Disturbing Behaviour update

So I blink my eyes and somehow it's been four months or so since my last update, and I'm still not done with my Disturbing Behaviour fanedit.

There are good reasons for that this time around - after listening to the David Nutter commentary track I started second-guessing some of my original decisions and having new ideas, and as a result it's turned into a double-edit project.

One edit will be a straight Extended Edition, reinserting the deleted scenes with no other changes; the other will be the Aberrant Edition, which takes my earlier ideas of cutting the goofy bits, changing music around and so forth and marries them with a slightly different narrative structure where the film follows Steve's perspective much more closely. In addition to this, I've put together a new director's commentary for the extended edition (merging the commentary from the deleted scenes into the original commentary and making trims where required) and attempted to create my own editor's commentary track for the aberrant edition.

This has unexpectedly caused me problems with the DVD authoring - both edits are basically done, but since I'm using the non-Pro version of DVD Architect and don't have 3-figure sums of money to spend on hobby software, I can't easily author the DVDs with dual audio tracks. I think I have a way around this, and will post another update as soon as the project is finished and available.

I've barely had time to even think about any other edits recently, but once I have this off my plate I'll probably dive back into adding blood FX to the Raid 2 deleted scenes and finish up my Extended Edition of that, then take a break before deciding what's next.

STILL not dead, and other news

Wow, so nearly a year since my last post here. Well, a lot has happened in meatspace in that time, but that's not relevant.

What is relevant is that I started and finished "Berandal", a de-sequelised and trimmed-down version of The Raid 2. Crudely put, it's a "Criminal Edition" of TR2, cutting the whole undercover cop story so that Yuda (originally a cover identity) is now the actual protagonist.

Meanwhile, I still haven't finished [ABERRANT], because I got distracted by Berandal. And I've realised I need to completely restart The Shadow Over Innsmouth, which will be frustrating.

My currently active projects are [ABERRANT] and The Raid 2: Extended Edition (in light of all the deleted scenes that have been released for the film on the Merantau Films Vimeo page).

When I have both of those completed, I've got The Shadow Over Innsmouth to restart, some testing to see whether it's worth trying my Eurotrip: The Long Way Round extended edition again as a workprint edition. I also have, at this point, a rather silly list of other projects I want to get around to as well:

• Sucker Punch De-Snydered - Remove the slow-motion as much as possible (depends how much can be done on the audio front there, it might be a lot of work), remove the dumb aspects of the story, add a different ending. If possible create an alternate soundtrack using different versions of the same songs.
• Elysium: Bootstrapped Edition - trim the flab (ie anything to do with Max's childhood), cut any scenes taking place on Elysium until Max gets there, cut any suggestion that it's easy or common for illegals to get to Elysium, cut Delacourt's presence significantly (reducing her as much as possible to a voice conversing with Kruger). Create a new opening using the teaser trailer.
• Mortal Kombat - basically a fix-up. I wouldn't touch the soundtrack but I'd be heavily trimming a lot of the ill-judged humour; I'd also need to see what I can do with the audio as I found that a lot of the fight sequences play much better when speeded up by a factor of 2 or 3 (there seemed to be a lot of unnecessary slow-motion).
• Lords of Berberian - meshing Lords Of Salem with Berberian Sound Studio, so that Lords Of Berberian is the film on which Gilderoy is working, and have Gilderoy and Heidi's breakdowns mirror one another.
• Scott Pilgrim: Seven Evil Exes Edition v2 - a do-over of my first ever fanedit, not just an extended edition but an "everything including the kitchen sink" edition. Extended versions of the songs used in the film, the animated segment, and possibly even new material built from the extras on the DVD. Long in gestation. 
• Hotline New York - a short film using Taxi Driver as the source; tinker with the colour scheme to make it more heavily neon (think Drive), add a new soundtrack using music from the Hotline Miami games, and turn it into the story of how Travis Bickle joins the 50 Blessings initiative.
• Maxwell: The Celluloid Man - a short film using Videodrome as the source, homaging Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Change footage to black & white, add a new soundtrack & opening, turn it into the story of how Max is turned into the Celluloid Fetishist and used in the war between a covert government group and Oblivion's group.
• The Cursed Count - a short film using Nosferatu: A Symphony Of Horror as the source, completely reframed to tell a Beauty & The Beast-esque love story.
• Endless Corridors - a short film splicing together the most intense corridor fight scenes from a variety of action films including The Raid 1 & 2, Chocolate, Oldboy and District 13.
• Cubic Testing Facility - a short, genre-bent version of The Cube adding in dialogue from the Portal games of GLaDOS as an unseen antagonist for the protagonists.
• 2011 - a combination of 2001 and 2010, cutting down on the "woah life in space" bits of 2001 and entwining the investigation storyline from 2010 with the original mission from 2001.
• Odyssey - using scenes from The Jacket, Predators, The Darjeeling Limited and possibly other films starring Adrien Brody, this is a sort-of-homage to The Odyssey. Basically I would use segments from The Jacket (including a deleted scene) to construct a framing device that allows me to stitch together parts from various Adrien Brody films. Will likely have an ambiguous or downright confusing ending.
• Space segments - basically, taking various science-fiction films that have gorgeous depictions of space exploration/travel but flawed stories, and creating short standalone silent stories from them. Thus far I plan to use Sunshine, Prometheus and Interstellar for definite. I'm open to other suggestions.
• 2001: GLaDOS Firmware Update - I should hope that the appeal of a "Dave vs GLaDOS" short of 2001 would be self-explanatory. Basically, using the audio files from Portal/Portal 2 to do dialogue replacement for HAL. (I've already seen some versions of this, I'd be aiming for something with more polish and a clearer narrative throughput rather than just relying on the inherent humour of having GLaDOS's voice added).
• Evil Dead: Army Of Darkness - I'd originally thought of this for the Time Travel Consecution, but didn't have time to participate. Basically, this would be a very short version of Army Of Darkness built around a conceit of Ash screwing up repeatedly and having to come back over and over again until he gets it right. I don't know if I can pull it off, but I'd like to just for the sake of a create teaser ending I've got in mind for it.
• Dark Metropolis - Basically a fusion of Dark City and Metropolis, using the conceit that Freder (the protagonist of Metropolis) and John Murdoch (the protagonist of Dark City) are the same person, and the Strangers in Dark City are agents of the ruling elite in Metropolis. It would almost certainly have to be silent and B&W, but I don't see that as a problem - if anything it allows greater freedom, for instance to use establishing shots from other films with similar tones and visual styles. It would, however, be a great deal of work.
• Monsters From The Mist Of The Pacific Rim - I'm not yet sure whether it would be a single film or some sort of miniseries in structural terms, but the idea would be to try and use The Mist, Pacific Rim and Monsters as all being aspects of the same narrative - so The Mist shows us the chaos of the fist appearance of the creatures, Pacific Rim shows us costly efforts to fight them (including the construction of the Wall) and Monsters shows us a world now struggling to cope with these creatures still roaming around.

God knows when I'll have time to get around to all of them, but at least I've got the ideas written down somewhere.

Right now I'm waiting for Vimeo to process uploads of two segments from [ABERRANT]. They're the only bits I'm still thinking about tweaking - once that's done I'll render the film, create the DVD and have done with it, then I can free up some brain space for new projects.

Idle Fanedit Ideas: Interstellar

I watched Christopher Nolan's Interstellar last night.

It was an astonishingly pretty film with some great use of music - I really appreciated the use of the organ to give it a distinctive sound without resorting to classical music as so many space-faring films tend to do.

Unfortunately, the characters weren't great and despite the film being 150-odd minutes long, didn't get fleshed out enough. The dialogue was a lot clunkier than I've come to expect in a Nolan film, and it felt over-long.

So I've been thinking about how I might tackle this as an edit. The first thing would be to shorten it - I suspect this would be a case of a lot of little trims rather than huge chunks, for example the bits where Dr Mann and Cooper are off exploring could do with tightening up a fair bit. Ditto the opening is a bit of a waste, because while it's trying to establish character the characters aren't developed enough to make it worthwhile. Similarly, I'd want to cut or trim dialogue in various places, starting with every single use of that bloody Dylan Thomas poem. (It's an overused cliché anyway, but using it 4-5 times within one film is just dreadful, like bad teenage poetry about the death of a pet).

Another thing I'm certain about changing is the ending - the existing ending is typical Hollywood nonsense where actually making sense is less important than delivering a reassuring moment of closure. (Cooper's return happens at something like 50 years after his point of departure, given that Murphy is extremely elderly and close to death, and yet Dr Brand still looks to be the same age as when he left her in the ship.) So I'd choose to play up the Kubrick homage and have Cooper send his message to Murphy via the watch (probably trimming those scenes as well), and then place the ending just after the tesseract collapses in on Cooper, fading to white and then cut to black. No "Cooper's handshake", no happy family nonsense, just end with Cooper going through something that he can't comprehend and heading to an unknown fate, just like the Starchild in 2001.

A parting thought: Interstellar is, like Sunshine, a film in which a very good director presents a bunch of visually-excellent and generally-well-thought-through ideas about science-fiction and space travel, only to completely bodge things up sometime after the halfway mark. I don't know what it is about big-budget sciencefiction but it never manages to stick the landing.

Notes towards an Evil Dead: Army Of Darkness short film

This is really a placeholder for something I want to look at in future when I have time, but I've been inspired by the Time Travel Consecution discussion thread on fanedit.org and getting ideas, frustratingly at a time when I'm already backlogged on projects and have no free time to do any work on them.

This is a rough outline of what I've got in mind:

• Start the edit as a standalone story - ie open with something like "This is Ash. He has really bad luck with the undead.", intercutting between the titles and short snippets from past films.
• Drastically shorten the film, down to maybe 15-20 minutes or so. Facilitate this through a combination of stylised on-screen titles and use of Ash's dialogue from elsewhere as voiceover material.
• I'd need to identify single narrative to serve as a shortened throughline for the edit; other short gags can be worked in as well.
• Possibly also use short snippets from Black Knight as a gag (dub over with Bruce Campbell dialogue).

I've got ideas for two possible endings (though I don't know if either of them would work for definite) but I won't post those here because it would take away the fun/surprise if I do eventually get this done.

[Aberrant]: A Disturbing Behaviour fanedit

I'm most of the way done with [Aberrant], my Disturbing Behaviour edit. It's not a straight extended edition; I've swapped out as much of the soundtrack as I could (I've still got some more songs I'd like to change, but I'll need to overcome centre channel leakage and so far I've not had a great deal of success). I've also been making some small trims to help keep the tone more consistent - the screenplay seems to have been aiming for poorly-judged comedy, but David Nutter managed to bring out an ominous overtone and is mostly successful, except when the script gets in the way.

I've amended the opening so that the first scene is pre-titles, as I think it works better that way. The password on the video below is "disturbingbehaviour":


Aberrant opening sequence from That One Guy on Vimeo.

I've also done a first draft of DVD cover art, because I know some folks seem to like that.

Somehow, it's April already

I'm not sure how it's April and this is only my second post of the year, but unfortunately I've been busy with work-related stuff so haven't had much time for fanediting recently. I've been working on The Shadow Over Innsmouth a fair amount - I'm finished with at least a first iteration of the (substantial) cutting I'm doing to the original footage, and have all the footage still being used tinted according to what may yet turn out to be a needlessly complicated colour code. I'm somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 way through writing the new dialogue, making an effort to bring it more into line with the original short story.

I may try and create a sample of my opening sequence idea soon, to try and drum up some interest.

Aside from that, I'm also picking at Aberrant, my Disturbing Behaviour fanedit. I'm around 1/3 of the way through. I'm readding the deleted scenes (after converting from 4:3 to 16:9) and making a few small trims here and there, and also swapping out some of the soundtrack. I need to go back and finish my new opening sequence, which should hopefully also make for a good sample of the end result.

Mortal Kombat workprint

I mentioned yesterday that I'd done a workprint of an improved (or perhaps just decrappified) Mortal Kombat cut. I uploaded it to Vimeo to get some feedback, so I may as well post it here. It's important to note that I did absolutely no work on the audio (except for removing the song from the title sequence), so I'm aware that the sound is dreadful and would need an enormous amount of work. Nonetheless, here it is.



The password is fatality.