Next Project: The Shadow (1994)

Ok, so I actually have several fan-edits in progress:

• ALIEN 3.5 - I'm blending ALIEN 3 and ALIEN 4, using deleted scenes, etc.
• JACOB'S LADDER - I love this film, basically as is. I think it's under-appreciated and damn scary. The 'twist' ending is a little obvious and the very end has a cheese factor, but still a great film. Ever since I saw the deleted scenes I felt that they strengthened an already great film, so I'm going to add them back in and make a few tweaks here and there.

But those are on hold while I finish my next project, THE SHADOW. First of all, I love the Shadow as a character and have since I was a kid. I have all of the OTR (old time radio) broadcasts from the 1930s and have collected the comics. Needless to say, I was excited when the movie came out & saw it in the theater. I enjoyed it, but after the excitement wore off I was left feeling disappointed. Upon later viewings I realized that it just wasn't very good.

The Positives? Great set design and costumes, decent casting, and solid cinematography.

Negatives: Some very clunky special effects now and then...and an uneven tone. The movie tried to be dark and 'fun'. And while (and I may be alone in this) Alec Baldwin and John Lone did a decent job delivering some snappy dialogue and straddling the transitions between campy comic characters and conflicted hero and villain, no other character is anything other than a stock plot device.

So, there isn't any additional material available, as far as I know...so I'm going to trim some of the dumber parts out and focus onre-arranging some of the scenes.

Also, I'm going to covert it to black & white, add in some different music (including the old radio theme, Le rouet d'Omphale ), and see where that goes.

I'll posts some screenshots and maybe make a trailer, more updates soon...

Fan Edit Search Engine

I've been fooling around with Google's Custom Search, and came up with a gadget that will search the most common places to find fan-edits. I've left out torrent sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay, trying to stick to the dedicated sites and forums...

Here's a link to the search, or you can try the little box to the right of this post ;)

The new blog.

I'm moving an old blog to Blogger here because I keep finding nifty little bits of code & such I'd like to run and Wordpress prevents it. That, and I'm trying to consolidate things around my Gmail account...

Anyway, as this will be a forum for me to discuss fan-edited films (both mine and others), I'll begin re-posting old articles related to the creation of my first official effort, MATRIX : ReGENERATED. I'll update the links and maybe add some new notes, but I'll backdate them so they sink to the archives faster...

WARNING: I made plenty of mistakes starting out, and later realized how ass-backwards and un-informed I was about many time-saving techniques like frameserving and video encoding. Read the "how-to" if you like, but please get to the end before following my lead ;)

Part 13: Never watching THE MATRIX again

OK, it’s been about 6 months now and the dust has settled. I heard from a friend that someone at Warner Brothers had a copy & it was making the rounds. Just want to state for the record that I LOVE Warner Brothers. What a great, easy-going, non-litigious group of folks that is…

Also, I noticed a DivX version of what appears to be my edit has popped up on some torrents. Turns out there was another Matrix : Regenerated fan edit out there, only limited to the 2nd & 3rd films. This created some chatter I think, but up until this week I hadn’t seen mine leak out yet.

Also, I was curious as to how a rabid MATRIX fan would take my version. People seem really passionate about the ‘sanctity’ of an original, but REGENERATED doesn’t make a claims against that or even generate any profits. My version is at least mutated enough (Chinese dubbing, false subtitles) that no one would rightly mistake it for the originals or even use it as a substitute for the others (i.e. “I just downloaded this for free, why would I buy it?). It does feel like a different film, not some bastardized version.

Most criticism seemed related to tampering with the artistic vision of the originals, but I guess that is the knee-jerk reaction. There were some valid points about ways to have improved the flow of the story, or recommendations if I was going to clean up sections with minor tweaks, but I’ve decided against further changes. I’d rather re-edit a new film. There’s only so much “Matrix” a guy can take…

For me, the most ‘unprofessional’ aspect of the edit is the section in which Neo is meeting with the Oracle after entering “The Source”. I had no good explanation for why he was there, why the Source led back to her, etc. And the editing is a bit clumsy to top it all off. I wanted to get Neo awake and the plot moving again, but couldn’t resist the little scene where she warns him of Smith. By far this is the weakest link in my edit.

Anyway, if you enjoyed it, great. It was mostly for my own fun and technical education. And if you’d like a more high-quality version of the edit than these XVID encodings, I know that some of the full 2-disc copies are floating around. I got some reaction back from people who had seen it while at a comic convention, so I’m sure you can find it if you look…