General Discussion

I recently posted to the screencast about editing a movie that may be a little convoluted or just have a lot of nonsense. I have always loved editing and I try my hand at it at least once a year. My latest project was editing the movie Max Payne down to only a 56 minute run time. I previously edited 30 minutes out of both Spider-Man 3 and AVP Requiem. I love the idea of fan editing and I am always looking for more movies to edit and see if I can improve upon them. All three of the movies I have previously worked with all suffered from the same problem which is they strayed too far away from the source material or included way too much goofy or boring scenes that were just unnecessary.

With Max Payne I tried to edit out all of the hallucination material as well as the exposition that just lays out the plot to you on a silver platter to make the story a little more of a mystery. I wound up cutting out two characters completely and narrowing the run time to only 56 minutes. With Spider-man 3 I edited out the Sandman's back story making him just a menacing villain. I also cut out the ridiculous dance sequences. With AVP Requiem I cut out a half hour of the boring human story lines and brightened up the movie quite a bit.

One thing I would like to try is to find a movie that is the opposite. I would like to take a movie that had some great deleted scenes that were cut and try inserting them back into the film. The only example I can think of off the top of my head is Revenge of The Sith which had some gaping plot holes that were in the deleted scenes. I think there are many different ways to look at fan edits. Another way I'd like to look at Max Payne is to try and make it a 10 minute long short film all done with a narration by cutting the audio and certain scenes.

I have seen plenty of fan films where people have combined multiple movies from a series into one and this has never interested me because you end up with a movie where suddenly you are introduced to a whole new cast of characters with only a few possibly remaining. There was something that was posted on the Screened page a while back that was a trailer that I believe was called The Batman Complex that was a great concept and also brings up interesting ideas of combining films. It would be interesting to see if two films could actually combine into something all new. A fan edit to me is one of the most interesting forms of film as it takes what really matters which is the audience opinion and you get to see what they would have done with the movie and maybe get a little insight into what could have made a movie more successful.

So yeah I realize this blog is going nowhere and it seems like a boring rant but I was just curious what anyone else thinks about fan edits. I personally think it is an imaginative look at film making and I would love to know what anyone else thinks or what movies they think could benefit from editing.

I'd never even heard of a fan editing an entirely new cut of a movie, but it seems like a really intriguing idea! Is there some way I could see your cut of Max Payne?

I enjoy editing as well, and this makes me kind of want to give this a try. I imagine finding the right movie first would take some time.

I've been trying to find a way to upload it somewhere. If I figure it out I will let you know.

You've inspired me to load up Premiere and see what I can do about altering the endings of both Duncan Jones movies. I love both, but, trying to avoid spoilers, I'd have removed some voiceover from the end of one, and stopped the other about 10 minutes earlier.

The newsreel stuff at the end of Moon. It's better without it.

I haven't seen Moon yet but I know what you are talking about with the other and I hope it works out. Glad I could inspire.

you should edit pulp tarantino

I've actually heard about this. Editing the movie into a new experience can be cool. The only bad thing is if you seen the movie enough times to know where the places has been cut.

Now cutting two films together to make one is whole new to me. If done right it can be the greatest thing ever.

I've actually done this a lot with music. Whenever people ask about a band and ask me to make a cd, I'm always trying to cram as much in as possible. So 30 seconds here, 20 seconds there, and I could fit in a few more tunes.

Helps the most when I'm working with progressive music (which could always use another pass or two of editing). So I can see the appeal for movies, too.

@privateirontfu said:

I should try editing Bridesmaids. There's a fantastic movie hiding underneath 30 minutes worth of scenes that go on way too long. I'd cut out that toast scene entirely.

Bridesmaids, for me, has a lot of suuuuuper-awkward scenes that I find hard to watch. It's a movie with a solid hour of a character descending into a social nightmare of her own creation. I'm not sure how much you could edit out without crippling the movie's story structure, though.

@Rorie: I will say the toast scene does go on a little long but I think you still need it for the story. Honestly I've watched that movie three times now and I wouldn't really cut anything out but I can see why people would want to. I would be interested to see what someone would do with it.

@Rorie said:

@privateirontfu said:

I should try editing Bridesmaids. There's a fantastic movie hiding underneath 30 minutes worth of scenes that go on way too long. I'd cut out that toast scene entirely.

Bridesmaids, for me, has a lot of suuuuuper-awkward scenes that I find hard to watch. It's a movie with a solid hour of a character descending into a social nightmare of her own creation. I'm not sure how much you could edit out without crippling the movie's story structure, though.

Yeah, you're probably right. I'm realizing that a lot of my problems with that movie can't simply be edited out. There's a lot of wasted talent, in my opinion. Matt Lucas and Tim Heidecker were pretty much useless. Wendi McClendon Covey and Ellie Kemper just weren't given anything funny to work with. I guess that problem could have been solved if the movie had a title other than Bridesmaids. I would have picked Maid Of Honor, personally, seeing as how the movie really only cares about the maids of honor, and doesn't seem to give a crap about anybody else in the film. Which is totally fine. But I was promised a movie full of Melissa McCarthy, dammit! Not just 15-20 minutes of her.