To play around with some techniques, and to analyze the editing of the scene, I’ve made a chart that breaks down the Star Wars trench run sequence, which I’ve made available as a PDF.
I figure I’d put together a quick “how-to” of how I made it:
- Ripped Star Wars off of a DVD into a format I could use in Adobe Premiere. This step may be technically illegal.
- In Premiere, I cut the sequence into shots, and organized shots into layers according to the subject of the shot.
- Used File -> Export -> Final Cut Pro XML to save the sequence to an XML
- Used XSLT to convert the Final Cut XML into Open Office Calc XML, as described here and writing this script.
- I opened that in Calc and played with the resulting data as a spreadsheet.
- The simpler bar and pie charts I could make with Illustrator’s graph tools, but to generate the timeline of colour-coded shots, I wrote an AutoIt script that would draw rectangles based on values copied and pasted from the spreadsheet. Here’s the script I used.
- The Movie Bar Code at the very bottom I made with the “Import Video Frames to Layers” tool in Photoshop. Note there is a limit of 500 layers it will import, so I processed the video in After Effects to smoosh each 20 consecutive frames into one.
- From there, I just played with the data and ways to visualize it that would interest me from an editing perspective.
I think I learned more about Illustrator and spreadsheets in the process. It was tricky to get some of the objects in explosions to read as a very tiny silhouette. I’m curious about generating randomized edits using the Final Cut XML format, that might be worth exploring in the future. I also know everything I might need to know about the Star Wars trench run.