Synopsis:

The Battle of Scarif is just under 50 minutes long, making it a nice little companion piece to the original theatrical release. Alternatively, you could watch this right before A New Hope! The main point of this edit is to focus on the epic battle sequence from Rogue One, while also adding elements to make it fit in more with the other Star Wars films.

Intentions:

I thought Rogue One was a decent movie that had an great final act, but the bland musical score kept me from considering it excellent. Instead of re-editing the entire movie however, I thought it would be fun to make a "short" film instead, with music by John Williams and a classic opening text crawl.

Change List:

- Insertion of an opening crawl (of course!). It will summarize the events that occur during the course of Rogue One that lead to the Scarif battle. - First scene of the film is the confrontation between Krennic and Darth Vader, with some adjusted dialogue for Vader. - The Rebels will still bicker over going to war, but this stuff will be trimmed. As will Cassian’s super long monologue about the Rebellion. - I never found myself that invested in Rogue One’s characters to begin with, so a number of “character” scenes and lines will be adjusted. The main focus of the edit will be the battle itself and the actual recovery of the Death Star plans. - Insertion of classic Star Wars music cues from John Williams. I’ve been going through the entire saga OST and will be dropping tracks where appropriate. Most people have agreed that Giacchino’s score just didn’t cut it. Not that I totally blame him; apparently he had 3-4 weeks to write and conduct everything. - Various SFX enhancements. This is big. Because I’m adding new music cues throughout the film, this means that I have to remove some of Giacchino’s cues. Unfortunately the music sometimes bleeds across the 5.1 audio channels with the sound effects, meaning that I’ve had to rebuild the sound design for entire scenes where John Williams’ music is now. This has been by far the most time-consuming part of the edit, but thankfully there are some really great Star Wars SFX libraries online that I’ve been able to use for this. - A light sprinkling of those old-school wipes and transitions from the other Star Wars films. Why not? - The film ends with Vader slicing and dicing Rebel scum, and watching as the Tantive IV flies away. Leia’s scene has been cut.

Additional Notes:

Other Sources:

Special Thanks: