advent_crash (Level 16)

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.