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Star Wars Episode III Post Notes archive


enderdrag64

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Spoiler

Goodbye old friend.... The opening of the piece is revisited later in the day, as Lucas has requested a change. He felt that a small moment of horns heard during the clone briefing was too light, too happy for the scene. Williams later recorded the pertinent measures sans that flourish

 

I bet this is that part in one of the docs on the DVD where you can hear Lucas singing along @Manakin Skywalker

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8 hours ago, enderdrag64 said:

An Energetic Start

February 09, 2005


"This is going to be an energetic start," says George Lucas, looking at the list of the cues assembled today.

 

"Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. 6M7 is the first of the day," says Composer John Williams, stepping up the podium with his baton. The orchestra members straighten in their chairs. The baton drops with the first downbeat, and a very familiar refrain plays -- not 6M7, but instead the last part of "Happy Birthday to You."

 

Williams smiles, as the orchestra offers their applause at a prank well executed. It is indeed a special day for John Williams. "I'm so happy to be sharing my 42 birthday with you," says Williams. "Thank you so much; that was very sweet."

 

This seems like exactly the sort of thing Mike would put towards the end of an expansion as an archival bonus track. (Assuming it was recorded, and the recording still exists....)

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  • 2 months later...
1 hour ago, enderdrag64 said:

An additional bonus, I managed to find one of the webcam pictures taken when it was at the scoring session:

 

image.jpeg''

 

The webcam was set up to take pictures every 20 seconds, and was there for multiple days, there were likely thousands of webcam photos of the scoring sessions that were once available online. Unfortunately most of them are currently lost, after months of searching I've only managed to find ~100 webcam photos total (out of the millions that were available on the service)

 

Also, thanks to Star Wars Insider, here are a few of the pictures that would've been attached to the articles in my original post:

(apologies for the poor quality, these come from magazine scans)

 

The Score Begins:

image.png

 

Recording Revenge:

image.png

Interesting! They already had digitally engraved parts/(scores?) for this one?

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Here's a random question. If JW had Star Wars III on the sheet music for ROTS (and from memory he had I and II for the other prequels), what did he write at the top of his sheets for ESB and ROTJ?

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23 hours ago, crumbs said:

what did he write at the top of his sheets for ESB

 

"Empire"

 

image.png

 

23 hours ago, crumbs said:

and ROTJ?

 

"Revenge of the Jeddi" :P 

 

image.png

 

JW's original sketches for ROTJ haven't actually leaked, just wanted to show a funny Herb Spencer spelling from the orchestrated sheets (plus, it's possible Herb was just transcribing exactly what JW wrote himself, I dunno)

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This is all great, back when Pablo Hidalgo actually liked Star Wars.

 

I love loving back to not even 20 years ago when we were so different about spoilers compared to how we are now. Nowadays they wouldn't even admit that Anakin and Padme reunite in the movie (but you can find full leaks way easier now compared to them).

 

The behind the scenes stuff for the prequels were really great at the time. Was there much footage of the scoring session of Revenge of the Sith outside a couple clips from the Battle of the Heroes music video? 

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12 minutes ago, SilverTrumpet said:

This is all great, back when Pablo Hidalgo actually liked Star Wars.

 

I love loving back to not even 20 years ago when we were so different about spoilers compared to how we are now. Nowadays they wouldn't even admit that Anakin and Padme reunite in the movie (but you can find full leaks way easier now compared to them).

 

The behind the scenes stuff for the prequels were really great at the time. Was there much footage of the scoring session of Revenge of the Sith outside a couple clips from the Battle of the Heroes music video? 

Other than the webcam that like I mentioned essentially streamed the recording sessions live (with no audio), there's the recording session footage in that music video, footage in the Within a Minute documentary, footage in the Endlessly Compelling web documentary, and footage in the recent Abbey Road documentary on Disney+.

 

There is quite a bit of overlap between the different footage sources but there's unique bits in each of them as well 

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37 minutes ago, SilverTrumpet said:

I've seen most of that besides the Abbey Road doc, which I haven't gotten to yet. That's REALLY nice to know there's stuff in there. Gonna bump it up the list.

Just skip to the 10ish minute part about SW. 

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38 minutes ago, Brando said:

Yeah, it was roughly an hour in, but they only spent like 5-10 minutes with John, then went back to pop music.

Oh I thought you were talking about the timestamp not the length whoops

 

12 hours ago, enderdrag64 said:

An additional bonus, I managed to find one of the webcam pictures taken when it was at the scoring session:

 

image.jpeg''

 

The webcam was set up to take pictures every 20 seconds, and was there for multiple days, there were likely thousands of webcam photos of the scoring sessions that were once available online. Unfortunately most of them are currently lost, after months of searching I've only managed to find ~100 webcam photos total (out of the millions that were available on the service)

 

Also, thanks to Star Wars Insider, here are a few of the pictures that would've been attached to the articles in my original post:

(apologies for the poor quality, these come from magazine scans)

 

The Score Begins:

image.png

 

Recording Revenge:

image.png

woah something interesting I just noticed here:

image.png

This is definitely the Execute Order 66 scene

image.png

 

In the final film this plays with tracked music from TPM, why would this be on the projector screen?

 

Or were they perhaps waiting for the proper Order 66 to start so they could record Lament

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5 hours ago, enderdrag64 said:

 

Or were they perhaps waiting for the proper Order 66 to start so they could record Lament

 

Wouldn't the projected version of the film be the special "streamer" version with all the markers John needs to time the music for each cue?

 

In which case they'd only project the scenes JW is actually scoring, with a little extra head and tail at both ends. I don't see why they'd have this particular scene, given it's about a minute before the non-TPM music starts.

 

The plot thickens...

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Maybe Obi-Wan falling off the cliff wasn't originally shown, and was part of the later reshoots? Idk if that would even make sense though considering without that scene there'd be a major gap once we catch up with him again.

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3 hours ago, Manakin Skywalker said:

Maybe Obi-Wan falling off the cliff wasn't originally shown, and was part of the later reshoots? Idk if that would even make sense though considering without that scene there'd be a major gap once we catch up with him again.

 

Would be surprised if it wasn't part of the original shoot. There was a deleted scene where Obi Wan encountered the Nos Monster in the waters of Utapau (after falling off the cliff).

 

image.png

 

Is there nothing in the leaked sheet music that indicates music might have been recorded for the pre-Lament scenes?

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You can see the choir in this photo, so it's probably a Lament recording. Maybe the editing of the previous scene was different or not even finished, since JW didn't have to write music for it.

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The original Lament cue is about a minute longer than the final edit of the scene, so it's possible that the little scene with the Emperor giving the order happened originally in the middle of the montague. 

(Similarly, the Making of book specifically mentions Williams and Lucas spotting music for the scene of Anakin marching towards the Jedi Temple with the clones, which has tracked music as well).

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29 minutes ago, oierem said:

The original Lament cue is about a minute longer than the final edit of the scene, so it's possible that the little scene with the Emperor giving the order happened originally in the middle of the montague. 

(Similarly, the Making of book specifically mentions Williams and Lucas spotting music for the scene of Anakin marching towards the Jedi Temple with the clones, which has tracked music as well).

Wow, that's an interesting idea. I was curious too about what was supposed to accompany the removed bit from Lament. I thought it was some deleted shots, but it's also possible...

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Of course, there are many possible sync variants here. Tried to insert a scene with Execute Order and entering the Temple somewhere. I don't know where to put the first 30 seconds, but Obi-Wan's fall looks... not bad. Not sure about Temple (I just removed wide shot here). 

 

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I'm not sure where these were released or how they got out there but on YouTube there are some videos that claim to be the original animatics for the order 66 sequence - could it be that Williams scored a version of these?

 

 

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1 hour ago, ragoz350 said:

Of course, there are many possible sync variants here. Tried to insert a scene with Execute Order and entering the Temple somewhere. I don't know where to put the first 30 seconds, but Obi-Wan's fall looks... not bad. Not sure about Temple (I just removed wide shot here). 

 

Nice try! 

For some reason, I always thought that the cut portion of Lament (which features the "Dies Irae" motif for Anakin) was meant to play over shots of Anakin marching towards the Temple... but who knows.

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3 hours ago, enderdrag64 said:

I'm not sure where these were released or how they got out there but on YouTube there are some videos that claim to be the original animatics for the order 66 sequence - could it be that Williams scored a version of these?

 

 

These are early previsuals made before the shooting (?). Some ideas got into the film, some were changed, some were abandoned. I think JW worked with unfinished CGI, but already with footage of real actors.

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9 minutes ago, ragoz350 said:

These are early previsuals made before the shooting (?). Some ideas got into the film, some were changed, some were abandoned. I think JW worked with unfinished CGI, but already with footage of real actors.

Right but what I'm asking is did any of these ideas survive long enough for Williams to have scored them

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2 hours ago, enderdrag64 said:

Right but what I'm asking is did any of these ideas survive long enough for Williams to have scored them

Yeah, since the sketch of this cue is unavailable (as is Padme's Visit), it's only guesswork here. 
I can imagine there were 1-2 more shots of Yoda in the sequence, like in the previs, but the final movie added his interaction with the wookiee, which JW clearly didn't score. There was also a filmed scene of Anakin killing Ahsoka Shaak Ti, which theoretically could have been here.

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4 hours ago, enderdrag64 said:

I'm not sure where these were released or how they got out there but on YouTube there are some videos that claim to be the original animatics for the order 66 sequence

 

These were released on the 2011 Blu-ray set and every Blu-ray/4K set since. You can see the menu selection screen at the very beginning.

 

Also interesting that the Obi scene isn't present here.

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 24/03/2023 at 7:45 PM, enderdrag64 said:

Oh I thought you were talking about the timestamp not the length whoops

 

woah something interesting I just noticed here:

image.png

This is definitely the Execute Order 66 scene

image.png

 

In the final film this plays with tracked music from TPM, why would this be on the projector screen?

 

Or were they perhaps waiting for the proper Order 66 to start so they could record Lament

 

Most of the musicians in the picture seem to be in a relaxed state (as far as I can make out), and JW seems to be making some sort of "attention everyone" gesture, so the picture might have been taken some time before the actual start of the Lament cue. Could have also been a take starting somewhere in the middle of the cue to fix some flub or record a rewritten bit. At any rate, I don't think they were recording at the exact moment the picture was taken. Just my two cents though!

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