thank you for your comments, IRANTANPLAN. Yes, some transitions were rather rough. Deep impact has a different aspect ratio than War of the Worlds, true, it also has very different colouring, also Terminator 2 and 3 where the nuclear war scenes came from. All these scenes were recoloured to better fit them into the movie, but still they don't for a 100%. Still the blurryness is part of the Deep Impact movie. There is also some pixelisation towards the end that I am absolutely not proud of, still I think it alltogether worked rather well. Well, the voiceover at the end was kind of necessary, because the movie started with one and it was already very difficult to get the viewer believe the change of perspective from Ray to a universal point of view. The basement scene was very difficult, picturewise and scorewise and you are right,a continous piece of score would have been better, but since we needed the original voices and sounds wherever possible, this was, well, probably about the best we could do at that time. Still I find myself thinking about several scenes and I get the feeling that this project is not totally closed. This was such an ambitious project and it was such a pity we couldn't improve it anymore picturewise, because our project files were corrupted... oh well. If you ever find the time to make a "corrected" WOTW tec version, just go for it, I would love to see that.
Wouldn't it be possible to leave out the basement scene completely? I had something like this in mind: When Ray is forced to decide between his son and his daughter, she is taken away from two older people. At the point where Ray is running after her, one could put in a transition to the scene, where he is looking for his daughter after the basement scene. It would also be pretty devastating, because you would propably imagine, that the tripods slughtered all those people running away during the transition.
I don't believe this will work. When Ray comes to the war scene, the world is in chaos but not yet overtaken by aliens. It would obviously take a lot of time for the earth to transform that much, so the search for Rachel scene could actually happen... the audience will probably not buy this time gap.
I watched this, i liked it, however i "LOVED" your Matrix DeZIONized... This one was ok in comparison, i guess, the original movie itself is kinda bad, but since your making a cut, you could allmost squeese this movie to the lenght of Boogeyman, cause there are some scenes that should have been "FINE TUNED" the ones with HIS ANNOYING BRAT of a DAUGHTER... I thought through the thing and many of her scenes i think are possible to trim, all her yelling and screaming...
I liked your edit, in fact i havent seen WOTW the original, i thought this would be the best way to go...
ok, so my thought, i thought actually your adding the Deep Impact scenes was a good idea and such a way making another ending as well, but when we see the Earth at the end, shouldnt it be mostly crapped instead of "nice" and normal looking, thats one thing i thought was wrong... maybe its supposed to be MANY years later when earth is shaping up and growing plant lifes again and getting back to how it used to be, but as well since your directly cutting into using the nukes, we dont see any Debris or anything when the nukes launch either... So some recoloring and aftereffects should do nicely there, just a thought, but kudos on figuring a way to remove a stupid ending...
While we are on the subject, is there anyway u think u could "edit" The Signs, maybe make, "signs of the coming" or something where the aliens dont die from fricking water, but they start to attack and take over, using scenes from this movie i think could work... adding sound effects maybe and....
Oh and cut the part where we see the alien in the middle of the movie...
The ending could show them in the basement, alot of sounds from the outside and a shot of the outside with tripods attacking and announcer saying: 2 Weeks after the Mysterious Crop Markings started to turn up, the Earth was under attack...
After 2 Years of Annihilation the Entire Mankind had be completly wiped out from the face of the earth, the planet was left dead and the attackers moved on...
Well thats just one idea, i just GOD DAMN hate the WATER ending...
You'll hate me for this, but Signs is actually one of my favorite movies. I have to say, the weird ending is the whole point of the damn thing. Most of what happens in that movie points to that conclusion. It's not a movie about an alien invasion--it's a movie about that weird gray area between coincidence and fate, which is why there's the whole religious subtext to the film. It's a movie about faith, and I find it really touching, which is pretty crazy, seeing as how I'm an agnostic (or on really bad days, a full blown atheist).
(BTW, it's in bad taste to post spoilers about the ending of a movie without warning folks.)
The title of the film isn't a reference to the crop circles, it isn't meant to define them as being "warning signs". The title refers to all those little coincidences that add up to the conclusion, where you wonder if its all coincidence, or if its fated to occur that way, and thats where all the faith and religion crap comes in. Those little coincidences are SIGNS of there maybe being something more to the world...fate or god or whatever...
If you want an alien invasion movie, stick to ID4 or War of the Worlds or any of the other billion movies out there. If it floats your boat, cut the end off Boon's recut of WOTW and slap it onto Signs. It just seems kinda dumb to want to make all these movies end the same way:
Aliens invade, people die, nukes fly, earth reduced to a cinder, people/aliens win and are left to rebuild.
As an afterthought, regarding your suggestions for WOTW--
When Boon was working on the WOTW recut, I volunteered to help him a bit some of the stuff he was writing for the film (mainly the opening and ending sequences), but unfortunately, due to time conflicts and "creative differences" between he and I, my involvement was dropped.
I think he did a good job, but the main thing that bothered me was the use of the two subtitles at the end of the movie, denoting shifts in time (one of them I think was "20 Years Later"). It didn't fit with the film, as the film never uses that sort of subtitling, and then in the last two minutes of the film, he uses them twice, when in reality, they weren't at all necessary. Firstly, because the audience is smart enough to kinda figure things out for themselves, and secondly, the shot of that little blossom or whatever it was that was opening up doesn't need to be taking place now, or "20 years later", or even "100 years later". It's a simple of rebirth, hope, yadayada.
And that was a major lesson to me, when it comes to writing and film editing and all of that--really stupid little stuff can pull you out of the moment completely. The editing at the end was really nice, really put together good, but making the assumption that the audience wasn't smart enough to figure out the ending, and so using the subtitles, just made the whole damn thing scream "FAN EDIT!". Give the viewer the minimum amount of material necessary for them to figure out what's going on...which is why the re-editing of those shots to make the earth look ruined and whatnot aren't really necessary...Boon shows the earth getting nuked, and then we cut to that blossom opening up, and that's the damn point. We get our asses kicked, but we can get back up and rebuild. The point is made, and the viewer gets it.
Originally posted by: boon23 I don't believe this will work. When Ray comes to the war scene, the world is in chaos but not yet overtaken by aliens. It would obviously take a lot of time for the earth to transform that much, so the search for Rachel scene could actually happen... the audience will probably not buy this time gap.
I'm still playing around with that flick. More of an accident, I cut out everything after the "parting scene" and did a fade to the end, where they go to the arc and left out all that "Ray kicks that tripods butt" crap and it workes surprisingly good. I think I'll play a little bit around with that, maybe put in some "on the way to the ark" stuff in, if I can find something that would keep the illusion.
I absolutely agree on Signs. it was a religious movie about fate and faith, not an Alien invasion movie. The Aliens were jsut the addition to it to give this a context. I love Signs the way it is.
And I think we did work pretty well together and without you our WOTW would not have been what it later on was. You had plenty of really good ideas, btu there we are in the true world of film business. The final decision is to the producer. I know there are things about this edit that bother me and most of it is quality based, I am not satisfied with the transitions in the cellar, I don't like the colours from Deep Impact and those stupid interlacing and deinterlacing problems... But I never bothered about the subtitles. I see the problem more in the change of perspective. My ending moves away from Ray, but the movie was with him for the entire time. This causes a serious break IMHO. Unfortunately I had no more scenes with Ray, which I could use.
IRANTANPLAN, it sounds as if you want to make a fanedit of a fanedit...hehe.. I guess that has never been done before, But I am proud if our project was the inspiration for that.
Originally posted by: boon23 IRANTANPLAN, it sounds as if you want to make a fanedit of a fanedit...hehe.. I guess that has never been done before, But I am proud if our project was the inspiration for that.
To be honest, I don't have the original DVD yet, so it's kind of necessary to use your version. As soon as I got my DVD I'll have to redo everything anyway, because my edit will be based on a PAL source (which doesn't have the nasty interlacing problems). But your version is a good start anyways. I'm also thinking about losing the entire narration at the beginning and the end (maybe some exposition in a text crawl, I don't know yet).
Perhaps I'll also change the order of some scenes. The coolest thing of course would be to establish very early in the movie, that thay plan to nuke them out, and that the family does not try to escape the tripods, but is trying to reach the arc. The scene on the river is very apocalyptic, it seems kind of fitting for such an idea. But at the moment I'm just playing with ideas, don't really know what can be done with the given material. In the end, my version may be even longer than CBBs, because of the needed additional material
The biggest problem at the moment seens to be, that you can't to colour correction to a big extend in iMovie, so I will need Final Cut Pro for this....
