasized in the edit, which removes much of the (silly) joviality that existed in the movie originally.
Overall, I'm not really sure how to assess its current level of achievement based on their reactions. There are too many things at play influencing their thoughts -- in particular, they are almost entirely reliant on subtitles to understand dialog in any movie, and the first draft's lack of those I think significantly impaired their understanding of the movie. I think in general, though, I still have some work to do. Some of that doesn't surprise me, as I knew it wasn't entirely polished yet. Some of it did.
It wasn't the stellar reception I was hoping for, but I guess it's hard to tell people "forget the predecessors to this movie happened, and just accept it as a standalone prequel to the original trilogy."