Slipstream 1989 (WIP) — Page 3

Pineapples101 said:

I know I'm putting this out there for others and not actually doing the hard work myself but...

* Steven Lisberger
* Gary Kurtz
* Mark Hamill

These would be top of my lists for people to contact, Kurtz and Hamill are always at Cons doing signings.

Steven Lisberger - what are the chances that he might be contactable via Tron Legacy director Joseph Kosinski? Does he have a facebook / twitter?

Once again, just putting this out there...

 tried all that, none have open contact details 

It would be awesome if there was a way to contact one of them to see if we could obtain the materials to do an HD transfer and then maybe even start a Kickstarter or something similar to fund the project.

I know where you'll be able to find Gary Kurtz on December 4th...

http://www.soundstage.thespace.uk.com/

Hey guys! My name is Rikk Wolf and I produce a comedy series entitled Incognito Cinema Warriors XP. We got our start as a humble little tribute to Mystery Science Theater 3000. We’ve managed to carve out a nice little niche in the riffing community.

We’re in the process of choosing the film we’ll riff for our Season 2 finale and we want to pick something really special. We’re very interested in Slipstream.

However, we’re sick of upscaling already terrible looking digital rips of already terrible prints of films to 1080p.

To the point - I know a guy. He’s restored films MUCH older than Slipstream to HD and now even 4K resolution. I can’t promise he’d be interested but I can ask and I’m sure he would at least advise to some degree.

My question to you cats is, if we were able to get our hands on a print, would you have interest in backing a Kickstarter to get an HD (or better) version of Slipstream out there?

I know some people don’t “get” making fun of a movie as a sign of affection, so I’ll understand if this sounds bizarre but we would of course make versions available WITHOUT our snarky commentary. In fact, our riffed version would be an entirely separate release, should this ever come to past.

Just putting the feelers out to gauge interest and my research into the film led me here.

You can check out our show at http://www.icwxp.com if anyone’s interested.

SilverWook said:

Welcome to the forum, Rikk! 😃

There probably would be some interest around here in that. I’m an MST fan myself. I bought the restored Manos a few months back and enjoyed it. 😉

Folks around here probably need some time to recover from the holidays and hangovers first. 😉

Hey Silver!

Always happy to meet another MSTie! Our only worry is they may be planning to use Slipstream on the MST3K revival to facilitate Mark Hamill’s cameo.

The fellah I mentioned did the Manos restoration and now The Atomic Brain!

Oh, I imagine if this did happen it would take a long long time. I have no leads on where to find a print of the film and I’ve never tried to track one down before.

My thread she lives again!
I found the trailer but cannot find the actual film, and I have been looking for years 😦
Problem is since it went public domain there is no interest in it unfortunately

I’ll actually be watching the film for the first time in its entirety later today to confirm it’s “riffable”. Excited!

May I ask where you were able to get the print of the trailer, Mike?

Approaching industry people at conventions or events about business orientated stuff like this is dodgy at best.

I wish we had some official representation but we’re just some guys working out of a glorified garage, ha ha.

However, we do have a following. If we think Slipstream would make a good episode and provided a print can be found, we’ll put our full force behind restoring it as well as riffing it.

I’m honestly fascinated by the process.

^…^ said:

I wonder if taking both the full screen and letterboxed laserdiscs, and use them together to cancel the japanese subtitles could work… -> Overlap Matching

That’s kind of genius and never would have crossed my mind.

In addition to producing my comedy series, I also do all the show’s editing, visual effects and color grading. I could easily do this if the full screen and letterboxed laser discs look similar enough in terms of quality and are the exact same edits of the film.

Trouble is, I have neither at my disposal. If someone could send me the laserdiscs (ZRFARNSWORTH?), I’m confident I could make it happen if their runtimes line up.

Digitally ripping the laserdisc will require a laserdisc player and ripping hardware but it’s in our budget. I would of course return the discs when we’re finished and be exceedingly careful with them throughout.

Yeah, looks pretty involved but I can make it happen. Actually sounds kind of fun.

User ZRFARNSWORTH has both laserdiscs but his post saying so is over a year old. Hope he sees the thread come back alive. Is it possible to private message on here?

I’m actually a touch surprised at the quality of the 4:3 “restored version” I got off Amazon. Probably just because we’ve used some pretty abysmal looking films on the show before but this wasn’t nearly as awful as I was expecting.

Still, it’s not good and we’d have to stretch it out, probably letterbox it and definitely upscale it to match our own content, which is far from ideal.

http://i.imgur.com/8OVMDb9.png

SilverWook said:

Click on their name, then click the “start a private topic button”. He only ever posted one message, and hasn’t been logged since almost a year ago. No idea if anyone else tried to contact him.

Thanks, I’ll hit him up! 😃

Rikk Wolf said:

I’ll actually be watching the film for the first time in its entirety later today to confirm it’s “riffable”. Excited!

May I ask where you were able to get the print of the trailer, Mike?

Approaching industry people at conventions or events about business orientated stuff like this is dodgy at best.

I wish we had some official representation but we’re just some guys working out of a glorified garage, ha ha.

However, we do have a following. If we think Slipstream would make a good episode and provided a print can be found, we’ll put our full force behind restoring it as well as riffing it.

I’m honestly fascinated by the process.

EBAY! and its like new UK rated trailer in widescreen, need to get it scanned at some point
I have always loved it since I saw it as a kid in the 80s

Just bought the JP wide-screen LD

That is excellent!

And just like last time (with the film trailer) … all we needed was to post about it here, and the universe filled the order!

(BTW, did I mention I’m dying to see how this goes?)

Hey guys, I see some of you have gotten your hands on the laserdisc but thanks to ZFARNSWORTH, I was able to digitally capture both the UK and Japanese laserdiscs.

Sadly, there’s not going to be any splicing them together to make a widescreen version without subtitles - at least by me.

In my absentmindedness, I forgot the fact that pan & scan 4:3 is done shot-for-shot so there’s no simple plopping of the UK version down on top of the Japanese version to cover up the subtitles. Someone would have to do this shot-for-shot and I just sadly do not have the time.

There’s also the issue of the color grading. The Japanese version looks like it was soaked in coffee for the last 27 years. I played around with fixing it but simply sucking the yellow out and getting it to match the UK version are two very different undertakings.

However, as we understand it, the film is public domain so I’m hosting the captures of them if anyone without access to a laserdisc player or the discs themselves would like to download them.

Just send me a private message here and I’ll give you the links!

We’re on the cusp of hiring a lawyer to aid us in tracking down a physical print, so I hope that route pans out. I’ll keep you cats updated!

Here’s a shot of our characters from ICWXP “discovering” the laserdiscs, too:

www.icwxp.com
www.facebook.com/icwxp
www.youtube.com/icwxp
www.patreon.com/icwxp

Rikk Wolf said:
We’re on the cusp of hiring a lawyer to aid us in tracking down a physical print, so I hope that route pans out. I’ll keep you cats updated!

Whoa … that is super! Now that it’s mentioned in the thread, expect the universe to magically deliver it to … (wait for it) … (wait for it) … eBay!!

Spaced Ranger said:

Rikk Wolf said:
We’re on the cusp of hiring a lawyer to aid us in tracking down a physical print, so I hope that route pans out. I’ll keep you cats updated!

Whoa … that is super! Now that it’s mentioned in the thread, expect the universe to magically deliver it to … (wait for it) … (wait for it) … eBay!!

Ha ha, that would certainly be nice! Seriously though, if everyone could keep their eyes peeled I would greatly appreciate it!

I have the JP LD in my possession, it is indeed 1.85:1 and from a release print I would say

That was pretty quick! Well, now, DVDMaiku, time to brush up on your Japanese!

Any chance to compare colors to determine of the orange-cast we saw on samples was their own artistic finger in Slipstream's pie? Or just film color-damage to parts or all the movie?

It’s very orange from what I saw so far, but my laptop I use for capture windows 10 killed so I can’t cap right now

From what I understand, the movie only had a very limited theatrical release in the UK and Australia as well as a few screenings in other parts of Europe. There was no US screening and probably only a very limited number of prints even created and distributed. Given the release dates, they probably just sent the prints from the original UK screenings around to other countries, so they probably ended up somewhere in France or Japan if they weren’t returned to the studio.

Sadly, there is a very high chance that obtaining a film print would be only slightly better than getting a hold of the original negatives and any prints that might still be out there in the wild are probably in very bad shape.

Rikk Wolf said:
… thanks to ZFARNSWORTH, I was able to digitally capture both the UK and Japanese laserdiscs.
… is public domain so I’m hosting the captures …

I’m stuck in download-hell so I can only get the 1st 8 minutes (JP version) before I must shut down (and there’s no resume to pick-up again later). But that is enough to see there are problems (on and off interlacing of parts of the picture, odd pixels-flicker here and there) as if the capture wasn’t keeping up with the source (and/or problems with the laserdisc player). These should be addressed before considering doing work on them.

I just finished getting almost 8 minutes of the UK version. It looks less rough and has better distributed color. For a quick proof-of-concept in a paint program, I made color corrections on a frame of the two version by eye, just trying to get it looking normal. The JP will need more careful reworking to squeeze out the proper color:

Slipstream UK laserdisc original		Slipstream UK laserdisc color correction
	.

Slipstream JP laserdisc original		Slipstream JP laserdisc color correction

Even though there isn’t much crushed or blown areas in either capture . .

UK: original . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . crushed highlighted . . . . . . . . . . . . . blown highlighted

JP: original . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . crushed highlighted . . . . . . . . . . . . . blown highlighted

. . the JP blue channel's contrast has been messed up (the reason for it’s “orange tint”):

JP – orig / Red / Green / Blue . . . . . . UK – orig / Red / Green / Blue

Once that channel is fixed, the colors of the two versions can be made the same for a seamless overlap (but not easy one – UK needed a tiny rotate to better line up with JP, and there may be some warp with which to contend) of the two sources for covering, or mostly covering, the burned-in JP subtitles. For now, I get this:

Referring to dvdmike's excellent trailer would be a big help for true color matching.

Further tests & examination of the JP laserdisc image shows pools of flattened areas in that problem blue channel. Most of the detail is plain missing. With that, I’d say there is no way to fix that blue channel enough to allow JP to color match UK.

One idea that might work is to recreate JP's blue channel with UK's blue channel … using DrDre's statistical color matching algorithm (in the Star Wars Preservations and Other Fan Projects forum) on individual B&W RGB-extracts (if it will work well or at all with damaged picture areas). If it can work, perhaps all the channels, either individually or together, can be processed for a close match of color distribution. But I’m not set up to test something like that.

Any takers?