Hi guys!

Horizon - How To Film The Impossible is, in my opinion, possibly the best documentary about classic VFX ever made.

I found a fairly decent copy of it on Myspleen some time ago but it’s still only a DVD transfer of an old videotape, with lots of noise, dropouts, interlacing artifact and really noisy sound. So I wanted to clean it up a little but never got around to finishing it.

It is a project I’ve wanted to do for ages and when I recently wanted to use this amazing documentary to demonstrate something, I found that out of the two copies that used to be on youtube, only the worse one remains and it’s really bad.

Also, our company started a VFX academy to train future compositors, because they always have trouble finding good people, and as part of this, they started doing lectures on history of VFX and I suggested this documentary to my colleague, who heads the academy and he loved it and asked me if I could possibly bring him a higher quality copy than what was on youtube.

This motivated me to finally do this little cleanup project this weekend (well, Friday night and Saturday, really - I was at work all day today) but those of you who know me will probably know that I didn’t stop at just doing a bit of cleanup 😄

And so, here’s the Horizon - How To Film The Impossible - Remastered:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hQ0GQjmIWDPOv0Xs3rJ2SgzOLDVQoiP2gPeHBNuqZto/edit?usp=sharing

Just finished watching it. It’s really nice, seeing decent film scans of Star Wars in here.

The idea of the small image over blurred background is to make the low-quality image smaller on a moder large screen, like it would have been on a small CRT back then and yet to keep the screen visually filled like in the original documentary. Then the idea extended into using the same thing for the film footage to make it visually consistent and again fill the screen, like the original documentary’s Pan&Scan footage. And finally, I added the extra horizontal blur under the BTS footage to simulate the same AR as the film footage. I personally really like the look.

As for adding a bit of dirt to the Indy (and 2010) footage, I wanted to preserve the feel that the original documentary had, where the film bits just breathe celluloid even through the layers of analog noise, so I used the film scans for Star Wars footage and I wanted to give the footage where I had to use Blu-Rays similar feel - I even regraded the Indy footage closer to the way it looks in the documentary.

OK, seeing how many people prefer the black bars, I think I’ll make a purist version 😉

This is a great documentary and I love seeing it in great quality with the modern scans spliced in but…pillarboxed AND letterboxed? I feel like I’ve time travelled back to the late 90s, early 2000s!

In all honesty, it looks really tiny. I personally think a simple pillarboxed presentation is best.

Does anybody have hi-res scans of any of the matte paintings shown in this doc? Without the live action footage - with the holes.

Excellent! I personally love the aspect ratio presented because I can watch this on my 2.35:1 screen.

Also, could I find someone willing to make English subtitles for this?
This would be a great starting point to getting it translated to other languages - I myself would love to make a Czech translation.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hQ0GQjmIWDPOv0Xs3rJ2SgzOLDVQoiP2gPeHBNuqZto/edit?usp=sharing

interesting documentary, indeed. thanks a bunch, harmy!

Great documentary, thanks for restoring it.

I got really bummed out when the “good” version was removed from YouTube a few years ago, and this version is such an improvement in every way. The high-res footage from the movies really helps to illustrate the points they were making in the documentary; like the white TIE’s overlapping the Falcon in shot SB19. I could never quite see what they were referring to in the either of the low-res VHS versions.

Excellent work Harmy. It’s great to see so much behind the scenes stuff from Temple of Doom. It’s legitimately my favorite movie of all time, and there’s not much content out there.

Thanks again for the purist version. I really cannot handle the “fill the screen” stuff that is becoming so commonplace.

Oh man I loved this documentary back in the day Always wanted to see it gain thanks for doing this awesome job man

Hey Harmy, thank you for taking the time to create a “purist” version. I’ll be downloading this when I get home!