ORIGINAL POST AT FANEDIT.ORG - NEWEST UPDATE AT THE BOTTOM:
I have no idea how many times I’ve edited the two first into one, and trimmed them down, made them look like they were filmed on film rather than digital, color graded them, score alterations and sound effects, removal of CGI overload (including orcs) and more. Every single time (this is now the third time), I’ve never even been close to a release, and loss of files due to laptop malfunctions etc., left the project dead - twice.
JUST A FEEL OF THE OPENING:
I choose not to release or preview anything of importance of this edit. I want you, as an audience and a fan of Jackson’s Middle-Earth, to experience my edit as his intended vision. No spoilers.
[1.1] THE AIM
THE AIM of this project is to make a prequel of the story that fits properly into Lord of the Rings - both visually, and - as the movie progress - also tonally. This is still a story of its own. Also, Battle of the Five Armies is a disgrace. There will hardly be any battle. Bilbo Baggins is the main character and we will never lose focus to his character or his story.
The offensive sideplots, characters and CGI has been removed. The only exception is Azog, who’s story and presence has been as realistically and unoffensively altered as humanly possible.
[1.2] THE COLOR GRADING AND MOVIE DEGRADING
The Hobbit (films) is a prequel to the Lord of the Rings by Peter Jackson, but doesn’t feel like it. Not in the slightest. The colors are bright and golden with a visually much cleaner, digital video-forefront, and a heavy reliance on modern CGI.
It is hard to not seperate the movies from one another (Hobbit - LOTR) when these absurd changes in style and visual format are bloating the screen from first minute mark until the last.
One of my biggest achievements on this THE HOBBIT cut will be how it will feel like a prequel that fits into the lived-in and very real Middle-Earth of the Lord of the Rings films, and not this digital playbox of cheerful colors and CGI-wonders with pacing, tone and character development just all over the place.
[1.3] THE EDITING
Besides from the obvious, which is the length of the movie (which will be heavily reduced from the original three movies into the length of a LOTR-feature; 3h. 10 minutes), there are heavy pacing improvements and story alterations. This is very much a fast-paced Middle-Earth movie, with similiarities to the build-up of FOTR, with a lot of heavy focus on story purpose and character development (for characters of importance, that is - Bilbo, Thorin, Gandalf, Balin).
Also, Radagast has a short apperance - which is not his original at all. We don’t linger on scenes or places for too long unless the story and pacing requires some build-up for things to come, we don’t sit in long Council Meetings with heavy exposition, we don’t encounter that many CGI orcs or CGI objects, fight CGI trolls for long or live in too many CGI enviorments unless crucial to the story and with heavy, visual alterations from my part - and we have no bloating, horrible CGI creation with a lot of screentime. Battle of the Five Armies is a bye-bye, and only crucial puzzlepieces will be included from there.
I hope you guys are excited! This will be a fun ride, I am sure of it. Feel free to come with suggestions! As always!
NEWEST UPDATE:
[FINISHED]
Oh boy, what a journey. A five-year old work-in-progress, and Covid-19 is what it took to finish it. This edit has been remade about five times, and only now - when i had a lot of time on my hands - did I finally get it right. Or, should I say, to a satisfying end product.
I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you less than you deserve - but the edit is still here, precisely when it means too!
The first page on this thread sums up the main ideas pretty well, and instead of teasing with a lot of new footage or telling you all how much better my edit is than what it once was, I’m just going to say this:
It’s The Hobbit film I suspect Jackson intended, but simply did not have the pre-production time he needed to pull it of. This is THE LORD OF THE RINGS prequel, in the established, lived-in and realistic Middle-Earth that Jackson created, that I wanted to watch in the theaters back in 2012.
3 hours and 12 minutes (without credits, 3h 24 with) of Bilbo Baggins, Thorin, Gandalf and Balin and their other Dwarfen companions and their amazing journey to take back their homeland, with the growing forces of evil lurking in the shadows.
The title, Lord of the Rings: A Hobbit’s Tale, completely justifies the content within; a Hobbit’s tale, within the stretching tentacles of the Dark Lord of the Rings.