Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge 2007 70
Sarah Giannantonio writes "AtomFilms and LucasFilms launched today the 2007 Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge. This is a yearly competition where the Star Wars community send in their fan films to be judged by George Lucas. Award recipients will have their film shown during Celebration IV and also on Spike TV. New for 2007 is the fan fiction category."
to be judged by George Lucas (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me guess, on their potential for product placement and merchandising?
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Nope. They will be judged by George Lucas on their potential for the addition of Jar Jar Binks.
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Sucks, only allows parodies, no serious entries (Score:2)
Guess George is worried someone might show him up.
-Eric
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Did you expect Lucas not to allow merchandising on the Star Wars films? Why shouldn't he?
Episode 1 to 3 look to me like the work of a conflicted man: somebody who wants to make serious art, but at the same time wants to make popular art. And I don't think the popularity is about money. What would Lucas do with more money?
If it was really was all about money, he wouldn't have given those movies such a somber story line. He'd have given them all triumphal, feel good endings like Episode IV
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Dismantle the Hollywood Studio system. THX was supposed to be a start with digital distribution closing the deal. What ever happened to that?
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Honestly I thought the movies felt more like a clown in an undertaker suit. They pretended to be serious, but were really full of crap and cream pies.
Award recipients will have their film shown (Score:2, Funny)
during Celebration IV and also on Spike TV
And all other entries will be shown on YouTube - over and over again
George Lucas you say? (Score:3, Funny)
"The CGI is weak in this one, move along,... move along"
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Lucas' Original Vision (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of us have absolutely no qualifications whatsoever in production of art of any kind. But I reckon we can still produce something to blow this paticular judge over. Then again, that six year old with the Jar-Jar crayon animation (0.2fps) has a pretty solid product.
Get over it! (Score:2, Troll)
He's made some poor decisions and Empire + Jedi probably would have sucked if he had more to do with them than he did...
But come on, get over it! This is a fan based competition. It's not about the best or most talented judge for the job - the fans relish on the fact that it's GEORGE LUCAS reviewing their movies - the goddamn cr
EP IV was the high point of the Lucas SW work (Score:5, Interesting)
None of the subsequent Lucas movies are nearly as good as EP IV. I don't count EP V as a Lucas film; it was much more solid but much less innovative than EP IV. In EP VI, the franchise is starting to show signs of middle age spread, but the movie is carried by the greater maturity of Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher. I think the later Lucas films suffer because Lucas the story teller needs the pressure of limited resources to stay on track. The actors never have a chance. Samuel Jackson has that rare quality that differentiates the movie star from the actor: its fun just seeing him on screen. Utterly wasted.
Necessity is the mother of invention. When Lucas made EP IV, he had to overcome two limits: screen time and budget. He didn't think he'd get to make another one of these movies, so he put as much as he could into EP IV, which was the fastest paced 121 minutes most people had ever seen on screen.
The other thing that helped Lucas in EP IV was the limitation of what he could put on screen given the budget and technology available. For Ed Wood, two guys sitting on folding chairs in front of a blank wall was perfectly acceptable as set for an airline cockpit. For Lucas, no set that was not created largely in CGI would ever be good enough, however good it might be. So where he put special effects into the movie, he did not dwell on them; they'd simply fly by. It made the story more credible by putting it in a believably detailed setting.
A fantasy story needs the details to be credible. That's what made The Day the Earth Stood Still such a great movie, it was so believable in all its other details that accepting a man in a cheesy foam rubber suit as a giant robot was possible.
CGI is what killed Lucas' filmmaking. Once he could put anything in his head up on screen, he could not resist drawing attention to it, to the detriment of the story. The characters are lost in epic set pieces. What is worse, the more you look at the details, the less credibile they seem, be they ever so well crafted. In contrast, the LotR series was stuffed to the gills with incredible sets, props and effects, but Peter Jackson uses them with restraint. Jackson had a way of alternating between huge and intimate scenes that somehow made the characters expand to epic scale. This may have been what Lucas was aiming at. EP I - III actually try to tell a rather interesting, somber story, but it is a story that requires a focus on the actors. People didn't take to Hayden Christensen's uncharismatic Anakin, but his portrayal of Anakin as a shallow and somewhat spoiled was entirely right. It's just that story wasn't told coherently enough to make its point: evil comes from people trying to do the right thing in a narrow minded way. The story desperately needed to connect the dark glamour of Darth Vader to Anakin's stubborn willfulness.
I don't want to be too down on the later Lucas movies; I got my ticket's worth of entertainment. But I have zero desire to see them a second time.
When you look at EP I through III, they are very different movies than EP IV, much more ponderous. In EP IV the story drags you forward when you'd like another second to look at the details. In later Lucas movies you keep wishing the story would get a move on. Things would have been different if Lucas had been constrained to use the same budget and technology he had for EP IV.
I do take my hat off to Lucas though, for encouraging f
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Yet in games, gamers do the same (Score:3, Interesting)
Whenever someone mods a game, you are doing exactly what George Lucas did, changing the "story" to what you thinks work better.
NWN2 is a prudish game with no nudity, that was a morallity decision by the creators, so are people who mod the game for nudity/sexy altering the original true vision?
There is also demand for more content, especialy romance/interaction type content. This again is then going against the original work. If Obsidian released a patch that suddenly allowed same sex romances to occur wou
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I think the big problem people have is he changed everything, then everyone said it's worse, and then he said "Fuck you, I'm the decider." And that was that. Plus, it IS worse. If he made GOOD decisions rather than BAD, there would be a different discussion. Take Tchakovsky's Romeo and Juliet piece: He reworked it 10 years later, and since it was BETTER, people chose the BETTER one as the definitive ve
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Whenever someone mods a game, you are doing exactly what George Lucas did, changing the "story" to what you thinks work better.
Actually most mods I've played are either epilogues or prologues, or involve completely different characters, or in a completely different setting. No one releases a mod that is a mere "tweak" of the main storyline. Or if they do, they aren't very popular. And by tweak I mean storyline tweak, not gameplay tweak.
All I can say (Score:1, Troll)
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Remake Episode One - THAT should be the challenge (Score:3, Insightful)
George should commission someone to totally recut and / or remake The Phantom Menace. Rather than expand the universe, perfect that first film. Amid some rather pretty scenery and effect, there are soooooo many cringe-worthy performances and moments.
Think The Phantom Edit - only more radical.
And for the love of The Force, get Portman to re-loop her lines.
Or perhaps he should turn over ALL the raw footage for Revenge of the Sith so a real editor can cut that film together properly. Let's all fire up FinalCutPro and have at it!
Sorry Ben - you're a damn good sound designer and a Friend of George, but ... your editing powers are WEAK old man.
Re:Remake Episode One - THAT should be the challen (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Remake Episode One - THAT should be the challen (Score:2)
I think it took out about 25 minutes of the film however it was a significant improvement on the original and a lot more watchable
They did the same with the second and removed that love scene in the middle (frankly I think cinema's should have put subtitles advertising use of the bathroom or the concession stand during that scene as they used to in intermissions)
Indeed, that's The Phantom Edit ... (Score:2)
... to which I referred in my original post. It's not so bad ... but could be so much better if taken from the original elements.
For more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_Edit [wikipedia.org]
Re:Remake Episode One - THAT should be the challen (Score:1)
Good entry (Score:1)
Episode 7: Revenge of the Geeks (Score:2, Funny)
"Noooo, it's not true! I'll never work for you."
This is old but still good (Score:2)
Finally - the Star Wars fad is fading out (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember when Star Wars was fun and even a little cool? Me too - it was 1983 and I was 7.
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not particularly interested (Score:1)
2007 -- not enough time it is! (Score:1)
I have a friend who's working on a SWFF right now (in which i have a small part), and the amount of work -- synchronizing people's schedules, getting people for cast and crew, yadda, rendering (on legit software, no less), scraping up the cashish for ... everything ... it all adds up and it takes time. For my friend's film, we're looking at a release date of January 2009.
Of course, my friend is pl
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Darren, the guy behind this, is playing the film totally straight; it's supposed to slot in as a real SW film, albeit with crappy fan actors (guilty as charged) and a microscopic budget.
Star Wars Cops (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWr6ec2zEyE [youtube.com]
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It came out ten freaking years ago, and it already won in the FanFilms series (the first one, in 2002).
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If you define 'under a rock' as Argentina, then yes. It feels pretty much the same also.
IMPS (Score:3, Informative)
Though, having read a little bit, it sounds like it can't be entered as it is being done as a serious work, rather than a parody. I realize that Lucas technically needs to protect his franchise, but that just seems over the top; let the fans do your marketing for you, and pat them on the head once in a while, it won't hurt you that much.
Remind me, guys ... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Sure, he was successful, but the last 3 movies sucked. They were devoid 'cinematic genius' and did little more than provide ILM an interesting demo reel. You can't dismiss people's opinions of Ge
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No. The hatred is still strong in this one.
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You are exactly correct on this one. My cousins, who are between ages 6 and 13, LOVE the new trilogy. My uncle (their father) got them all 6 movies, and I asked them which is their favorite, since I was curious what someone would say, unexposed to fanboyism on the net and 30 years of folklore on the subject. They ALL said Episode 1. I like the new trilogy, but I was shocked at
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Yes, but... Jar Jar Binks makes the Ewoks look like fucking SHAFT!
Please - nobody enter (Score:2)
Blow away your peers (Score:1)
I sense a great disturbance in the force (Score:1)
Complaints for the sake of complaining... (Score:2)
Seriously, for a forum that is filled with anti-copyright people who scream at the top of their lungs every time somebody even mentions protecting intellectual rights, this just takes the cake. George Lucas has not only moved to encourage and develop the amateur film community, but has pretty much given them carte blanche to use his own Star Wars intellectual property to do it (up to what would be a PG rating), and people are complaining.
If you