Here for the Fandoms

Once again, I have definitely totally finished my Hobbit edit, for real.  I found a more sophisticated way to edit the audio, and that lead me to another round of tightening up.  I now have my preferred Theatrical Edition (2:42), a richer Extended Edition (3:45), and a brisk Ludicrous Edition (2:10).  Keep in mind that the credits are 13 minutes long, so playback is considerably shorter.

My edits refocus three sprawling films by:

-Focusing on Bilbo’s story, neither slavish to the book nor indulgent of Jackson’s additions. -Cutting the goofiness, gore and dread for a consistent tone balancing the book’s exuberance and the sequel films’ grit. -Unifying the narrative with fewer flashbacks, cross-cuts, establishing and reaction shots. -Closing dozens of plot holes, inconsistencies, implausibilities and redundancies. -Mining all three Extended Editions for character moments and visual storytelling.

I reviewed seven other fan edits before and during my process, and took bits and pieces from all of them, most notably Dustin Lee’s.  My edits are particularly lean on Bard–now just a roguish archer–and Thorin, whose corruption is more natural and human.  Unlike most other edits, I kept Gandalf’s side quest and Thorin’s beef with Azog (except in the Ludicrous Edition).

My innovations include a new Misty Mountains montage, a simple, timeline-coherent warg chase to Beorn’s house, having Azog’s army march over the hill rather than explode out of the ground, and a much clearer climax where Gandalf realizes that Ravenhill is a trap, sending Bilbo through the battle to try to help his friends.  For the Extended Edition, I have a hand-masked background replacement for a peaceful reception at Rivendell, the origin of “Oakenshield” overlaid on Thorin’s interrogation by the Great Goblin, and a tense cat and mouse game through Erebor without the nutty forge sequence. 

There are many other incidental–but painstaking–edits morphing one shot into another, color correcting Beorn (who went from black to brown between movies), flipping shots, retiming, changing subtitles, etc.  There are several new transitions I’m proud of, but I am even happier with the twenty or so dialog scenes subtly re-cut to move the story along.

Thanks to this post for motivating me to keep making my art and not worry too much about pearl-clutchers who deliberately seek out bad faith ways to misread shit and

Introducing Vox Machina Lovebots! A discord server for fans of The Legend of Vox Machina (as well as the original Vox Machina campaign)!

This is a place to talk about the show without getting spoiled, make new friends, share content, among other things!

Here’s a post where I ask the question: “Who at Disney thought this was a good idea and signed off on it?” Sorry, this might get a bit long lol!

Today, I received a book I ordered called “The Art and Making of Artemis Fowl”, as one can tell from the title, it’s one of those sorts of books that documents the production of a particular film. I was already going to make a post about little tidbits in this book that (unintentionally) reveals a bit about the messy production of the Artemis Fowl movie. 

However, I became sidetracked by a particular page in the book that left me a bit baffled, and I decided that it warranted its own post. The two images here of both taken from page 154 of the book, where hair and makeup designer Carol Hemming writes about the work she did on the movie. This section does happen to touch on some of the, eh, cosmetic changes made to the characters, and some of the comments come across as odd to me at the very least, to problematic at worst, depending on how you interpret it. There’s a lot to unpack here, I feel!

In the first section, we’re already off to bad start in the first sentence with the use of “exotic” to describe the diverse cast of the movie. Carol goes on to explain that the reason they gave Butler white hair and blue eyes was because of the remains of “Cheddar Man”, a fossil of an ancient man found in England. However, a lot of the details given are incorrect when I looked into this myself. For one, Cheddar Man was not a 100,000 year old fossil, but instead more like 10,000 years old, so off by a magnitude of 10 times there! Secondly, from what I read, the scientists believe that Cheddar Man likely had dark skin, dark curly hair, and green eyes, though they can’t be certain, of course, with how old the sample is. So, using that as justification to give Butler white-blond hair and unnaturally saturated, bright blue eyes is certainly an interesting Choice™ they made. 

Frankly, I have always thought that if they wanted to make Butler black that they should have full embraced Nonso’s natural features, including his black hair and brown eyes. Altering his appearance in the way they did perpetuates that trope of giving POC characters more euro-centric features to “stand out” more. I mean, think of all the fictional media out there with dark skinned characters that have blond/silver hair or where asian characters are often given random streaks of bright hair dye. Of course, those design decisions aren’t necessarily offensive on their own, but one has to make sure they’re being mindful of their reasoning behind things, ya know? At the very least, they could have be more subtle, they changed Tamara Smart’s (Juliet’s actress) hair to be blond and it didn’t come off as unnatural, although if it were me I would have left her hair as its natural color too!

This second part is what really got under my skin, though. Carol says that in her research that she saw there was a wide variety of depictions of fairy folk in terms of skin tone and eye color, but that she tried to “show similarities between Artemis and Holly” and that they “share a subtle similarity of look that hints at a shared beauty and intelligence.” Um, let me know if I’m reading too far into this, but this makes it sounds like they felt the need to make Holly white, and appear very similarly to Artemis, so that they would relate to each other more? Did she have to look white to be seen as beautiful and intelligent? They already wrote in that odd addition to the story of them bonding over shared father related trauma, did they also need to look like to get along?

It seems she’s trying to say they wanted to show how the fairy people are very much like humans and have many similar traits and behaviors, but why does that have to involve making the fairies appear like Europeans? I don’t know, this whole part is very weird to me, especially with how this was a change from the novel and how Carol Hemming acknowledges that Celtic depictions of fairies can have a large range of diversity. But somehow, Artemis and Holly both being white is diverse according to her statement? Maybe it’s just so poorly worded that it sounds bad?

What do yall think of this? Maybe I’m over thinking a bit over here, but something just seems off with the reasoning given for their design decisions! There might be someone more informed than I am on these sort of issues that could share their thoughts!

Transcription of the images below the cut for those who need/want it:

I had this dream... a month ago? I don't remember what kind of dream it was, but I remember Lotor in this outfit. He was like superhero.. emperor and God or something in a same time in golden armour with some Egyptian details.

And I remember how people call him "Fire hawk".

This one I actually found myself!

And I don’t think that this counts, but it still has the beautiful “Ah, fuck” vibes the rest of the post does:

And let’s not forget the cursed “Supernatural GIF Perfectly Describes 2020″ one:

Read the paper here

YEAH

the age range of the 100 participants was stated to be (mean=26.88 years; SD=9.11; range: from 18 to 71 years; 61 females)