FAN TRAILERS AND PREMAKES

Here’s a thing …

Music mash-ups are, in case you don’t know, where someone takes two or more pieces of music and mixes them together to produce a chimera which is a separate beast but has elements of both (or all) its parents.  Ideally, they should work as pieces of music in their own right, but they also offer up the enjoyable experience of allowing you to play ‘spot the sample’.

Now, the same aesthetic is often employed to the visual medium as well, using the editing software that is easily available these days.  Let’s face it, if this were not so, there’d be precious little on YouTube.

Well, movie trailers are fair game for this and fans with an exhaustive knowledge of film and a lot of time on their hands, have been putting together faux movie trailers for years.  The results are often indifferent at best; but sometimes the care and attention the fans lavish on these short films pay dividends and produce wonderful, hilarious, intoxicating ‘what if’ scenarios.

Such as, what if Steven Spielberg decided now was the time to do a sequel to E.T.:

Isn’t that fantastic?  Utterly convincing.  If that were a pitch it would be green-lit and in our cinemas summer 2012.  Click on the video, go to his YouTube page and give the guy some encouragement, I’d love to see what else he comes up with.

Here is a slightly different take on the same idea – but this is a CGI animation which is delightfully impressive.  It imagines a mash-up of two of 1968’s sci-fi events and yet is a short film in its own right:

But now we come to a man who has, in a very short time, elevated this to an art-form.  He creates trailers for all-to-recognisable films from the geek generation using nothing but footage from films from classic Hollywood.  His conceit is that the early films of Spielberg and Lucas weren’t just inspired by the movies they saw as children in the fifties – they were actual remakes of the films he has ‘unearthed’.

He calls his trailers ‘Premakes’ and they verge on the genius.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the work of Ivan Guerrero:

Okay, you get the idea?  Ivan’s mission is to make an instant-gratification, short-term-memory culture care about old movies and, therefore, he also takes the trouble to tell you where he finds his material, in the hope that his viewers will pick up some of the old films for themselves:

Now we move onto an even better example:

Lucas has always been open and honest about the inspiration he took from Flash Gordon; this video makes that overt from those who refuse to believe.  Again, he provides us with his sources, showing the pain-staking shot-for-shot work he does:

And finally, what I consider to be his masterpiece, the 1951 version of Raiders of the Lost Ark, starring Charlton Heston:

Isn’t that extraordinary?  I particularly love the fact that he has converted this to black and white, because I have always maintained that Raiders, one of my absolute favourite films, looks even better in black and white.  It’s mostly made of an all-but-forgotten 1954 film called Secret of the Incas, but here’s the original footage in detail:

Now, if you want to know more about the intriguing Secret of the Incas, there’s a fansite dedicated to it here.

Meanwhile, Ivan’s own site is here.  And his YouTube page is here.  Wander over; tell him The Cellulord sent ya!

So, can you find any equally cool examples of this fan-driven art-form?  Share them with us in the comments if you have!  Cheers.

HITCHCOCK AND TRUFFAUT AUDIO - FOR FREE DOWNLOAD

 

You know the moment ... Indy is standing in The Map Room, his wooden staff is just the right length and, as the sun rises, a beam of holy light tells him exactly where he can find The Ark of the Covenant.  John Williams' best score soars to a spine-tingling climax and, if you're anything like me, the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.

Well, last night, I was wandering through the website feeds that tumble into my Facebook account and noted one from the very excellent /Film entitled Listen to 12 Hours of François Truffaut interviewing Alfred Hitchcock.  Cue holy light.  Cue violins.

See, more than twenty years ago, when I was at college and first discovered that one could actually study films, the first film we looked at was Psycho and, upon visiting the college library and discovering a whole shelf of books about movies, the first I checked-out and read was by François Truffaut, about his idol Alfred Hitchcock.  The book was simply called Hitchcock by Truffaut at the time, although it is now known as A Definitive Study of Alfred Hitchcock (which it absolutely isn't, but still ...).

I knew Truffaut.  Or, rather, I thought I did.  I'd seen him act in CE3K (1977) and watched at least one film he'd directed: Fahrenheit 451 (1966).  I'd never heard of La Nouvelle Vague at that point, but simply to think that a maker of films could also be a fan of them was a revelation to me, and the insight one director could bring to the work of another was inspirational.  A battered, old, third-hand copy of that exact edition now has pride of place amongst the hundreds of film books that crowd my shelves.  It was my introduction to the head-swimming world of film analysis and critique.  And you never forget your first!

The book is, essentially, an extended conversation between two cinema giants conducted in 1962 when Hitch was still at the height of his considerable powers and Truffaut was just approaching his ('62 is the year Jules et Jim was first released).  I don't think either of them would have claimed that they were equals but, as time passes and Truffaut's body of work grows in esteem, the gap between them narrows.  One could only imagine what the actual conversation was like before it was filtered, edited and transcribed into the printed text.

Well, now we need to speculate no more.  The tapes have turned up and quietly, inconspicuously, they have been appearing on the internet.  Indeed, they've been sitting there since 2008 on a cultural blog with the delightful name If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats, just waiting for the world to discover them.  The blog is oddball and wonderfully funny and, now I've discovered it, I'll be returning often!

It seems that these treasures were stumbled-upon by the curators of another cultural commentary site, Open Culture who discovered that the audio files had been gathered together by the editors of the Hitchcock Wiki here, and are now also available for download.

Thanks to the frenzy of interest this revelation has engendered, these download sites became massively over-loaded and crashed.  But, as I found when I visited another site carrying the story: Filmdetail, there are plenty of mirror sites so, if you want them, go hunting, you'll find them.  I did.  No Nazis, no snakes.

Twelve hours of unguarded discussion with the notoriously deceptive and mischievous Hitchcock is an extraordinary find.  It's cultural value is almost beyond calculation for students and lovers of film.  Now that this material is out there, it won't be long before someone provides a translation of the French elements, and other people will find uses for this audio ... DVD audio commentaries, perhaps?  They will certainly become an essential teaching tool for the next generation of students learning that it’s okay to study film.

I can't begin to tell you how excited I am by this.  I certainly know what I'm doing this weekend ... I'll be spending it with Hitch!

François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock and translator, Helen G. Scott in 1962

WEB: DAN O'BANNON'S GRAPHICS

.

While I was updating my research on Dan O'Bannon for my Alien @ 30 articles, I stumbled across an interesting little piece which connects my pieces about Alien and the link posted below about George Lucas.

The article is about the computer monitors and displays in Star Wars, all primitive by modern standards, but quite visionary at the time and all the work of a jobbing animator who was between movie scripts: one Dan O'Bannon.

The article is just one of many thoughtful and well-researched pieces you find on the very excellent webzine Den of Geek.  Don't let the name put you off ... it is far from the amateurish rumour-mill you might expect ... Indeed, I don't think there are many more well-written and deeply-considered science fiction websites out there.

So go and have a look ... then hurry back.
.

GEORGE LUCAS IN 1971

.

.
This summer, a quite extraordinary piece of cinema history was unearthed ... an hour-long video interview with George Lucas from 1971, the year THX 1138 was released.

Even though he was only 27 at the time, Lucas was considered something of a veteran of the film industry and this rambling interview details his career to that point, includes footage some of his early experimental films, much of which I've never seen before.

It also finds Lucas at a crossroads in his life: The ideals he and his mentor, Francis Ford Coppola, had cherished of creating an independent film company - the first Zoetrope - had floundered and Lucas was facing up, for the first time, to either going mainstream and dealing with the big studios, or abandoning film-making all-together. 

Well, we all know the decision he made and we all know the end result but, back in 1971, Lucas himself didn't know which way to go.  I think it makes fascinating viewing to see him speaking so candidly about his influences and his ambitions ... when we know exactly how much of it eventually came to pass.

Michael Heilemann's website Binary Bonsai found the film and put it on-line.

It's about an hour long but, I think, an hour very, very well spent.



Let me know what you think.
.

WEB: ULTIMATE IRON GIANT

.

.....A new feature on this site now:  When I find websites that I think'll interest you ... I'll tell you about them.  It's what Web 2.0 is all about, after all: sharing.

So, as we are approaching its tenth anniversary ... I thought I'd point you to this wonderful collection of sketches, design-sheets and original art for The Iron Giant.

It was, arguably, the last great (American) 2D animated feature.  It had a heart and a beauty that Disney lost and Dreamworks never really had.  It deftly interwove historical references, science fiction motifs and, of course, Ted Hughes' allegorical 1968 novella The Iron Man into a film which remains a delight to behold.

It would be lovely to see it on the big screen again ... let's hope the tenth anniversary gives Warners the excuse it needs to milk some more big-screen coin out of the movie.

Anyway, the website has been put together by David Zart, based in Ohio, who is basically just an Iron Giant nut (and I mean that in a good way).  He has spent the last ten years collecting a vast library of art-work associated with the film, which he has generously gathered together in his website. 

There are hundreds of images to drool over, from rough sketches to finished paintings to character sheets ... if you love peeking behind The Curtain, if you love The Iron Giant, if you love great film art ... you'll love what Mr Zart has to show you.

Pay a visit to:

the ultimate iron giant 
... but don't forget to come back here after : )
.