Monday 19 October 2015

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.

Wednesday 15 July 2015

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.