Superb Titles From the WC Movie (February 24, 2023)

Gotta love OCR A Extended. I was able to make a graphic with glowing text in GIMP for Scott Manley's Runway Project last season; it'd be really easy to replicate that exact style of text. I'd have to look up how to do it again...
 
The evolution of these during production is interesting. The approach to the claw doesn't really change much at all, except that nearly every cut save for the final calls it the C.S.S. Tiger Claw. Most of the preliminary titles are also green instead of blue

Beta-Tape 009 - Wing Commander Reel 1.avi2022-10-25-23h33m57s078.jpg




The Concordia Battle Group one doesn't change too much, but the time to earth changes a bit. The scene got shifted back and forth a bit in the edit so in some versions it's 10 hrs from earth, and in others it's 12 and so on.
HG - Reels 1-6.avi2022-10-25-23h39m27s222.jpg




The pegasus attack at the beginning of the movie probably morphs the most in some ways. Some of the early edits start with a fly-over of a destroyed Pegasus and then flash back in time to the attack. The final cut of the film is linear and so does away with a lot of the supertitles

Ver1
Wing Commander Opening Seq.avi2022-10-25-23h03m45s587.jpg

Wing Commander Opening Seq.avi2022-10-25-23h04m07s929.jpg


ver2
Tape 029.avi2022-10-25-22h59m43s397.jpg

Tape 029prores.avi2022-10-25-23h00m12s091.jpg
Tape 029prores.avi2022-10-25-23h01m10s633.jpg



The Concordia battle group title near the end of the film doesn't change much. The final CG shots are a different angle versus the preliminary animatics, but the title doesn't really change other than it goes from being called a "battle fleet" to "battle group"
BJ+MB - Wing Commander - Ref Cut.avi2022-10-26-00h15m22s507.jpg

Wing Commander Last 15 Minutes Todds Cut.avi2022-10-26-00h24m28s285.jpg



The most interesting supertitles in the rough cuts are the ones that got completely eliminated with the loss of the traitor cut. There's a number of establishing shots of the Kilrathi fleet that got excised from the movie because they were lead-ins to scenes that never made it into the final cut. It's a shame because it would have helped sell the size of the Kilrathi threat but it also helped keep the ticking clock of the plot more in mind during the more character heavy first half of the film.

In his first one you can see that work was done to bring the scene past the early pre-vis version
Tape 009 - Wing Commander Reel 1.mov2022-10-25-23h16m37s134.jpg
Tape 033.avi2022-10-25-23h14m55s451.jpg


The second one would have happened immediately after Blair and Angel first encounter the Concom on their reconnaissance mission
Tape 76.avi2022-10-25-23h58m48s729.jpg



The third would have been shortly after the decompression scene. The Kilrathi Admiral sends the Pilgrim traitor to the concom to transmit the jump coordinates to the fleet for the jump to Earth.


There's a final couple of deleted titles on the Confed side of the coin too. There's one that only showed up in a single early cut of the claw before the jump to the Ulysses Corridor, and then there's one from the end of the film that is a sad loss... I don't know why it was cut, but it was likely to save money on a costly render but quite a bit of work was done going from previs to active production. There was originally a shot of the confed fleet where Blair is brought in tow to Tolwyn's ship
HG - WING COMMANDER R1,2,3 TEMP CUES.avi2022-10-25-23h40m37s528.jpg

Tape 072.avi2022-10-26-00h24m06s642.jpg


And that's it! I think they're neat, and maybe nobody else does, but that's ok. It's a fascinating look into the evolution of the film from pre-production to post. A lot of the CG shots in the movie were mocked up in pre-vis and used to fill in during the early edits of the film and replaced as finished or newer versions of the shots came in.
 
The evolution of these during production is interesting. The approach to the claw doesn't really change much at all, except that nearly every cut save for the final calls it the C.S.S. Tiger Claw. Most of the preliminary titles are also green instead of blue

I believe what happened here is that the art department in Luxembourg made a bunch of decisions for the visuals that didn't really cross over to the folks running post in Austin. Things like the ranks, character names written on screen, etc. are all a little off. The physical patches all say "CSS" and that probably made sense for Europeans (Confederation Space Ship) but at some point someone pointed out that no, that's Confederate States Ship and we shouldn't use it... and then the guys doing the tie in material and the guys doing post production solve the problem in opposite ways... CS in the books, TCS in the on screen titles.

Worth noting though that this EXACT SAME THING happened on the original Wing Commander... they changed CSS to TCS pretty late in the script... the voice script still uses it and one CSS slipped through in a bar conversation ("CSS Suffolk")...
 
These are really nice. We never got to see the underside and back in the film, wish that we had. Do you know if the other ships of the fleet in the final cut were Concordia models?
Going from memory it's a little bit odd. It almost seems like one of the Kilrathi/Confed capships switches sides somewhere in the edit. I don't know if that was intentional or if they were just padding out the previs fleets and never intended them to be on that side. Regardless, the Concordia-type seems to be the predominant one in Tolwyn's fleet in all versions. Some of the articles about making the movie do mention a third Confed capship that was made but most of the workprints are kind of inclonclusive there on identifying it. There's a troop carrier/ dropship in the previs during the Pegasus attack but that's on the Kilrathi side. The Kilrathi already have 5 distinct capships in the final movie as it is but that would have been nice to see too.
 
Back
Top