What are your thoughts of Fan Edits? Are there any you'd recommend? Have you made any?
There are a couple of edits for Lynch's Dune - notably the Spicediver one, which rearranges the film to be more in line with the book and adds extra footage from the Director's Cut and other versions. They did a lot of colour correction also. There's another one which includes everything ever committed to film - even animated storyboards and half-finished fx shots - instead of the Princess' dialogue it uses a hilarious voiceover done by some dude who sounds like Mel Blanc. Running time is close to 3 hours with that one.
Steven Soderbergh is well known for his fanedits - I have his 2001: A Space Odyssey and it is great, rearranges a lot of the scenes and cuts out a huge amount of fluff inc. the apes beginning and the scenes with Floyd on the orbital. He has done Psycho, Raiders, and others. They occasionally crop up online but get taken down fairly quickly by the studios.
I’ve always wanted to see the fabled Topher Grace cut of the prequel trilogy that turns it into one movie, lol
wholehearted support for Brad Neely's redub of the first Harry Potter movie Wizard People, Dear Reader, including the parts where he drops an R slur
The Hobbit - the Tolkien Edit. Cuts all scenes that are non-canon. The love triangle they crowbarred in is gone. That annoying lady elf disappears entirely except for one scene where she bursts in looking for Frodo on the barrel.
The Phantom Menace - the Phantom Edit. Makes a tedious movie into a better one.
There is an edit of Star Wars that restores the movie to its original theatrical release of 1977. George Lucas tampered with it every time it was released afterwards. I forget the name, but it's available in torrent form in very high quality.
For all of these, I won't watch the better-known ones.
I dunno is removing one of the few women from the movie is really a win even though it was poor handled
Maybe when AI gets better we make a version where 100% of the speaking roles are women.
If you're into women in major roles, I think Tolkien is really not for you.
Under comunism there will be tons of fan edits and they will be cool.
Especially with video tool and AI you cna get some impressive results. The hell's club series is amazing and that is just a guy using current video tools.
Two more generations of AI and you will all have to suffer through my re-edits of The alien movies that has them done with ghibli art and Tim curry
Under communism, they won't even release official versions of films, you'll have to find your local editors union and tell them what kind of version you want to watch.
In my creative commons lorenz lasic dream society they would be as accessible as the director's cut thanks to an open remix culture.
I want to watch a 60 minute cut of the lord of the rings trilogy to refresh myself on aragorn trivia before a hot date. I want to see The Batman cut down to 90 minutes just so I can argue about what they left out. I want to talk to my coworkers about American Psycho only to find out they watched the PG version because their kids were in the room.
I think they're cool and allow people to train editing skills and narrative construction on a low budget, but I don't seek them out. More people should discuss what media could be if you make changes.
-star wars episode 1 and 2 the magnolia edits are pretty solid and probably the best of the prequel edits I've ever seen. Im a diehard Lucas apologist who thinks the prequels are good actually but I think there's always room for improvement. Speaking of:
-star wars episode 4 and 5 revisited (6 is WIP currently). Basically the editor added even more special edition cgi and tweaked some of the existing stuff. I think he pushes it a bit too far in a couple spots and while it might not be the definitive version of these movies...they are some interesting companion versions.
I was working on an edit of superman returns that attempted to make that mess more watchable at one point. I actually got my first vfx job out of college because a studio saw my rotoscoping of the costume to have the classic red and blue suit instead of the awful brown and teal one from the movie. You can probably find a clip out there if you do some searching. I ultimately abandoned it because I was too busy working actual paying vfx jobs and it seemed pointless to bother with superman returns since it was pretty clear that there was going to be a reboot fast tracked.
edit:
Oh just as a general thing: I fucking love fanedits. They're great. Under communism there will be fan edits everywhere. Intellectual property as we well know is not a real thing, but moreover it should be understood that if anyone is worried about "artistic intent" that internally within the studio there are almost always like 10-20 ish "cuts" of a movie before they compromise on a final version. Fan edits are just even more options.
The Maple Edit of The Hobbit is pretty good. No way I’d spend like 10 hours of my life watching that trilogy. Even at 4 hours, the Maple Edit felt too long (but watchable).
"Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me - Teresa Banks and the Last Seven Days of Laura Palmer" greatly improves the entire series. It gives so much context and lore the theatrical cut totally left out. There's even scenes that take place after the season 2 finale where Dopplecoop acts similar to how he does in Season 3.
Thats the only fan edit I've watched but I really like it.
does it cut out the FBI stuff from the beginning? I always thought it would be a much better film without all of that, as a tighter standalone horror story focused on Laura Palmer
It actually expands a bit on it and ties it more closely to the later FBI scenes with Coop and David Bowie (there's a lot more of him too).
That does sound interesting but also like the exact opposite of what my fan-edit of FWWM would be. I've actually considered making a ~100 minute cut of the film that could be watched without the context of the rest of the series. It would be pretty easy to do as I would mostly just be cutting out the first 30 minutes and maybe adding a few things from the Missing Pieces but not much.
and there would be absolutely NO David Bowie
My bf and I tried to watch some starwars fan edits earlier this year and it was 404s and 0 seeders everywhere we looked.
They're cleaning up a lot of children's books these days and re-releasing them without the offensive content. Roald Dahl was mentioned a while back, evidently James and the Giant Peach had a lot of problematic content.
