WAR OF THE YODA
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BACKGROUND INFORMATION
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"War of the Yoda" was an idea which came to me out of the blue way back in April 2006. It isn't uncommon for this to happen to me, but the idea of a ginormous Yoda was too appealing to let slip. I went on to the SoH JediMod server and gathered a few friends together. After an hour of shooting and re-shooting and re-re-shooting, I had enough material to realise my idea. The following morning I uploaded War of the Yoda: Prologue (it was effectively a pilot to see if I could pull this thing off), and others in my clan praised it and wanted more. They also pointed out problems (inconsistent subtitles, too dark, quiet in places) which I took into consideration. "Commie", who had acted as himself in-game but had his voice done by me, offered his vocal talents to replace mine. I then used the voice previously used for Commie for "Tenken".

The following weekend I tried to film at least parts of it with my friends. However, due to a lack of admin (required to increase the size of the model) and a lamer (who broke the lift on JediCouncilGC - a bug we would later reference in the final product), we only succeeded in taking one satisfactory shot. Any filming which required more than two people was done the following evening, and anything which required two people could be shot by me and acted out by my two brothers. Production was delayed by a couple of days due to my brother (who supplied two of the voices and acted) falling ill. We persevered and recorded the voices. I then finished editing the whole thing together and released it in a similar manner to Episode 0, to similar praise. The second one is, in my opinion, the stronger of the two, and I put that down to having a script.

I planned out a nine-part series, each growing more ambitious and epic (culminating in a huge fight on Anchorhead between the Jedi and various Yoda clones). With help from Commiel, I also wrote in some sub-plots to give the series some symbolism and depth (themes such as power, sacrifice, love... the usual wish-washy movie stuff). However, I had to put off production of the next installments due to increasing amounts of schoolwork. When I came back and attempted to film the more complicated sections (required more than ten people, patience and loads of complicated manouvers) I realised that there were never as many as ten people who were willing to help me. My plans were too ambitious and the epic story failed to become epic. All that were ever made were Episodes 0 and 1. If I can work out how to control bots/edit cutscenes, I might try to continue with the series. However, chances of that are slim.

A lot of the editing (both sound and video) is iffy in places. This was due to my lack of experience with Adobe Premiere 6, so therefore the transitions, some of the subtitles and sound is poor in places, but I don't think it completely destroys the overall quality of the videos.

A few months after I gave up hope, I decided to do something with the viedos. I took a screenshot from Episode 1, and that became a Picture of the Day on jk2files. I believe it was selected out of hundreds, possibly thousands, of other entries. I think in the end it had an average user rating of 7.8, which isn't actually that bad. I also uploaded the videos to YouTube, but they seem to have been largely ignored.

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I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the people who contributed to War of the Yoda, if they knew they were helping or not. The second .txt file in this download is an attempt to document all the modders, modellers and skinners who contributed in some way. Some of the skins were never released to the public, so as such the list is incomplete. I would like to thank you, the reader, for giving your time to read this (and hopefully watch the videos!). I hope I have entertained you and not wasted 20MB of your bandwidth.

Perhaps one day I will make another machinima series. I have ideas in my head for many different JKII/JKA videos. Perhaps one day, if I have the time, willpower, technology and people, I will turn them into something everyone can enjoy. Who can say what the future holds?

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To somebody not in the Shadows of Hope clan or not a player of JKII, some of the details and jokes might not make sense. I will attempt to clear these issues up:
1) "Thing", the poorly re-skinned Lando, who appears at the top of the lift and breaks it, is a skin which I made. It became infamous because of its annoying, squeaky sounds (and Crazy Frog taunt).
2) The lift fails to work due to a bug in GriffinClaw's Jedi Council GC 3.2. When Thing goes to "save them", the lift fails to work because of this bug.
3) In the sequence where Yoda and Staker run in through one door and come out of another, to understand the joke it is important to realise that they are doors to separate rooms.
4) Somebody with a pink lightsaber and poorly re-skinned Dante ran in to try and save Staker from the giant Yoda. This skin is Eazy's, who had at the time been recently expelled from clan affairs for being incredibly immature (among other things, but suffice to say if I were to list the problems we had with him then it would justify having its own text document). To poke fun at him and his attitude, we had him try to save Staker from Yoda and fail. This reflected many of his activities within the clan.