The open submission theme this year was Antagonism. I sort of cheated in that I had a half-done draft of a Palpatine vid for vid_bingo. (This one was my emergency backup premieres-premieres idea, in which case I would've submitted Start a War for an Antagonism non-premiere.)
For this one, my key principles were twofold:
This is also my first attempt at time remapping! It made the lightsaber fights much bouncier. I also did some audio editing, as I couldn't make the "I've seen diamonds cut through harder men / Than you yourself, but if you must pretend / You may meet your end" bridge work with Dooku film footage, and didn't want to make it multimedia just for that section.
My personal favorite bit is the Order 66 montage, followed by the jump cuts with Anakin going up the Temple steps.
condnsdmilk resurrected the Eurovision (European vidder, music, and/or source) vidshow. When I heard of this, I went "hey, it would be cool to make a vid with a non-English song!" and approached condnsdmilk about a premiere because I am insane. (Remember, 2.5 full-length vids plus 10k+ of fic in uh way too little time.) Vidshow vid listing.
Based on timestamps on communication, I got the "yes, would love a premiere!" message on the 19th of March and was done on the 14th of April. This included one brief false start where I wanted to make the vid to Sonne, but that didn't really jive tonally with the bright and colorful SWTOR footage, I swapped to Niin tuleni teen, which I already knew should work. (I tested it with one of the vfxercises last year in screencap format.)
No super insightful meta here, but I did make sure to pre-introduce the few people who betray us first in their civilian guises before later defeating them. Same for Darth Lachris, who shows up half a minute before her demise. I'd like to think that my lyric matches are insightful, though given that no-one knew the source and the song was in Finnish (albeit subtitled), I don't think anyone caught them. Fun fact: I had a momentary panic over what font(s) to use for the credits screen, but then I realized I'd answered that in the vfxercise as well, lol.
My original grand and sweeping vision for the premieres show was to make a vid to Reincarnation, but then I ragequit midway through clipping TPM (mostly because I'd have had to clip all nine Star Wars movies plus the Kenobi show and also I hadn't watched the sequels yet so I didn't know if my idea was valid), so I went for my backup idea.
Before the premieres show, there was a panel on women behind the camera (female directors & the movies they direct), and one of the panelists, colls, brought up her first vidding disappointment vidding Leia: she is a presence, but she doesn't really do that much. I had the exact same experience clipping for this. Leia sounds authoritative, but as soon as dudes turn up, her action scene body language is :O and she gets steadily more and more damseled over the trilogy. My solution was to put in basically every action-y clip of Leia and use editing to let her claim sole credit for e.g. blowing up the first Death Star. I also used the flashback in TRoS for Leia pwning Luke's ass in a lightsaber fight. I think, solely due to available footage, that I won't be making very many Leia vids. Though I have clipped every scene of hers save for the interminable Han/Leia sexual harassment in the middle of ESB (seriously, that movie made me into a Luke/Leia shipper) and the Jabba's palace/slave Leia stuff from RotJ, for posterity's sake.