eldusto84 said:
Ok, I thought I might jump back in this thread after watching "Tolkieneditor's" fanedit of the Hobbit. It looks like we made several similar editing choices along with several dissimilar ones. However the biggest drawback to his version is the poor video quality. Perhaps the 6GB will look nicer but he's still working off a DVD rip of the first two films and a bootleg copy of the third.
That being said, I've gone and made a page on my website dedicated to my fanedit version: JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit. The idea is the same- cut all three films into one long epic that is more faithful to the book. My source media are the 1080p Blurays, so I won't be able to edit the third film until it is released (legitimately) this spring.
Here is the link to my fanedit info page:
http://www.maple-films.com/the-hobbit-fanedit
I'm also going to start a new thread on the topic here.
http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/JRR-Tolkiens-The-Hobbit-turning-a-mediocre-trilogy-into-one-really-good-film/topic/17418/
Thanks for sharing! I have been slowly working on my own edit, and it has been very interesting reading about the cuts you made, along with those from the Dwarfed edition and the 4.5 hour Tolkieneditor edition. Rather than strictly trying to shorten the movies or try to make them close to the book, my goal is to get them as close as I can to Jackson's original 2 film version. I don't have any problem with them being somewhat flawed or changed from the book, I just felt that the theatrical editions were overstuffed and distracted from the core story. I'm sure there will be a lot of versions out there, and my interest is really just to make a version that I want to watch, and as a secondary motive maybe to give some other editors a few good ideas.
So far I have an early cut of one movie up to the point where they meed Bard. My only major change is that I moved the Erebor prologue to the start of movie two. Movie one now starts with "It began as you might expect. In a hole in the ground..." There's still a bit of Bilbo and Frodo, but you get to the main story much more quickly and the entire beginning is in Bag End. Movie two will start with the Erebor prologue, which is good in its own right and much more relevant to what's happening in that movie.
Aside from that, almost all of my changes are just removing extraneous side stories and clipping a few small bits of dialogue. I removed: Radagast's first two scenes, most of Azog, the flashback to Moria, some of the dwarves goofing around in Rivendell, part of the White Council, the extensive escape from Goblin Town, and most of Legolas and Tauriel. I left the wargs and eagles in, but I cut it down significantly so that no one leaves the trees except by eagle. Similarly, I cut down the barrel chase so that no one gets out of their barrels or has weapons. Kili is still injured afterwards, but it never shows how it happened.
I'm already planning to make a handful of changes (smooth out the transition between movies, cut the elves down a bit more, fix a few audio issues), but it's pretty close to what I want and I'd love to hear any impressions of it. My plans for movie two involve more significant changes, but largely I'm going to remove a lot of excessive action sequences and cut out anything that happens when the company isn't present. Bard is the only exception, since he's fairly integral to the plot, but he'll be cut down a bit too. I'm going to try to finish at least rough cuts of both movies before watching anyone else's edits, but I am very interested in seeing how others got around the little issues that pop up once you start taking scenes out.
