Going Rogue IV: The Edit

supervillain team up movie that could most generously be called BAD.

“There's a lot of very valid things to criticize in suicide squad, from its incomprehensible”

action to its intangible sludge monsters to its over-sexualized costuming. It's also the bizarre choice to make a save the world from a sky-layser story using characters whose entire deal is meant to be government black ops with plausible deniability. But one of the most interestingly bad parts of suicide squad is its editing, and the story of why it's so bad.

Directed David Ayer only had around 6 weeks to write the film script. So during principal photography, he shot around 200 hours worth of footage, planning to find the story in the edit. Ayer's director's cut was a relatively somber, dark and gritty film, most likely cut by seasoned Hollywood editor John Gilroy.

But Warner Bros. executives had been spooked by the tapered response to Batman vs Superman Dawn of Justice, and they were concerned that Ayer's suicide squad didn't deliver on the film's trailers, which had a fun, joky, edgy, and a hot topic kind of way tone.

“So while Ayer and Gilroy were working on the director's cut, studio executives from Warner”

Bros were working on an alternate cut of suicide squad, with trailer company Trailer Park, who'd cut one of the film's popular trailers. Warner Bros. then tested both versions of the film with audiences. Neither option was well-received, but the studio and trailer parts cut got a slightly higher

score, even though it required what would end up being $22 million of reshoots to work.

David Ayer has been pretty blunt about his dissatisfaction with the final film, and he insists there's a much better version of suicide squad on a hard drive somewhere on the Warner lot. He has tweeted #releasetheaacut. John Gilroy is the sole credited editor on suicide squad, but he probably had very little

to do with the film that was released. He'd actually left suicide squad by the start of summer 2016. He'd gone off to help his brother, writer and director Tony Gilroy, on Rogue One, another

“big budget franchise film that was having trouble reconciling its trailers with its directors”

cut. This is going rogue, the podcast that has seen all the Rogue One trailers and knows every shot that was cut. I'm your host, Tancy Gardem, and in this episode we're going to be looking at two elements of film making that speak directly to audiences, editing and marketing.

Also, we've wanked and we've nodded at it for the past few episodes, but we are finally

going to answer the question, why do the trailers for Rogue One look so different to the movie? And what does it even mean if they do? We've already met one of Rogue One's editors, the truly delightful Colin Gowdy, who missed his first call from Lucasfilm because he dropped his phone in the bath and it was sitting

in a bag of rice in the laundry. He'd been working on Rogue One since 12 months before cameras even rolled, initially creating a rough draft of the film using other movies before staying on to cut the pre-vis for the E-do scenes in the middle of the film. Colin Gowdy is an incredibly experienced editor who's been working since the 70s, but

he's not a Hollywood editor. Another editor wasn't initially attached to do Rogue One with Gowdy acting as a collaborator and a backstop, but when that editor dropped out, Gowdy remained. A week before Rogue One started shooting, New Zealander Javors Olsen joined Rogue One as another editor, coming off a truly punishing run of three Hobbit films.

Olsen is younger, but unlike Gowdy, he had actually cut multiple hundred million dollar films.

So while they might not have been an official hierarchy, Olsen was effectively the senior editor. Olsen would also later be responsible for the one scene in Rogue One that everyone likes. During shooting, Colin Gowdy and Javors Olsen were set up in Pinewood Studios, upstairs from soundstage where the film was being shot.

As scenes came in, they would divvy them up with one editor doing a cut before it went to the other for a pair of fresh eyes. On Edwards' previous films, there was a huge amount of footage to work through on Rogue One. And because a lot of that footage was shot without a specific purpose, the edit was where

the decisions had to actually be made. Here's Garthead Woods's own assessment on his shooting style and how that affected the edit. But sometimes you just don't know where it's going to go. You know what I mean?

Someone comes up to you and says, "Where's that in the movie or the scene?" I don't know, like it's like running round the supermarket and you're just grabbing everything

People are like, "What are you going to cook?"

You go, "I don't know."

“The shop's closing in 10 minutes, like we'll never allowed back in, just grab everything.”

And then you leave and then you sit in the edit and then you go, "What have I done?" Like this is, this is going to take us three years and it was a long process cutting the film. It, we had a lot of material, like way more than normal. That three years figure might feel pulled out of the air, but bear in mind that Edwards

and his monsters took eight months to get from a four-hour cut to a 90-minute cut. And that was a four-hour cut, not 200 hours worth of rushes. But Rogue One did not have the luxury of time. They had about nine months from the end of shooting to the film's release. Javis Olson worked through his Christmas break to catch up to the shoot and make sure they'd

be able to have an edit as a assembly cut in time. Because Gowdy had worked with Edwards on monsters and was used to his shoot everything style, he'd often cut a highlights reel from the rushes to pass on to Olson. Olson would later describe the rushes as feeling, quote, "A lot more like a documentary

“shoot in that take one might be a wide shot looking in one direction and take two could”

be a close up looking in the other direction, which gave the script continuity person a hell of a job and was an interesting adventure for us in Editorial 2 because the coverage was not the standard set-ups you'd normally get. We might find a beautiful little moment towards the end of take-a that was not covered anywhere else.

It was really exciting but meant that cutting was not quick. It was a lot of work." Colin Gowdy edited the middle scenes of the film on Edo, since he'd already cut the previous for that and was more familiar with the flow of the action and the special effects. Gowdy has been a massive fan of Star Wars since the '70s and he'd often act as a fan

proxy. It's in pre-production and the edit. During an early design meeting about the Imperial weapons facility on Edo, Gowdy bought it in over-edwards the film's director to say that Imperial gun turrets had to be square

“instead of round since Edwood suggested they were round and everyone knows that rebel”

gun turrets around Imperial gun turrets are square. During the edit, Gowdy saved the shot of C3PO and R2D2 at the rebel base, which the producers Allison Schema and Kathleen Kennedy wanted to cut for time. The shot was originally a much longer tracking shot through the entire base, showing different rebel pilots, soldiers, and support crews all hustling to get to scarroth, before ending

on 3PO and R2. What is in the film is actually just the tail end of the shot. The producers suggested that they might as well lose the entire shot if they weren't going to have the first two-thirds of it, but Gowdy pushed back since this was the only time we saw the droids who appeared in every other Star Wars film.

He also kept the original Star Wars films close. Here he is talking to E.C. Henry before Rogue One was released and just for clarity, Avalid is the editing software that they were using. I mean, I have all the original movies on the Avalid and I refer back to them constantly. I'm like, how long did they hold that shot in the original film, and I'll go and look

at stuff. Because sometimes you think, "Oh, that's a bit too quick.

You took the cutting on new hope, it's incredible, the final space battle on attacking

the Death Star and New Hope, the cuts, the duration of the shots they hold on that's on the X-wing pilots, it's really short." And you would think on a movie that was 40 years old, they wouldn't be cutting as fast as we do these days, they really did. Something Gowdy doesn't mention here is that the cutting in the original Star Wars movies

is often so quick, because the effects shots were too short to have anything other than quick cuts. Most of the special effects budget on a new hope was spent developing the Dijkstra Flex, a fitly but game-changing computer-rigged camera system invented by Russell Dijkstra. It would change visual effects in film forever, by allowing sweeping camera movements

around models, rather than a static, one-ship chasing each other's Star Trek Pupypule style space battle. But in its infancy, the Dijkstra Flex was temperamental and buggy and could only really execute incredibly short shots, hence the really fast data ting. The edit on a new hope is truly a story of fixing it in post.

George Lucas had an editor in England who he fired when he got back to California. Lucas got to work re-cutting the film with new editors, his then-wife Martial Lucas and Richard Chu, who had edited the conversation and one flew over the cook who's nest. The final space battle scenes were taking a huge amount of time to cut, so regular

Brian Dapama collaborator Paul Hirsch was brought in as a third editor, Hirsch ended up staying

until the very end of post-production, longer than Martial Lucas or Richard Chu, and he actually ended up cutting the Empire Strikes back as well. As a team, the editors did a lot of fine tuning, using the tops and tails of takes, reshooting

replacement or ADR.

“The structure of the first 10 minutes of a new hope was streamlined from the original script”

version, which cut frequently to look on Tatooine, looking up at the space battle and flirting with his boyfriend Big Stark later. The editorial team also handled the very delicate addition of the impending death star attack on the rebel base in the final scenes. Originally, the ex-wing pilots were just going to be attacking the Death Star with the amorphous

threat to other planets and rebellions hanging in the air. But by adding the Death Star's zeroing in on the rebels on Yavin 4, the whole scene has an all or nothing fight for survival edge that wasn't in the original scripted version.

If you watch the end of a new hope really closely, you'll notice that you never see a direct

talking headshot of anyone mentioning the impending attack. It's all voices over shots of screens, often disembodied voices over loudspeaker systems. It's all really delicate, light touch editing that shows how much you can change a story that's already been written and shot. There's this kind of overdone saying that every film is written three times.

Once in the script, once on the shoot, and once in the edit. But that ignores the fact that the edit is the only one that the audiences actually see. Sure, it's informed by the script in the footage, but editors control the flow of information to the audience, and often end up deciding what's more important for the story in every scene.

Say, for example, you were cutting the scene where Jen and Bodie are talking about Jen's

estranged father Galen. Bodie is talking about his close relationship with Galen, and how Galen pushed him to do what was right in the face of massive personal risk and existential danger.

“So do you show Bodie talking about this or do you show Jen's reaction to it?”

You're probably going to cut between the two, but when do you choose to cut? Do you revel in Jen's pain at the relationship that she's lost with her father? Or do you choose the take-where Felicity Jones is really playing her as emotionally closed off and unable to process the idea that her father isn't the villain she's had to tell herself he is?

Do you take Jen's reaction from an early line and put it over a later one because it feels like a more subtle acting choice when it's put there?

Do you focus in on Bodie, who's finally able to feel like he can be honest with the people

around him, even though none of them really trust him? And should you cut to Cassian overhearing this conversation? Considering that he has orders to kill Galen. Or for a less hypothetical example, he is Colin Gaudy on the filmmakers podcast talking about the decisions he made while cutting the scene where Jen watches her father's hologram.

But then internally in terms of how you're noticing that scene with the other, which is the approach of the Death Star, there was a point in the dialogue when he says, "I'm thinking of you and where you are now."

“And I remember that point thinking, "Where is she now?"”

- She's underneath the Death Star. - The Death Star was about to fire on her. The Death Star was about to fire on her, and we've got to cut to that right. - Got to. - Where did that point go? - Wasn't scripted in that way. - And it was like, "That's your lynch pin." Once you know that you've got to hit that cut after that line of dialogue, then all the other

into cuts have to find their own place within the scene because that's the one in move of a bosspot. - How you choose to edit a scene affects not just that scene, but often the rest of the film, and an editor can effectively overwrite the writer and director if they want to. Granted, the director is normally in the room, and it creates a weird vibe, but I really think the importance of the edit is overlooked in a lot of discussion on films and filmmaking,

and it's about time we gave editors the credit they deserve. Also, of the entire film industry, editors probably have the highest proportion of people coming into their office to cry, and they deserve credit for putting up with that too. By April 2016, Garathon was Colin Gaudy, and Jayvers Olson had finished the director's cut of Rogue One. It was not the mythical four-hour director's cut that every single studio film

is now rumored to have. It was around 2 hours and 15 minutes, 10 minutes longer than the final film. It was, however, significantly different to the film that would be released in December. As I mentioned last episode, the film's opening was much leaner, going straight from gin being rescued as a child by saw to her as an adult being recruited by the rebellion. No prison break,

The scenes on Edo were probably pretty similar to how they appear in the final film,

“but like in the Chris White's draft at the screenplay, the final mission on Scarif was essentially”

two different missions. Gin and Cassian would steal the Death Star plans from the imperial vault, but to transmit them to the rebel fleet, they had to cross the battlefield to a separate transmission tower. This is conjecture, but I guess that this version of the final act lasted for more than an hour. And the halfway point between the two missions was probably BODY's death and the destruction of the escape shuttle, at which point the battle stops feeling winnable.

Again, this is conjecture, but after BODY's death, the team probably rallied together to transmit the plans up to the rebel fleet, rather than taking them physically off-scarif. They crossed the battlefield, Bayes and Cheroot probably died heroic deaths to make sure that gin made it to the transmission tower, then Cassian and K2SO barricaded the bottom of the transmission tower while gin

“headed up to transmit the plans. Cassian was short, appearing dead before K2 was cut down in a”

hail of gunfire. While up on top of the tower, gin had to face chronic alone, before Cassian returned from what looked like certain death, Han Solo style to help her. Together, they transmitted the plans to the rebel fleet who were unable to help for other reasons that were not entirely nailed down in the edit at this point, then gin and Cassian died together on the beach, as they do in the final cut. In the director's cut, gin and Cassian's final moments weren't into cut with Vader,

or Taken, or the destruction of the rebel fleet. It was just a quiet moment focusing on gin and Cassian's noble heroic death. While the edit team focused on balancing the characters and live action plot elements of the scarif battle, the space battle elements were left largely to one side, which meant it was much later in the process that John Null suggested that the rebels should push one star destroyer into another and use it to disable the shield gate. This was a really great idea.

Null got inspired watching videos of container ships that didn't break in time and plowed into shipyards, these unstoppable objects needing immovable forces. It's one of the better special effects in the film that just has the vibe of getting to massive Lego sets and smashing them together.

Even with a Lena First Act, the director's cut of Rogue One fell long, long enough that

producers Kathleen Kennedy and Alison Schema seriously considered cutting Edo from the film entirely. The film was about 20 minutes too long, and Edo was an easy 20 minutes to lose. They ultimately decided against it, since it was the first time in the film that the core team really came together and worked as a team. But the fact that they considered cutting Edo at all, hence had a much bigger problem with that entire 20 minute sequence. From a pure plot momentum perspective, nothing happens

on Edo. Jen already knows the Death Star plans are on Scarrif because Gail and Telser in the hologram that she watches on Jetta. She has no proof of her father's sabotage of the Death Star, which is why they go to Edo to rescue him. But since Gail and Dyes, Jen ends up with no more evidence or information than she went in with, which is why the team goes to Scarrif to steal the plans. When she leaves Edo, Jen doesn't actually know anything that she didn't know when she left

“Jetta. There's definitely some important character moments on Edo, besides just the team coming”

together. You get Cassian choosing not to kill Gail and Osso, trusting Jen over his orders. Jen gets her classic Star Wars moment of holding a dying parent in your arms.

Body does his first violent act of rebellion and Bayesian Turut are there. Another issue with Edo

is the fact that it's 20 minutes. Rogue One is essentially broken into three acts by location. Jetta is act one, Edo is act two, and Scarrif is act three, with scatterings of other planets in between. You'll stand at three act film structure for a 90 minute film is about 25 minutes for the first act, 40 for the second and 25 for the third. The second act is usually longer because it's the film's core premise or plot, since it's after the character is basically chosen to be part of the story.

You buy a ticket to how to train your dragon and you're going to see some dragon training in the second act. In Rogue One, Jetta is a 50 minute first act. Edo is a 20 minute second,

and Scarrif is a 50 minute third, which is why the pacing of the film feels off.

If Edo had been cut, the Scarrif battle would have likely been broken into acts two and three,

but even then, the film would have felt lopsided towards Scarrif.

“There were other story issues that would have become apparent during the edit,”

like the jump cut from Jena's a child to Jena's an adult, with only the film's title card in between. This jump cut probably seemed fine on the page, especially in early drafts when a adult Jena was a rebel sergeant, but as later drafts turned Jena into a prisoner being offered a deal rather than a soldier being given orders, the jump cut would have felt jarring. Adding to that jarring feeling was some pretty radical changes to Star Wars editing conventions.

Some, like starting the film without an opening crawl, were decisions that were made by the whole team a long time before shooting, but others, like the choice not to have wipes between scenes, were made relatively late in the game. There was a version of the film with wipes, but they were removed since they were totally inconsistent with the overall dark vibe of the movie.

“The film also opens with a flashback and includes a time jump,”

both things that had not been done in a Star Wars film before. One stylistic choice that is going relatively unremarked on is the onscreen title cards for planets. These were added very late in the edit process, and I hate them. There is something incredibly off about the onscreen text, the blunt white font and the kind of default lettering, and the fact that the titles only show

up 10 minutes into the film on the third planet that we see. While we're here, I also want to

mention Rogue One's onscreen title card. It's bad. It's a bright yellow, serif, outline font, and as far as I can tell, it's so bad it hasn't actually been used anywhere other than in the movie. All of the posters, promotional content, DVDs, Blurais, Tain Books, everything associated with Rogue One, uses the marketing title treatment instead, which has the same font, but with filled

“in letters, usually in gold or black rather than yellow. That's how bad this title card is. The”

film tries to pretend it didn't happen. All other media also uses the A Star Wars story, subtitle, which the in-film title card for Rogue One doesn't, although the in-film title card for solo does. Rogue One really was still something of a test case for standalone Star Wars choices, and not everything they tested got a thumbs up. Meanwhile, industrial light magic were working on Rogue One's visual effects. The one's

promised limit of 600 VFX shots was being quietly and completely ignored. The film has two major characters, K2SO and Grand Mofftarkin, who are entirely CGI. Tarkin in particular was proving to be

difficult as a fully rendered human skin puppet. Tarkin was the first visual effect that Ilem started

work on, and it was one of the last to be completed. Peter Cushing, the original Tarkin actor and Hammer horror movie icon, had passed away in 1994. On set, the role of Tarkin was performed by actor Guy Henry, who also provided Tarkin's voice. Henry was chosen for the role because he'd played young Sherlock Holmes in the 80s and had based his performance on the Peter Cushing version of the character, meaning he could embody Peter Cushing pretty well without doing an impression.

Henry has also been in heaps of stuff since the 80s, like Harry Potter and Rome. These are great actor, and he seems to have been pretty terrified about his performances Tarkin. While he had a good time building a rapport with Ben Mendelssohn in their scenes together, he said he quote, "wasn't comfortable throughout the entire process." And in particular, he was worried about his voice, insisting on doing 80s so he could get another go at getting

the voice right, and even telling producers he wouldn't be offended if they got a voice actor to redub all of his lines. The motion capture for Tarkin also wasn't as straightforward as dots on the face to digital Peter Cushing. Guy Henry's performance was filmed and tracked via dots on the face, but it was then mapped on to an entirely digital version of Henry, which would then be used to map the performance onto a digital version of Cushing,

which would then be tweaked in incredibly fine detail by animators. Motion capture de-aged actors were having a bit of a moment in 2016. In the 12 months around Rogue One, there was Captain America's Civil War Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2, Pirates of the Caribbean, Dead Mental Notals, and Kingsman the Golden Circle. However, all of these films only de-aged characters for brief flashbacks, and in all cases,

they were digitally de-aging actors who had been working at the age they were being thrown back

Plus, they would have the actor who was being de-aged on set to perform the motion capture

and dialogue. Taken was a completely different beast. He wasn't being de-aged. He was being resurrected. In multiple scenes, being played by a different actor, and while there was plenty of reference footage of Peter Cushing, not much of it was relevant since he spent most of his career playing Sherlock Holmes or fighting monsters. One of the main references used for digital

“Taken was a full face mold of Peter Cushing that was made for the 1984 film Top Secret,”

which Cushing appears in one scene of as a man with a massive eye. To make the eye they had to do a full face cast and Jon Nol managed to get that face cast, scanner, and use it as the model for CGI Taken. Rogue One's CGI work on Taken was pretty groundbreaking for 2016, but it has an aged well. That said, it's far more convincing than the Princess Leia Camero that ends the film. Part of that is definitely due to performance. Guy Henry actually

got to perform his lines as Taken, while Leia's one line is recycled from Carrie Fischer. What does it leave sent us? Help. It doesn't help that the audio quality on that line is significantly scratchier than anything else in the film. There are other reused lines from a new hope with red and gold

“leader, but they have the advantage of being part of a much busier audio mix that hides the”

low quality 70s tape. This is gold leader, shouting by. This is red leader, standing by. It also doesn't help that Leia is in a very bright, flatly lit set that more closely resembles a new hopeslighting and it's not flattering to the CGI. One of the recurring issues with the Taken CGI was actually that the Rogue One Imperial Sets were consistently darker than reference footage of Peter Cushing. But that darkness is also much more forgiving on Taken, because frankly,

you can't see his whole digital face most of the time. But also as a viewer, you're willing to forgive some of the finer details in the Taken digital face, because it's not as familiar, while Carrie Fischer's Leia is an icon. A decent chunk of the audience probably didn't even know that Taken was digital, because they didn't recognise the character or know that the original

“actor was dead. With Leia, everyone knows that she's CGI, and when you're looking for the scenes,”

you're more likely to find them. While the Rogue One editing and VFX team crouched to get the film into shape, in San Francisco, a different team was sorting through the Rogue One rushes, to create a much shorter, much more widely seen version of the film. The trailers.

The first trailer for Rogue One was made before the film started shooting. It was never officially

released, but it was played at Star Wars Celebration in April 2015. During a panel about the anthology films, which I mentioned in episode 2, it was the panel that Josh Trank was a no-show for, because he had a really bad case of getting fired. This first Rogue One trailer was basically just a VFX concept piece for the film. It showed a lush green forest planet with some of alicinuses Obi-Wan Kenobi lines from a new home. For more of them, a thousand generations.

A Jedi Knight to the Guardian was a piece of justice in the old Republic. A tie-fight of screams through the sky, and as the camera sweeps up to follow it, the trees give way to a clear outline of the Deathstone, dominating the sky. The footage then cuts to black over the sound of panic pilots' voices before revealing the title. Star Wars Rogue One. Garathon was described the footage at the time as a teaser for the

film before they began shooting it, and while phone camera recordings were posted online, it got buried by the Force Awakens trailer that was released the same day. It would be 12 months before there was another Rogue One trailer. The film had finished principle photography, and the director's cut was close to, if not already completed, when the official Rogue One teaser trailer went out in April 2016.

The trailer is framed around Gena, so being given a mission by the rebellion under Geras,

and has some teaser visuals from both Geta and Scarif, but basically nothing of Edo.

It's a great trailer. It gives you a really good idea of who Gene is, or who she was at this point in production, as well as selling the whole team on a dangerous mission vibe, although

underscored with imperial claxons, and the whole thing has a kind of paranoid urgency to it,

“so cut us to the sound mixes. The final shot of the trailer of Gene in an imperial”

tie fighting uniform with a voiceover from Sawer poses a really strong dramatic question. Neither this shot nor saws lines are in the final film. Last episode we actually covered this specific shot as an example of India hour. It was shot because Felicity Jones turned around in a corridor as lights were turning on around her, and Gareth Edwards thought it looked

good, so he had to shoot it. About a third of the shots in the teaser trailer aren't in the film,

and only two lines of dialogue actually made it into the cut. There's a very simple reason for this. Trailers are made by a marketing department, not the film makers. Rogue One as a film didn't technically really exist when these trailers were being made. It was still being assembled,

“and while Roughcuts may have been available, it's worth remembering how deeply shrouded in”

secrecy the details of Rogue One were. It's entirely possible that the marketing team weren't allowed to see a rough cut. Instead, the Lucasfilm marketing department would have sifted through the film's raw footage for compelling images, and they would have found a heap of them thanks to India Hour. India Hour shots make great trailer vision for precisely the same reason, a lot of them got cut from the film. They're interesting images that ultimately don't have a strong narrative

purpose. They aren't spoilers because they don't actually say anything. There was never a version of

Rogue One where Gena so defected to the Empire, only a trailer where if you keep fighting what will you become was put over an image of her in disguise. It's the coolish of effect in action.

“As an audience, we assume a relationship between images and audio that are put next to each other,”

but we really shouldn't in the case of a trailer because we know that it's not necessarily a narrative. It's very easy and common to edit lines of dialogue for a trailer. Usually condensing them or cutting together exposition that's much subtler or has more context in the script. One of the most famous examples of this is actually from another Star Wars film. It's time for the Jedi to end. Ryan Johnson's version of this line was in his own words,

much more convoluted. The Lucasfilm marketing department put together a much more concise version for the trailers, and Ryan Johnson liked it so much that he adjusted the film to match the trailers, since it hit the emotion he wanted to get to in fewer words. It's likely that swords lines from the Rogue One teaser trailer were either cut together or cut down. They could have come from a completely different scene, or had a different context. All of this is to say that the

version of Rogue One that is suggested by the teaser trailer does not exist, and it never did.

But to say that the trailer is meaningless is also reductive, because the Rogue One teases are kind of like a weird archaeological look at what Rogue One was like during principle photography. The trailer is made of those pieces, even if it was never the same thing. For example, Sorgherera has a shaved head in the teaser trailer, like he does in the film's prologue, but in the final film, for most of it he has gray hair and an

older, more worn down look. From that, you can draw one of two conclusions. Either there were a lot more scenes of Sorgherera with Young Jen and a shaved head, or this is how Sorgherera looked for the whole film during principle photography, and almost all of his scenes were later reshot. The latter is more likely, because there is some behind the scenes footage of Felicity Jones with a clean shape and forest wittaker, meaning that there were scenes between adult Jen,

and there's different looking and pretty different sounding version of Sorgherera. The teaser trailer also has a much more combative Jen in her few lines. For example, there was the line. "This is a rebellion, isn't it?" "I rebel." Which got a fair whack of criticism at the time for being cringe. It was cut from the final film,

And I have a bit of trouble saying my arse, so I really have to practice, and there was one

“line in particular, which is a rebellion, isn't it? "I rebel." Which takes so much effort,”

because I naturally want to say, "This is a rebellion, isn't it?" "I rebel."

A second longer trailer for Rogue One was released in August 2016. It also has a lot of shots

and lines that don't appear in the final film. It spends more time setting up the unlikely friendship between Jen and Cassian, although it presents it as a much more trusting relationship, with Cassian helping Jen against the rebellion's wishes, rather than being her assigned babysitter. "If you're really doing this, I want to help." "Good." "Good." There's a number of lines from Baze that were later cut, Sorgherera's gray hair,

and once again there is a criminal lack of body. This trailer ended with a teaser shot of Darth Vader, confirming that he would appear in the film, although not in the shot that appears in the trailer.

“There's also a very compelling shot towards the end of the trailer, of Jen facing off against”

a tie fighter with nothing but a handheld blaster. Like the Jen Imperial Uniform shot from the teaser, this shot is not in the film, and even when the trailer was released, it wasn't going to be in the film. It had been story-borted and shot, but by August, the entire scare of sequence was undergoing major changes, and this tie fighter face-off had already been cut from the film. But the Lucasfilm marketing department felt that this really captured the spirit of the film,

so they had the VFX shot completed, knowing that it wouldn't be in the movie, just the trailer. Marketing Rogue One came with a lot of new challenges. It could trade on the Star Wars name, but it had to be clearly separated from episode 7, which had only been released a year before. The slightly pretentious sounding anthology series was quietly replaced with a cleaner subtitle, a Star Wars story, which reminds me a lot of the time they renamed Coco Zero to Coco No Sugar,

because it turned out half of people surveyed didn't realize Coco Zero had no sugar. Rogue One didn't have any legacy characters or actors, and it was trying to hold off the very few recurring actors to avoid spoilers, so it couldn't wheel Harrison Ford out for a very grumpy press tour, like episode 7, and unlike any other Star Wars movie, Rogue One is not for kids. Four kids is a phrase that's usually used derisively about Star Wars, but the child like wonder

and joy that the film's conjure has always been their greatest magic trick.

Legendary Critic Pauline Kale dismissed a new hope saying that, for young audiences, it is like a box of Cracker Jacks, which is all prizes, brackets derogatory. But in her praise of Empire Strikes Back, only three years later, Kale stressed that the film was childish in the fullest deepest sense. The Force Awakens was made and marketed as a family film, even if it was PG-13, the violence was largely bloodless, and while a little long for younger kids,

there aren't many scenes that don't have action, adventure, or BB-8. But Rogue One is not a kids film. It's not that it's inappropriate the kids. It's just not very interesting. It's pessimistic. The internal politics of the rebellion and the empire are very much for grown-ups, and the lack of mysticism of the Force extends into a lack of weird aliens, and awe-inspiring visuals, and wishing lightsabers. The ending sacrifice and mass death of protagonist

doesn't look glorious to a kid. It looks like losing, even the costuming and the droids are dauer. Kids were at risk of finding Rogue One, for one to the better word, boring. This lack of family appeal didn't just cut down opportunities for a wide cinema audience.

“It also affected one of the key revenue streams for Lucasfilm, licensing and merchandise.”

The Force Awakened sold around $5 billion worth of star wars products, which with a 10%

licensing fee would have brought in 500 million for Lucasfilm. The widespread of products from toys to choose to lipstick also created a broader awareness that the series was back, but it's harder to sell merchandise of new characters who aren't really aimed at children, and who all die on screen. There was some traditional Rogue One merchandise, figurines, Lego, official costumes, and some more child-oriented items, like the official Rogue

One line of nerf guns. Yes, that is a thing that you can buy. There's a Cassian one, a Gen 1, and a Death Trooper one. You can buy a Star Wars SS nerf gun. But because there were no lightsabers,

merch that was made, most of it lists Jin as Sergeant Jin Urso, because merchandise is much

“harder to change after it's been made than a film. Marketing has long been a big part of the”

success of Star Wars, and a lot of that was due to one man, Charlie Lipnko, a friend of George Lucas from USC. After graduation, Lipnko was hired by MGM, working under Mike Kaplan, who had run the largely unsuccessful marketing campaign for 2001 as Space Odyssey. Lipnko became fascinated by why that movie had failed. As a dedicated flash Gordon and comic book fan, Lipnko decided that if he ever got a chance to market a film like 2001, he'd take it to sci-fi conferences

and fan events, building an audience from the ground up. In 1975, Lipnko ran the marketing

campaign for George. The first movie to make over a hundred million dollars, and George Lucas got

back in touch, sending Lipnko the third draft of the Star Wars script. Lipnko loved it, and when he started working as the marketing director for Star Wars, his first priority wasn't trailers. It was the film's novelization and comic book rights. He wanted to make sure they were published before the film's release to drum up interest in this new original story. Lipnko took a slide show and some posters to comic on in 1976 for the convention's first

ever panel on an upcoming film. Lipnko's hardest cell was to movie theater owners to get them to actually show Star Wars at all, but once he had screens for the film, he made sure there was an audience for it. A new hope did have a trailer, and it's not great, especially compared to other trailers from the era, like Alien, which still holds up to date. The trailer promises that... Some of the effects in the trailer weren't finished. Most obviously Darth Vader's lightsaber,

which is what in the trailer. It all vibes very B-movie. By the time Empire Strikes Back was being promoted, Star Wars was a known quantity. Empire got a really fun trailer, narrated by Harrison Ford doing his cheesiest 1950s sci-fi trailer voice. The thing is, with these original trailers, it was really hard for fans to scrutinize them. You could only watch them at the cinema, or when they were broadcast on television. The Star Wars prequels trailers, however, arrived at a game-changing

and uniquely cursed time. When suddenly, trailers were available on the internet, and due to slow

“download speeds, most viewers couldn't help scrutinizing them frame-by-frame, because that's how they”

were arriving, frame-by-frame over painfully slow dialogue. The internet also provided the opportunity to share your frame-by-frame analysis of this now instantly accessible media, and 20 years later, we live in hell, where scrutinizing trailers is part of the media cycle. Studios launch countdown trailers for trailers. Over analysis of pop culture isn't just common, it's actively encouraged by the Auroboros algorithms, because posting content with a tighter current trends

can boost your viewing figures massively. And Lucasfilm was, to some degree, banking on that. The Force Awakens had a marketing campaign largely built around nostalgia, and Rogue One couldn't really replicate that, but it could drop breadcrumbs for the fans. And fans, who've it up those

“breadcrumbs? I remember it taking less than a day after the behind-the-scenes real for Rogue One”

was dropped, for fans to find the barest hint of Jimmy Smith's shoulder, and conclude that Bale Ogarna was in the film. Months before Smith's involvement was announced. Between the teaser trailers shot of Jen in an Imperial pilot uniform, and the shot of her

facing down a tie fighter in the second trailer, a fan theory emerged that Rogue One would actually

go past the start of a new hope, and Jen would hijack a tie fighter and become the pilot that veers into Vader during the trench run in a new hope. There were also countless, very dumb theories that Jen would turn out to be Ray's mother, based solely on the fact that they were both brunettes. These theories, reaction videos, and trailer breakdowns are in Lucasfilm's best interests. They are, and I cannot stress this enough, free marketing for Lucasfilm. Really, they're further than

own time with their own resources. Fans who do a six-hour analysis of the Star Wars film are

“knowingly or not giving free publicity to that film. Yes, I am seen. Yes, I am owned.”

But the algorithm goes both ways. There is a reason that this podcast is coming out when it is, and I am hoping to ride that wave of renewed interest in Rogue One just as much as all the old-ride dipshits who actively recruited through content about the last Jedi. We all live in hell. If Rogue One had been released in 1977, there's a decent chance no one would really have any idea how much the film changed between shooting and the final print, and there's also a decent chance

that people would have only seen the trailer once or twice before going into the film. This is one of the very rare moments where I need to acknowledge that I saw the Rogue One trailer many times not just because I'm a nerd, but also because it was part of my job at the time. I was working for the local outposted the Disney channel and to include the Rogue One trailer on air, we had to run it by our standards team, who asked us to cut shots that were deemed to violent,

scary, or impactful. But because the sound mix on the trailers is locked, we then have to replace those shots either by slowing down shots on either side of them or stealing similar shots from other trailers to replace them. So when I went into the midnight screening of Rogue One, I went in with an extreme familiarity with the trailers because I had been closely watching them for a couple of weeks as part of my job.

“The Rogue One design brief of not how it was, but how you remember it, goes directly against”

the immediate accessibility of modern media. Going by memory, the locations in Rogue One are bigger and grander than they were in a new hope. The Empire is darker, scary, the heroes of Scrapia and Dirtyer, the battles are bloody a bigger and played out on a massive scale like a classful of kids playing Star Wars in the school yard. The cinematography is the moody documentary look that George Lucas wanted, not the flat bright studio lighting and wide focused shots that

cinematographer Gil Taylor gave him. Rogue One had the opportunity to do a completely faithful recreation of every set and crop from a new hope, but they chose not to. The moments where they did do faithful recreations, like the Princess Leia Camino, feel the holoist.

“So that's why the Rogue One trailers are so different to the film, because they were made before”

the film and for a different purpose. Trailers could easily paper over structural story issues and an access of footage. If anything, they reveled in it, but the film couldn't. By the time the directors cut had been delivered and the film's producers were tossing out ideas

like cut the entire second act for time, it was clear that Rogue One was in trouble.

Maybe if they'd had three years in the edit, Rogue One could have been brilliant, but they didn't have three years. What they had was a disjointed, often visually beautiful, but deeply inconsistent and unfunny film that would not be the smash hit follow-up to force awakens that Disney needed it to be. Rogue One needed one of the least understood, but most dissected parts of modern filmmaking. Re-shoots. Next time on going rogue, we are going into additional

photography and ADR, and how contingencies can lead to inconsistency. And with six months

until release, we'll finally meet Tony Gilroy, Oscar-nominated writer and director,

and Rogue One's new dad. Going rogue is written and presented by me, Tanzi Gata, with editorial assistants from Charles O'Grady and Christian Bias. Our music is by Kevin McLeod of Incompatec and Shane Hivers of Silverman Sound Studios, and our logo uses a photo by Anika Mikkelson. You can find a link to this episode's script with full sources in the episode description or on the show's Twitter account, going rogue and

the score pot. If you're enjoying the show, please tell anyone else you think would like it, and maybe check us a review or a rating on your podcast app. I know I just did a whole thing about how the algorithm is eating itself, but it's the algorithm's world. We're just living in it.