TRANSFORMERS: MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE - (Released)

I honestly regard Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen to be one of the worse films that I’ve ever seen (right up there with the theatrical/dvd cut of Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones). However, there were several specific scenes and story elements in the sequel that (believe it or not) worked for me:

- I thought the first six minutes of the “Shanghai robot battle” was rather exciting (it beat the hell out of the remaining action scenes of the film) and it was nice to see the new renditions of Arcee and Sideswipe.

- I loved the idea of Soundwave as a satellite - I think it’s a logical “generational upgrade” for that specific type character, plus his voice always sounded awesome.

So I’d decided to start work on a fanedit of the first Transformers film which (along with numerous others cuts, edits, and improvements) will eventually add those sequel elements into the first movie.

FanEdit Information
Type of Fanedit: True Fanedit
Intention With This Edit: To develop a better cut of “Transformers” which would add a few select scenes or plot elements from “TF2: Revenge of the Fallen” into the story of the first film.
Original Titles: Transformers, Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen
New Title: Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye
Original Runtime: TF = 133 minutes (2 hours, 13 minutes); TF2 = 149 minutes (2 hours, 29 minutes)
New Runtime: 106 minutes (1 hours, 46 minutes)
Time Cut: TF = approximately 34 minutes; TF2 = approximately 142 minutes (2 hours, 22 minutes)
Time Added: approximately 7 minutes taken from TF2
Software Used: Sony Vegas 7 (video editing), Adobe Photoshop CS2 (image editing), Sony Sound Forge 8 (audio editing), Sony DVD Architect 4.5 (DVD authoring), AutoGK (xvid-version encoding)

Release Information
XVID-encoded AVI

• Size: 1.4GB
• Resolution: 720x304
• Aspect Ratio: 2.37:1, 16x9 widescreen
• Audio format: 5.1 Dolby Surround
• Language: English

DVD-9 Release (V2)
DVD Format: NTSC - DVD9-DL
Region: 0 (region free)
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1, 16x9 widescreen
Audio format: 5.1 Dolby Digital
Language: English
Subtitles: none
DVD Extras: Custom Motion Menus
DVD Extras: “About the Edit” page
DVD Extras: JasonN Fanedit Trailers

Major Edits/Changes
MAJOR EDIT: Sam’s first introduction in the film is now getting into his father’s car to go to buy his own car
MAJOR EDIT: “Qatar Military Attack” sequence is now moved to after Sam gets Bubblebee from the dealership
CUT/EDIT: Cut out the “location subtitles” (a minor issue, but I really hate these - it’s like filmmakers have no faith in the audience’s intellegence)
CUT: Removed Captain Lennox’s “wife/baby” subplot
MAJOR EDIT: A lot of editing to the “Lake Park” scenes to tone down “high school drama” elements and remove the “dumb jock” character
MAJOR CUT/EDIT: Removed as much of the terrible “sex, drugs, and toilet humor” that was previously present in the film
ADDITION: Added Stan Bush’s “Dare” to the car background music of Sam/Mikella’s first ride in Bumblebee
CUT/EDIT: Cut much of the “Bumblebee = Hurbie the Love Bug” scenes, including his stalling out at the cliff edge
MAJOR CUT: Completely cut out the “Girl Analyst/Black Hacker” subplot
MAJOR ADDITIONS: Added several of the Soundwave scenes from “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” throughout the fanedit, especially alongside the “Frenzy Hacking” and “Decepticons Mobilizing” scenes
EDIT: Altered Soundwave’s voice through a vocoder to make it sound closer to his original G1 “vocoder” voice
MAJOR EDIT: Reorganized Sam’s “History Class” segment to occur after Soundwave/Frenzy hack into the Pentagon and Air Force One
ADDITION: Added Ravage’s attack on the military complex for the alien metal “shard”
CUT: Removed all scenes of Sam being interogation in the police station
CUT/EDIT: Numerious cuts to the soldiers battle with Scorponac in the desert
MAJOR EDIT: Removed the “Kill Bill” theme music from when Bubblebee upgrades himself
CUT/EDIT: Many cuts and trims to the scenes of Sam searches for the glasses at his home and Sector 7 introduction
CUT/EDIT: Tone down the ‘“over the top” antics of the Agent Simmons character
CUT: Removed the "Soldiers’ Mutiny of Sector 7" sequence
EDIT: Pitch Starscream’s voice higher to closer match his original G1 voice
MAJOR CUTS/EDITS: Numerous cuts, trims, alterations, and even scene rearrangements to the final “City Battle” sequences
MAJOR CUT: Completely removed the original ending of “Transformers” (Sector 7 disbands, Captain arrives home to wife and baby, and Sam/Mikella make-out on top of Bubblebee)
MAJOR ADDITION/EDIT: Used the first 2/3 of the “Shanghai Battle” sequence from “TF2: Revenge of the Fallen” for the fanedit’s finale.
ADDITION: The first End Credits song is Black Lab’s “‘Transformers’ Theme”; second End Credits song is Stan Bush’s “You’ve Got the Touch”

How To Get the Fanedit
http://fanedit.info</span>
(or just PM me)

Video Previews:

Sam drives Mikella home: http://www.vimeo.com/7210690
Soundwave/Frenzy hacking & Sam’s history lesson: http://www.vimeo.com/7210944
Starscream’s “old/new” voice: http://www.vimeo.com/7211060
Bumblebee’s upgrade (without ‘Kill Bill’ theme): http://www.vimeo.com/7229144

I'd watch this for the Starscream thing alone.

Took a bit of audio editing and sound-effects work to pull off, but I've manage to completely remove the 'Kill Bill' theme music from when Bumblebee upgrades himself:

http://www.vimeo.com/7229144

Do you mean "percent"?

The only scenes from TF2: RotF that's being included in my fanedit is:
- the Autobot/Decepticon battle in Shanghai (ends with Optimus Prime decending from the plane)
- Soundwave's hacking the satalite
- Soundwave launching Ravage to Earth
- Ravage's attack on the military complex
- Soundwave telling the Decepticons to mobilize

(I was debating on also including the Megatron/Starscream dialogue on the skyscraper, but Megatron's design is too different from his TF1 design to work effectively)

This sounds like a very interesting project - the incorporation of Soundwave into the Frenzy hacking scene was quite well done :)

Sounds cool! So you'll still be hacking TF2 into a watchable movie as well once you get the right software?

Kurgan said:

Sounds cool! So you'll still be hacking TF2 into a watchable movie as well once you get the right software?

Not sure what you're talking about as far as right software - are you talking about DVD ripping software? (because I already have the RotF DVD ripped to my HD)

As for me making TF2: Revenge of the Fallen as its own fanedit?
No.... just.... god no.

Well I always said I wanted to see somebody combine the best of the two into one movie, so I'm looking forward to this. I figure somebody could make a far less objectionable TF2 with a lot of little edits (sort of like what was done with Batman & Robin).

One last preview video - Sam searching his home for the Glasses (after he and Mikella meet the Transformers), followed by Sector 7's introduction: http://www.vimeo.com/7336381

As of now, the fanedit has been 100% finalized - I'll start rendering the mpv/ac3 files for the DVD tomorrow, followed by rendering the xvid-AVI version from those files (the AVI version will be released first, btw).

I think it'll be a lot easier to work with ROTF than it was with the first movie since ROTF is a much better movie to begin with.  The first movie had so many bad and useless lines it just took forever to wade through and edit everything I felt was necessary.  I took notes while watching ROTF a few nights ago and there's a lot less than I thought there'd be to cut, though still plenty.

As far as that last scene you added a link to, I found it much simpler (and better) to cut straight from Sam telling Mikeala to watch the autobots to him searching his room.  Completely cut out his talk with his dad and Optimus' bumbling around the path.  You already cut the mojo bit and the "my bad." 

Of course I also kept in the masturbation joke since I had no issues with it and found it humorous.

Kevinicus said:

I think it'll be a lot easier to work with ROTF than it was with the first movie since ROTF is a much better movie to begin with.

I'm sorry if this is rude.... but that is absolute BULLS**T.
-__-

As for the preview video, I needed to keep the "Sam/Dad talk" because it reveals how Sam got out of jail (his dad bailed him out) since I completely removed the prior "Police Station" scenes. As for the masturbation joke... yeah, I thought it was in very bad taste and terrible humor.
("These movies are for the kids", my ass, Bay...)

JasonN said:

Kevinicus said:

I think it'll be a lot easier to work with ROTF than it was with the first movie since ROTF is a much better movie to begin with.

I'm sorry if this is rude.... but that is absolute BULLS**T.
-__-

 

As for the preview video, I needed to keep the "Sam/Dad talk" because it reveals how Sam got out of jail (his dad bailed him out) since I completely removed the prior "Police Station" scenes. As for the masturbation joke... yeah, I thought it was in very bad taste and terrible humor.
("These movies are for the kids", my ass, Bay...)

Different people like different things, but I thought it was far more entertaining (better action and no hacker/analysts), and produced at a much higher level, and I think that even more now that I've spent a couple months editing the first movie so that it's watchable now.  I can watch ROTF unedited just fine, though I still plan to fix the flaws. 

I prefer the relatively short police station scene to the talk in the back yard that drags too much for me.  I'm not worried about kids as far as the humor, though if I were I'd have no problem with anything in these movies.

Higher production values does not mean that a movie is gonna be good - District 9's budget was less than 10% of Revenge of the Fallen, yet it managed to have far superior story, writing, character development, and originality than anything achieved in Michael Bay's TF sequel.

Kevinicus said:

I'm not worried about kids as far as the humor, though if I were I'd have no problem with anything in these movies.

So you think that a movie with humping male dogs, robots peeing on humans, a swearing mother who gets stoned out of her mind on marijuana brownies, a little robot that feels up a girl's leg, extreme misogynistic views towards young women as nothing more than sex objects, masturbation jokes of poor taste, terrible racist stereotypes of anyone non-white, and pathetic xenopobic attitudes of anyone non-American IS PERFECTLY APPROPRIATE FOR CHILDREN?!!?

However, this thread is not about Revenge of the Fallen - it's about my fanedit of the first Transformers film, so from now on let's keep all comments about that instead.

Fair enough.  I will say if you do cut the masturbation bit, then you might look into trimming Sam's mom apologizing for  Mikeala having to listen to it.

It'll be cool to see how each of your treatments of the material end up. Man I love the fan editing community!

I'm no editor, but TF2 felt far more like a "workprint" to me than the first movie, like if you just trimmed a lot of the stuff it would be a watchable movie (though still a "dumb popcorn movie" in the end).

So yeah, sorry about that. I didn't think the masturbation scene worked for me, but my friend (who is twenty years older than me) thought it was a laugh riot. It's like the last possible thing they could be talking about/doing showing the mom is completely clueless (and Sam has no dignity left). Some of those jokes work a little the first time you see it to get a few cheap laughs from the audience, but just don't hold up well on repeated viewings.

And I guess having Sam's mom be one whose ditziness is increased by being under the influence is repeated in the sequel, but it's still stupid.

The fanedit is now available as an 1GB xvid-encoded AVI and can be found at:
http://fanedit.org/7780/

(or just PM me for the links)

Neat! I think I'll wait for the DVD version though...

Updated changes for the DVD Release:
1. Ok, I feel really pissed off at myself for not catching this sooner than I did....

Apparently in two of the "Soundwave in space" scenes (1st is where he acknowledges Wheelie to follow Mikella and 2nd is when he tells the Decepticons to mobilize), Michael Bay - in his efforts to constantly reuse as much footage as possible in TF2:ROTF - used THE EXACT SAME ANIMATED FOOTAGE OF SOUNDWAVE IN BOTH SCENES!!!
http://www.vimeo.com/7551430

(the only difference to these scenes, apart from Soundwave's dialogue, is Wheelie's subtitles in the 1st scene and a slight contrast filter in the 2nd scene)

Repeat footage in movies tend to annoy me to no end (unless it's like in a flashback), so I've gone back and re-edited the Soundwave's "achknowledge" scene in my fanedit to use different footage instead (I've also replaced the "zoom-in from space" shot from earlier in the hacking sequence with an alternative shot of Soundwave):
http://www.vimeo.com/7551456

2. Cut the hacker girl and her black friend from the helicopter scene with Sam/Mikella.

3. Trimmed about 20 seconds from the "Shanghai" epilogue (cut more footage from the Commander Center, removed Captain Lennex and co. talking in the helicopter, and removed Ironhide's "I smell him" line)

4. Smoothed out several music cuts/transitions that could've been better

Jason,

I watched the avi version last night.  I thought it was great.  I was really impressed with how the movie still moved at a pretty good click while having all of the clutter cut out.  The only thing I didn't really get was how Bumblebee started to chase Sam early in the movie.  It seemed like there was something missing. 

I thought Soundwave and Star Scream sounded great.  The Shanghai opening sequence from TF2 made a great conclusion.

I can't wait for the final DVD.  Good job!

Out of curiosity... how do you explain the continuity with the Shanghai scenes? After all, the human military and autobots are working together to fight hiding Decepticons, something that doesn't happen in the first movie until the very end (the final battle). And there it's daytime.

Sorry if this seems like a silly question...

Kurgan said:

Out of curiosity... how do you explain the continuity with the Shanghai scenes? After all, the human military and autobots are working together to fight hiding Decepticons, something that doesn't happen in the first movie until the very end (the final battle). And there it's daytime.

 

Sorry if this seems like a silly question...

I think I can explain this for JasonN.  It's basically like a romantic comedy after the couple gets together at the end and then they jump forward a year or something and show that they're married and have a kid or the girl is pregnant or something.

After the city battle is done and over with JasonN jumps forward 2 years to show the Autobots and military have been working together ever since and are still kicking Decepticon ass, and that the fight isn't over.  That's about it in a nutshell.