SOTDS? I'm not familiar with that one... can you give the full title or a link to the thread?

What a coincidence, my wife already thinks I'm the most insane husband ever. She's very tired of staring at the back of my head and hasn't been quiet about it. It doesn't help that she doesn't really understand/appreciate our fascination with the whole fan edit concept. But after being party to what got shot on Saturday, she said she's actually looking forward to seeing the final product, and decided she'd give me "all the time you need" to get it right.

So at least my marriage won't be destroyed by this project.

Trooperman's Episode II: Shroud of the Dark Side

I have been watching this thread. Pretty cool. I haven't been able to check out the clips yet, but I'm very interested in this. Too bad I can't go to the screening...

Actually, hoping not to sound like a complete tool, but I saw the clips/trailers and I was completely unable to find anything that was new or changed about them.
What should I have been seeing?

Really? Which ones did you watch? There was a full-out trailer, showing some different coloring as well as some dubbing, and there have been a few clips with Trooperman dubbing Anakin. He's even shown his re-edited version of the Coruscant nightclub sequences, which has Trooperman's Anakin voice, quite a bit of different footage, and the music is totally different.

Sometimes Trooperman would post clip by clip comparisons of scenes before and after his changes were made. Perhaps you downloaded and watched an unchanged clip. Trooperman's changes are pretty heavy. He is even changing the music for the opening crawl (at least at one point this was up in the air).

Um I was actually referring to the SoJ clips... that being the thread's topic.

Sorry, thought we were still in the context of...

I thought you were talking about SOTDS too. I'm confused. Other than reformatting the first page, and including the youtube links, I haven't changed anything recently.

I know you haven't changed anything.
But I was saying on the clips you do have, I'm not sure what's different in your version versus what's already been released.

Who are you? And what have you done with the real Doctor M?

Lol.
I've been interested in this edit based only on your description of what you're doing.
I never found anything in the trailers that gave a sense of what's new/different (which is true for many edits).

Ok, I get you. Well I am withholding most of the changes just to keep things a surprise. That's why I released teasers instead of real trailers. Rather than give anything specific away, I decided to just explain my philosophy towards editing the movies. Basically its to cut out what is lame, campy, and unintentionally unfunny, if it isn't necessary to the plot. Remove any continuity errors. Re-edit scenes if it will intensify the mood or speed up the pace in the action sequences closer to what's expected in modern action films. Improve any effects that I can. Focus more on Kal-el's relationship with Jor-el. Try to bring the entire film down to under 3 hours. And do everything in such a way that someone who isn't very familiar with the movies won't notice that I did anything.

And since I didn't like the way either Superman 2 wrapped up, I created a new, darker ending that fits fairly well with Superman Returns.

I realeased the train chase clip mostly as an example of that philosophy, and to show that I know how to edit. Its good to hear that you didn't notice what was changed!

If you compare it to the original, you'll see that I removed the ugliest running shots. I ramped up the pace a bit, and edited it so that Clark cares about not being seen by the girl's mom. I also removed the sequence aboard the train because:

1. Unless she was blind the mom would have seen Cark, yet she says she doesn't believe the girl.
2. The mom calls the girl Lois. That would mean Los is around 8 or 10 years younger than Clark.
3. It bothers me when movies try to link characters together in the past for no good reason. Lois saw Clark when she was a kid, C3P0 was made by Darth Vader, etc. It just a directors wink at the audience and it pulls me out of a movie.
4. The father tells her she has a "writers gift for invention", another wink at the audience.

And then I released the "De-Fifed" clip just to prove that I could the effects.

I'm very hesitant about releasing anything else. But after the test screening this weekend, I guess I should probably post something new.

I've been off work recovering from an operation for the past 2 weeks, and last week I sat down and watched every single Superman film (including both the Lister and Donner versions of II). Not watched the old ones since I was a kid, and it hit me straight away how much potential the first 2 movies have for being absolutely incredible if edited together properly and a hybrid of the 2 versions of II were made. Basically I wanted to say, your project sounds incredible and I'm really excited about seeing the results since I'm on a big Superman trip atm and from what you are letting us know so far, your Son of Jor-El edit sounds like its gonna be amazing.

Excitedly Anticipating a release!

Thanks Pupil! I hope you're recovering is going well!

The test screening is at 3:30 today. I was up until 3 this morning encoding the video, and just wok up to continue working on the temporary audio mix, which is definitely my weakest area...

Thanks Taolar, good luck getting things finished, and I hope the screening went well.

pupil

The test screening went extremely well, even though I was still working on the audio mix of disc 2 in the other room while they were watching disc 1! I'll write more later. Windows died on me right after rendering disc 2, and I'm going to have to re-install everything today.

-T

Well the computer is up and running again, with no data loss, but I promised my wife I'd take a break from all things Super.

So, quickly, while she's out, I'll go over the test screening. I was up until 2am on Thursday working on the first half (which is basically Sup1) quickly doing work on the fx that were necessary to the plot. We're talking really bad fx (like the smear job under the Landspeeder in the original Star Wars) and then left it to render the mpeg2. My son decided to get up at 6am the next morning, so that was 4 hours of sleep, but I scheduled friday off from work, so I got to do more sloppy fx work on part 2 all day. I spent too much time polishing the end, so I was up until 3am. I left it rendering, and set my alarm for 7:30. So after another 4 hours of sleep I started on the audio mix of disc 1 Saturday morning. The best I could do is blend some tracks together, and for major edits where clips were re-arranged (like the destruction of krypton sequence) I just removed the surround sound track which had most of the original music, keeping the center channel, and found a good place to lay down the music only track. I'm so glad they provided the isolated score on Sup1 dvd. There were still some harsh audio transitions, and I'm sure the levels fluxuated a lot, but I just didn't have the time to rewatch the whole thing, so I rendered the audio and loaded them into Adobe Encore to make the DVD. The program muxed the audio and video together and then I get a "Unknown Error -1". WTF??? A quick search for an answer on the Adobe forums came up with nothing useful. The movie marathon started at noon, and here I was at home at 11 with no superman. So I searched around and found DVD Lab Pro that I had installed a long time ago. Loaded it up and started the muxing process which took so much longer than with Encore. But it did finish, and I left my house at 11:45 and made it to the location just at noon. First on the movie marathon was Deleted Magic, which everyone enjoyed. I set my computer up in another room and started burning the first disc. Then I had an intemission of 1/2 hour to let more people arrive. We ended up with 8 people at the test screening. I gave a little introduction on Fan Edits, a quick history of the making of the first two Superman movies, and what I was doing with them. Two of the people had seen the both movies in the last few years, everyone else hadn't seen them in a long time. That was perfect. So after explaining that most of the effects were only temporary and that the audio mix will probably be horrendous, I started the showing. I hung around for the Krypton scenes, and they looked great on the 8 foot screen.

I snuck back to work on the audio for disc 2. Unfortunately Sup2 dvd doesn't come with an isolated music track, so I had to fill in the major edits with music from Sup1. The ending took the most work because I was replacing almost all of the audio, and even had ten new lines of dialog that I wanted to blend in. The rest of the movie could survive a bad audo mix. But I was afraid the new ending would fall apart if it was obvious that it wasn't a scene from the original films. Time flew by way too quickly and the first half of SoJ was done and I still hadn't rendered the audio for disc 2. So I threw on a disc of short film intermissions that I had put together, and started rendering. I had a fresh disc about 1/2 hour later and was glad to be able to sit down and watch it all myself.

Although I'm very happy with the way the first half turned out, after seeing it on a big screen I realized the second half is now my favorite. Out of the two, the second movie had the most room for improvement, and at a lean, mean 74 minutes, it works very well. Although it still has its share of levity, it is mostly dark as hell. And the new ending... well, I can't describe it as a happy one. There's no time travel or amnesia kiss in this movie. Things aren't neatly put back to the way they were. At best the mood is more of a melancholy hopefulness, sort of like the end of Empire Strikes Back.

The greatest thing was that no one noticed that the new footage didn't belong, except for the actor himself and my wife, who was present during taping. Until we started giggling uncontrollably, no one knew anything was up. They were just going with it.

The only suggestions I got from the audience was the audio levels in a few spots (which I expected), and fixing some rough edits, which are already planned with FX. They said it moved along at a good pace and except for one cut plot point, which I was hoping no one would pick up on, everything made sense. I'm sure I can fix that with some more FX work, although it will take some work. But everyone enjoyed it, and even the people that had seen it recently weren't that sure of what I changed. One person, who wasn't a big fan of the original superman movies said that he really liked it, especially Superman 2 (which he HATED in the theatre).

So enough congratulating myself... I'll be back to work next week. I'm actually going to enjoy the break!
-T

Congrats on the test screening. I love it when a plan comes together! I'm not a big fan of Sup2 so it is sounding like I might enjoy this one.

Glad the test screening went well and it's really great to hear how special things like these are presented. I'm not sure if your guests realized what a special thing it was to be a part of a work of art in progress. I wish I was there as I was there for the opening of both Superman I and II.

Here's a scene that I've been polishing today. It's a little different than what I showed at the test screening. My main intention was to quicken the pace and increase the fear that Superman might have actually been hurt. There are 18 cut ponts, with a few clips moved around, one flipped, and a total of 16 out of 62 seconds removed. Still, I think it's a very subtle edit. Watch the first half and see if you notice anything that I changed, then watch the second half, which is the original scene. Please tell me what you think!

BTW, the DIVX compression made everyone look like they have a sunburn. The final DVD will NOT look like that...

-T

Bus Throw Comparison (9mb divx) <------ Right-Click & Save

Wow, this is one of those instances that shows that the editor is an important aspect of any film.

If I had just seen the Donner footage I would have said there was nothing wrong with it. And then the SoJ version has a real economy to it and makes it a much better action beat. Kudos.

I disagree with a lot of what Tweaker said. I don't see a problem with the pace or the lifting.
I do agree that Reeves has a stupid grin on his face. It looks like you could fix that by cutting away from him sooner (keep the audio but put it over other footage).