Cinema/Idle Fanedit Musings: Prisoners/End Of Watch

I finally caught Prisoners this weekend, and thought it was a pretty good, albeit flawed, film. I think the main issue I had with it was that for a film that's getting so much praise for being clever, it was fairly predictable - if you've seen A History Of Violence and 8MM, you'll recognise pretty much everything that's going on in this film.

It's not a crippling flaw, although the third act does drag quite badly, in my opinion. The core performances and cinematography are very good, and carry the film as much as possible - though it would have helped if the third act didn't substantially change the tone of the film and take the plot into a much more generic direction.

One thing that I found quite odd throughout the film was that Detective Loki constantly works alone, even in several circumstances where it presents an obvious risk. His behaviour doesn't compensate much for those risks, either.

At first this just seemed to be another sloppy aspect of the script, but as I thought about it an alternative explanation suggested itself to me - what if Detective Loki were Brian Taylor from End Of Watch? Both characters are extremely competent police officers, albeit with very different demeanours. I can easily imagine Taylor being traumatised by a combination of PTSD and survivor guilt to the extent that he puts his job in a new city ahead of his personal life, driving his wife away and desperately trying to make up for his partner's death by being a textbook over-achieving police officer. It would also provide a great reason for Loki to insist on working alone.

Bearing in mind that one of the issues I had with Prisoners was its length (which in turn is a result of focusing on two protagonists), I'm thinking that a fanedit that refocuses the film purely on Loki's perspective could work quite nicely, using segments from End Of Watch as flashbacks to round out his character and flesh out his obsessive need to be a supercop.

The Equation Of Crime pt 2

So the last couple of weeks have been too busy for me to do any real amount of editing, never mind posting updates. This means I've only had a chance to get back to my Von Trier homage today, although so far I've been able to substantially re-work my opening sequence in a way that gets things going faster and also removes some stuff that was mainly there to mimic the Pi opening sequence.

I'm waiting for it to be embed-ready at Vimeo, but in the meantime here's my first pass at the opening sequence, using Clint Mansell's Pi r^2 from the Pi soundtrack.



TEOC opening sequence from That One Guy on Vimeo.

The password is "the equation", without the speech marks.

Update: Unfortunately I fumbled the export of the new version so while it's online at Vimeo, there's also about 8 minutes of nothingness after the actual title appears. That's what happens when I try to rush, I guess...

TEOC opening, version 2 from That One Guy on Vimeo.

The password is the same as the first video.

WIP: The Equation Of Crime

For a change of pace, I've been working on a short silent homage to Lars Von Trier's The Element Of Crime called The Equation Of Crime. I'm hoping to have it finished in the next week or two, but I'm still not sure whether it'll work out like I want - the ending is proving tricky.

On a separate note, I'll soon be making the switch to Sony Movie Studio. Most likely I'll finish my current active projects in PrE and switch when I start a new project. It may well be the new year before I start using it to any great extent.

Cinema: How I Live Now

I saw How I Live Now today, and was reasonably impressed with it. What could've been a tepid YA romance/drama against a wartorn background was instead a film about the outbreak of war in England, which incidentally happens in the vicinity of a passionate teenage romance. Good performances, good cinematography, some clever use of sound and a nastier bite to the details and atmosphere than would usually be found in such a film made for something that was almost as good as Children Of Men.

As a result I found myself thinking of other similar films set in the UK, and am toying with the idea of an edit basically telling the stories of various groups against a backdrop of an apocalyptic war. So far I think 28 Days Later, Children Of Men, How I Live Now, and perhaps Channel 4's recent found-footage dramatisation of the repercussions of a collapse of the National Grid, Blackout. It's a very rough idea, and would take quite a lot of work to polish into a feasible project, but I'll mull it over for a few days and see where it goes.

Meanwhile, I'm working on a short project called The Equation Of Crime, essentially turning Pi into a silent homage to The Element Of Crime. I'm still not sure if it's going to work or not, but it's certainly an interesting challenge. I'll post up more about it, including a first draft of the opening sequence, in a day or two.

I aten't dead. Also, project updates (The Shadow Over Innsmouth), a workprint snippet (Oblivion) and some images

I've been distracted from writing anything recently by a combination of working on various projects and being on holiday.

I'm mainly focusing on The Shadow Over Innsmouth at the moment, which is fun though there's a lot of work ahead - I've been splitting the scenes up and applying tinting based on a location/time key I devised. Once that's done and I'm happy with it, I think I'm going to put together some filters for certain scenes to try and push for more of a 20s-style silent film feel (I'm still working for that effect, though there are far too many anachronisms featured in the film for it to be more than a lofty ambition...). Once that's finished, I need to finalise a script to use (the goal being to bring it much more in line with the original Lovecraft story) and then create and insert the intertitles - I've been looking around through things like this Tumblr page for ideas. After that I need to work up a full score - which will be interesting, since my first instinct was to use a combination of songs from ISIS, Pelican, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and so on (with added videogame soundtracks where they fit well, such as the OST for LIMBO), but I've also discovered Alexander Mosolov's music in the interim which seems like it might well be suitable.

Anyway, while that's in progress I knocked these images together to give some idea of what the end result might look like:


On a different note, I've put together a workprint of an alternate opening sequence for Oblivion, progressing on from the ideas I posted previously. I'll upload it here soon, but I'm still not decided on whether I'll bother doing it. I've seen a couple of the deleted scenes floating around and they look quite nice, but the film's already quite bloated at 2 hours long, because for the story it's telling and the paucity of character development it really shouldn't be more than about 90 minutes. So I'd need to figure out where I can jettison that much material, especially since thus far I can't see much I could rip out of the third act. (I'd absolutely love to completely dump the attack on the Scav base, for example, but I suspect that it's not possible to edit the existing footage so that they accept that the drone can't be fixed). And, frankly, it's a mediocre action film that rips ideas and visuals from a bunch of better films, so it's not really something I'm interested in prioritising.

Here's the first six minutes of how it would play, including changing the title to Titan:

Titan - Alternate Opening from That One Guy on Vimeo.

The password, astonishingly, is "titan".

I'm also in two minds about my Saw project; one idea being a bit more radical and time consuming (not to mention quite likely to fail without a lot of work) and the other being lazy and so minimal that it's barely worth calling an edit. The time-consuming one being basically to use the Full Disclosure feature in highly edited form along with a substantial amount of cutting to turn the entire film into a videotape that Jigsaw has created - and at the end of this videotape, Billy would pop up saying "I want to play a game", with the camera sweeping back to reveal that the viewer is yet another victim in a trap (using footage from the Saw II trailer). But nice though that idea is, it would be a lot of work, so for the time being I'm going to think about it and probably just finish off the easy idea (which is basically "remove the bit where Jigsaw tases Adam and triggers an improbable dream/flashback sequence explaining that Jigsaw is John Kramer, terminal cancer patient").

Project status updates:

This project isn't really more than a sideline for the time being - the title will change to something less rubbish when I can come up with something better, and the overall goal is essentially to trim the stupid bits from the Mortal Kombat film as well as making the fight sequences a bit more visceral and exciting by selectively accelerating certain sequences. There's a lot of slow-motion in the fight scenes, considering.

I've gotten as far as a workprint with all the video cuts and changes I want to make, and almost no work on the audio. I'm leaving it a few days before I watch it to see what works and what doesn't, after which working up a new 5.1 soundtrack will potentially get added to the list of project work to be done.

As far as other projects go:

• I really should get back to Jigsaw's Puzzle and finish it (the video changes are miniscule and almost done, the only work really left is fixing the audio to match). 
• I've been tempted to revisit Scott Pilgrim for v2 of my Eleven Evil Exes edit, in which I plan reinsert all the deleted scenes, swap in some of the alternate footage, reinsert Scott Pilgrim Vs The Animation as a flashback, and extend several of the musical performances in the film with full versions of the songs being performed. I had considered trying to create new animated material based on the animatics for the original ending, but that's probably more hassle than it's worth, really...
• I have a DVD of Berberian Sound Studio on its way to me, which should hopefully let me schedule a rewatch of BSS and LoS to see how feasible my idea for Lords Of Berberian would be.
• I'm idly considering picking an R1 DVD of Sucker Punch and using that to restart my Sucker Punch De-Snydered project. Though I should probably leave that alone for a while, the audio editing alone will make it kind of fiddly.

Idle Fanedit Ideas: The Lords Of Berberian

Last year, I had the peculiar pleasure of watching Berberian Sound Studio, a film that at both pays great respect to the under-recognised efforts of sound engineers and recordists as part of filmmaking and depicts, in a magnificently surreal manner, Toby Jones' character and his descent into madness. It was an excellent film, with a magnificent soundtrack by Broadcast and a great performance by Jones. If I had to fault it, I would say that the third act necessarily became very strange even within the context of what had preceeded it in the film.

Earlier this year, I watched The Lords Of Salem, Rob Zombie's most recent film. I don't know if I would say it was magnificent, but I certainly enjoyed it and thought it to be very good. Zombie's tendency to cast his wife in every film he makes has irked me in the past, because she's not a particularly good actor, but in this she is surprisingly effective. The story centres around Moon's radio DJ character, who receives an LP of a hitherto-unknown band (the titular Lords Of Salem) and begins to descend into madness and paranoia as a result of the LP. If I had to fault it, I'd say that the ending is somewhat weak - the first and second acts are great, but the apex of the story doesn't really feel climactic enough.

Inspired by Q2's fantastic Memories Alone (which cuts down and meshes The Wrestler with Black Swan, intertwining their two storylines with the change of making Natalie Portman's character the estranged daughter of Mickey Rourke's character), I've been giving some consideration to how the storylines of Berberian Sound Studio and Lords Of Salem might be overlapped.

There are a few problems:

• Lords is set in Salem, Berberian in Italy.
• Lords appears to be set in the present day, Berberian is a period piece set in the 70s
• There's no immediately obvious way to have any characters from the two films meet or interact.

Nonetheless, the idea does have some potential. Since both films will need to be cut down, I think the way to proceed would be to cut down any elements of Lords that make it glaringly obvious to a casual viewer that the period is wrong - I'm thinking things like technology here rather than clothing or props. Then cut Berberian such that the film being edited is an English-language feature - ie Lords Of Salem.

Given how strange and unsettling both films are, I think there's also scope for some experimentation with things like suggesting a crossing-over between films (eg maybe have Toby Jones opening or closing a door, then cutting to Sherri Moon Zombie responding to that door and not making it entirely clear what's happened).

At the moment this is just another idea percolating at the back of my mind - it'll have to remain that until at least such a time as I pick up Berberian Sound Studio on DVD and can make some notes on its structure. I think it's a promising idea, and one I look forward to experimenting with in future.