Trailers featuring footage that does not appear in the film they're promoting

[Carl Looper]

One could remake the Harryhausen movies, they are popular folk tales and myths after all, but to replace the effects in the original movies is crazy -- those movies are only famous now BECAUSE of Harryhausen's stop-motion effects -- Harryhausen is the real star of those movies!

 

For sure.

 

Restoration of old films need to respect the old films (in lots of difficult ways).

 

But if one has a problem with the attributes of old films (ie. those that belong to the original film), then one should avoid getting involved in restoration, and make a new film instead, using whatever techniques one considers appropriate - be they one's that extend older methods, completely replace them, or even devotionally repeat them.

 

I've been working off and on, on the technical design of various effects for a short film (on film), where I'll be using traditional analog methods to achieve the effects. Conceptually the work is really easy. But in practice it's incredibly difficult - compared to how one would otherwise do it digitally. It's to do with the physical handling of film in a contact printer and an optical printer - getting mattes to co-operate with each other, etc.

 

I run into this problem where I know, due to various predictable vagaries, that the result could easily have this or that side effect (compared to digital methods) and I ask myself - why go to all the trouble of producing a certain effect by analog means, if it's going to have this or that side effect - and what's more - cost me such a huge amount of effort in the process. And I have no answer to such - so I end up putting the project aside for a while.

 

But I keep coming back to it. It's all about a certain type of admiration for pioneering work - not so much in terms of what the pioneers might have preferred to achieve (such as seamless compositing) but what they actually achieved in practice, ie. intentionally or otherwise. There is a certain earthy magic to it, as distinct from an idealised version of such. Would just love to explore that in various ways - to exploit those methods - in practice - ie. rather than just simulating such (which I otherwise do when designing how I'll do it).

 

C

Edited February 8, 2016 by Carl Looper

[George Ebersole]

 

The main reason anyone rewatches those old Harryhausen movies is for Harryhausen's stop-motion effects, not the acting or directing.

That's true now, but when I was growing up watching that stuff you watched it for the fantasy. Stop motion was the best SFX technique at the time for those particular scenes, so it was used ... verse TOHO's studios "suitmation".

 

Today, sure, you watch them to revel in Harryhausen's mastery of the technique. Which I think makes it a more interesting "what if" had Harryhausen had a workstation in his garage verse his makeshift studio.

[George Ebersole]

Must disagree with you there. Lucas could afford to never work again after 'Star Wars' and what he chooses to do with his own time is his affair. Good on him if he chose to spend more time raising his kids. I admire him for that.

*shrug*

 

I think the real issue is the quality of product that was produced with the "Vader as a young man" films. The first couple of movies from the 1970s have cross generational market appeal, and that's how they were marketed and presented, and were big successes.

 

Then the films dealing with Vader's backstory were clearly aimed at children, but hoping to create a theatrical experience for parents who saw the first films so they could experience the newer films with their kids. Only the newer films weren't that good because of the shift in demographic emphasis; i.e. kids.

 

That's a bait and switch. And the core message is more of Hollywood's fetish with nazis, or rather fear thereof...only in space. Oh well. I guess it's why I never took up those offers to work at ILM / LF, for as much as I admired the artistry, I really didn't "love the movies" like everyone else.

 

Imagine if Ridley Scott, a film maker I really admire, decided to go back and tweak ... "Kingdom of Heaven", or if Francis Ford Coppola decided to add CGI or digital inserts to the Godfather films or any of the other splendid work he's done. What would you think of that? That sort of dovetails with the link for that video of the SW remakes.

[George Ebersole]

Re. Harryhausen

 

Replacing Harryhausen's stop motion work ???

 

That's completely ridiculous.

 

There's a philosophical riddle which asks the question: if forced to choose between the destruction of Newton's Principia, or Plato's Republic (a Sophies choice), which would one choose?

 

The answer is the destruction of Newton's Principia.

 

Why?

 

*snip*

 

No it isn't.

 

I think the issue is that Harryhausen's work was contracted as work to help support and add to the story that the studio and director wanted to make.

 

Harryhausen, at the times those films were made, didn't get top billing and wasn't the star. His art was, but only in the context of dazzleing the audience with Dragons, Cyclopses (cyclopsi?), undead skeletons and so forth.

 

Again, sure now you watch those films to soak in his cinematic skill, but ideally you're watching the movie more for just his presence as a SFX artist, but also because you like the story.

 

I think his one comment in the documentaries on the DVDs is that, in his opinion, it was not prudent to make the effect too real when making his kind of effects, because then you detract from the idea that what you're watching is a fantasy. The other school of thought I've heard from ILM and Apogee both is that the best SFX are the ones you can't notice.

 

What do you think of that?

[Satsuki Murashige]

Well, yeah. The prequels were complete crap, and even a lot of people I know who worked on them will admit that. There were a lot of rather unhappy ILM people at the time, despite the regular paychecks.

[Phil Rhodes]

I take a rather cautious view on this whole subject.

 

Much of the work that was done on the original Star Wars movies is quite supportable. There were explosions with terrible blue fringing, matte lines, and other egregious problems which would have been seen as faults in the original and were not corrected because they could not be. I don't think there are any sensible arguments against fixing this stuff if someone wants to do it.

 

Whether that view can reasonably be related to something like Harryhausen's skeletons is another matter. The original Star Wars looked quite good, certainly good enough, in the most part, not to seriously distract modern audiences. The skeletons look very clearly like stop motion and, even if we consider that look to be story-appropriate for a collection of reanimated bones, they look sufficiently primitive that modern audiences may be seriously distracted from enjoyment of the film as a result. It's an interesting question as to whether it is therefore legitimate to rework them.

 

Personally I think the best answer is less to do with an objective quality assessment than it is to do with the historical context. People should see Harryhausen's chattery stopmo skeletons because they're of historical interest, not because they make it a good film. They don't. The question is therefore one of whether we approach the film as a historical document, or as a piece of entertainment.

 

It was always intended to be a piece of entertainment.

 

P

[George Ebersole]

I take a rather cautious view on this whole subject.

 

Much of the work that was done on the original Star Wars movies is quite supportable. There were explosions with terrible blue fringing, matte lines, and other egregious problems which would have been seen as faults in the original and were not corrected because they could not be. I don't think there are any sensible arguments against fixing this stuff if someone wants to do it.

 

Whether that view can reasonably be related to something like Harryhausen's skeletons is another matter. The original Star Wars looked quite good, certainly good enough, in the most part, not to seriously distract modern audiences. The skeletons look very clearly like stop motion and, even if we consider that look to be story-appropriate for a collection of reanimated bones, they look sufficiently primitive that modern audiences may be seriously distracted from enjoyment of the film as a result. It's an interesting question as to whether it is therefore legitimate to rework them.

 

Personally I think the best answer is less to do with an objective quality assessment than it is to do with the historical context. People should see Harryhausen's chattery stopmo skeletons because they're of historical interest, not because they make it a good film. They don't. The question is therefore one of whether we approach the film as a historical document, or as a piece of entertainment.

 

It was always intended to be a piece of entertainment.

 

P

Yeah, that was kind of my point. The film as initially released wasn't a showcase of Ray Harryhausen as such, but the seqjuences to add to the story. You went to see the stop motion stuff because it showed you monsters and things that don't exist. Not because Ray Harryhausen was a household name and you wanted to see what his latest master piece was.

 

But this thread started out as footage in trailers dropped from final releases. Sorry if I hijacked the thread--purely unintentional. If someone wants to start a new thread dedicated to this subtopic, then I'll gladly chime in there, otherwise I think I've had my say.

[Carl Looper]

Today, sure, you watch them to revel in Harryhausen's mastery of the technique.

 

Yes, exactly.

[Carl Looper]

We should really make a distinction here between restoration projects and new films.

 

It probably goes without saying that when doing a remake of some film (some story) one can argue for whatever techniques one deems appropriate - be it stop motion, CGI, or whatever.

 

But in a restoration project the direction that arguments will take are really quite different. For example, in a restoration of any films featured Harryhausen's special effects work, anyone arguing that Harryhausen's effects work should be replaced with updated effects, will be laughed out of the room.

 

Understanding why should not be all that difficult.

 

C

[George Ebersole]

Well, I guess I haven't had all of my say as yet. You can laugh at me all you want, I won't leave until you understand that I'm not downplaying his skill as a miniatures stop-motion grandmaster, which he clearly has been to me, to you, to most everyone here and the world over.

 

What I've attempted to say in previous replies is that if you want to keep such a film interesting for newer generations who have not seen it before, then, if you're going to "upgrade" a film, then it might be worth considering to see how an exact CGI double of the dragon, the cyclops, skeletons and everything else, might look.

 

"Journey to the Center of the Earth", "Jason and the Argonauts", "7th Voyage of Sinbad", "Gullivers Travels", "Mysterious Island" ... look, I love them all. I saw them when I was kid, and have them on DVD, and treasure them.

 

But younger audiences might (not that they WILL or ARE) be more impatient with SFX that look dated or unspectacular.

 

And note, I didn't say to take Harryhausen's name off the film either.

[Carl Looper]

The restoration of special effects is a really difficult area. It is typically special effects where one will have the hardest time determining an appropriate direction. The history of special effects is one where it is clear to see an ongoing modernist approach to such, be it by incremental evolutionary changes, or revolutionary ones. An ongoing attempt to "improve" the special effect, typically couched in terms of believeablity or suspendability (of disbelief).

 

Insofar as the effect is aimed at something that is not otherwise visible, except through the effect, there is an inherent ambiguity regarding what exactly the artists/technicians etc. were otherwise aiming at with an effect. In many ways it is only the effect itself which becomes the unambiguous expression of what was otherwise intended - even if it is "faulty" with respect to what was really intended.

 

Now one could try and reconstruct what was "really" intended, rather than what was achieved. But how? One approach is to look at the historical record following a given film, and note the inherent modernism that takes place. One can argue that the newer techniques represent that which the older techniques were trying to achieve - but at the time, could not. That's certainly one way of determining what was intended.

 

But one can counter-argue that had the filmmakers themselves, acquired newer techniques, they would have simply made a new film using such techniques.

 

And contemporary modernists should do the same - make a new film rather than "repair" old films. The world of restoration is a very different world. The "historical interest" in older films is not just that which belongs to some modernist going through the archive looking for how to replace what they find there (or a postmodernist looking for how to recycle what is there) - it also belongs to those who actually enjoy history, ie. that which actually did take place (to the extent we can reconstruct such), as distinct from what might have otherwise taken place had newer methods been employed.

 

History is that which there to be found in the historical record. Restoration is about removing the layers of arbitrary grime that have accumulated in the interim period, so that one might better appreciate that history. It's not modernism which is capable of doing this because modernism has no real interest in history. It treats history as a rubbish bin. And post-modernism is no better. It treats history as a recycling bin.

 

C

Edited February 9, 2016 by Carl Looper

[David Mullen ASC]

One problem for restorers is that the film stocks used to finish the effects to (I'm looking at you, CRI's) have aged faster than the surrounding camera originals, so if a restorer wants to work from the original and not b&w separations, then the effects shots now match the surrounding footage less-well than the did originally.

 

Luckily this was not a problem for a lot of "Space: 1999" since many space shots were not duped but involved in-camera double-exposures, but some of the laser bolt shots look worse now because they were copied to CRI stock.

 

The original "Star Wars" used CRI for their fades, dissolves, and wipes, plus many laser bolts and light saber shots, which faded much worse than the camera negative shots or the vfx shots finished to a dupe negative. This is one reason why the 1997 restoration started out by redoing most of those transitions (they didn't do them digitally, they redid them in an optical printer when they could find the camera negative originals for the dupes.) That aspect of the restoration was less controversial than the replacement of finished vfx shots with CGI.

[Carl Looper]

Looking at medieval art one could argue that what they are trying to achieve in certain paintings, such as the one below, is what the Renaissance would eventually achieve - a more unified sense of perspective. We could, on the basis of this position, "repair" this painting by reworking it's geometry to better fit a contemporary notion of perspective (or even a Renaissance sense of perspective).

 

But we don't do that. We don't take this painting down off the wall and replace it with a "better" version of such. What we do, if we do anything, is give the work a good clean. Much of such cleaning actually involves removing all the stupid "fixes" that might have been done to it in the interim period.

 

Why?

 

Because we (as an audience or artist alike) might actually be interested in history. We might actually enjoy this painting for what it might reveal of the way people thought at the time the painting was made. We might actually enjoy it's "clumsy" use of perspective. I know I certainly do. It has a particularly potent quality to it.

 

 

 

[Patrick Cooper]

 

Thanks David. Yes, in the promo photo (I must have seen it in a magazine at the time as well) the lizards were quite prominent, rearing up like a horse might. There were two of them from memory, side by side, each carrying a storm trooper. Yes, I guess the corresponding shot(s) in the film must have ended up on the cutting room floor.

 

C

Somewhere I do have a photo (likely in a magazine stashed some place) of a stormtrooper sitting on a giant green lizard (complete with saddle) from the original 1977 SW film. In this photo, the lizard wasn't rearing up or anything - it was just standing there. It was a full body shot (tightly framed) and you could see a lot of detail in the lizard. And to be honest, it looked pretty damn impressive. Certainly realistic. However, as has been noted here, I'm betting that it's movements may not have been all that good. Oh well it looked great in stills.

 

By the way, Ive thought of another example of a misleading trailer. However, on this occasion, it's not a case of footage not appearing in the finished film. It's about manipulating a shot so that it appears differently to what you see in the film. The movie is one of those alien Predator films (one of the relatively recent ones.) As people who have seen these films will know, the Predators use some kind of laser sights to aim precisely at the targets they're hunting. In the trailer, there is a shot where a small group of humans are greeted with a huge number of laser sights sweeping all over them, suggesting a large number of Predators are aiming their weapons at them. I admit that I haven't seen the movie but people who have seen it say that this same shot has less than a few laser sights trained on the people (perhaps only one or two beams of light.) And consequently, the level of threat is decreased. Very deceptive trailer indeed.

[George Ebersole]

Restoration verse upgrading or attempting to keep the film contemporary.

 

You don't want to lose the original work, and I wouldn't advocate wiping out a version of a film in favor of a new rendering of the same film, but with new effects shots. I advocate keeping the original, but perhaps upgrading the effects for a newer version that could be shown to keep interest in the property. That's what was done with the 1960's Star Trek television show. It's success, or lack of it, is a personal decision for the viewer.

 

Restoring say something like the silent era "Metropolis" or "Thief of Baghdad" might require reconstructing damaged frames with information from surrounding frames run through a work station. But in doing so I would never advocate dropping in CGI shots of airships and airplanes for the model shots in Metropolis, nor a CGI black and white tinted dragon for Douglas's version of "Thief of Baghdad". Those shots work, and adding technology that doesn't blend with the era and wouldn't add any value to the film.

 

With something like "Mysterious Island", it might be worth considering replacing things like the Dodo or the giant crab and bee with CGI facsimilies in order to adorn the film, not really take away from it. You don't want to replace the shots with different shots, but try to improve on the work that's already there to see if the new technology can be blended to look as if it were part of the original production, but to smooth out the inherit jerkiness in stop motion.

 

But never would you then burry, burn, destroy or otherwise shelve and forget Harryhausen's work. You want to adorn it. You want newer generations to marvel at it, improve it, then perhaps show how it originally looked, then explain that this hard working artists originally did it all by hand.

 

It may be a failed effort to do so. Kids and teens may be forgiving of stop motion from the 50s and 60s. I wasn't, but I still enjoyed the films and the fantasy they presented, but that's just because I have pretty high standards for stuff.

 

I hope that clarifies my position. Sorry for losing my cool earlier.

[Carl Looper]

There is quite a lot of powerful and interesting work which will create a new work through transformations of older work.

 

But the goal in many cases (or the best cases) is not to "improve" the older work (as if to replace or upgrade such, as if to release version x.y) but to amplify aspects of the older work which may not be so obvious in the work as previously given. For example, a feminist transform on some Hitchcock work might reveal specific sexual undertones that one might have otherwise ignored or glossed over. There are works that deconstruct an older work, be it for specific critical/academic purposes, and/or otherwise difficult to describe creative reasons.

 

Picasso did a very large series of paintings which were transforms on Velasquez's Las Meninas.

 

Francis Bacon took a Velasquez painting of the pope, and transformed it in a number of different ways.

 

 

Edited February 10, 2016 by Carl Looper

[George Ebersole]

There is quite a lot of powerful and interesting work which will create a new work through transformations of older work.

 

But the goal in many cases (or the best cases) is not to "improve" the older work (as if to replace or upgrade such, as if to release version x.y) but to amplify aspects of the older work which may not be so obvious in the work as previously given. *snip*

 

Can you give a filmic example?

[Carl Looper]

 

Can you give a filmic example?

 

This is a good one. It looks a lot better on film. Was done on an optical printer.

 

You tube clips from the work in 3 parts:

 

 

 

Notes.

http://sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/alone_life_wastes_andy_hardy/

http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2000/02/wrinkles-in-time/

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0157304/

https://orbismediologicus.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/found-footage-films-and-the-optical-unconscious/

Edited February 16, 2016 by Carl Looper

[George Ebersole]

Well, if you say so. To me that's just Warhol being Warhol again. Also it doesn't seem to add any additional meaning to the shot that wasn't already there in the first place.

 

I thought there might be something more significant. But we're getting off topic from trailer footage no in final prints.

[Carl Looper]

Well, if you say so. To me that's just Warhol being Warhol again. Also it doesn't seem to add any additional meaning to the shot that wasn't already there in the first place.

 

I thought there might be something more significant. But we're getting off topic from trailer footage no in final prints.

 

Well, it's not Warhol. But even if it was - what difference would that make?

 

Warhols Marilyn Monroe screen prints would be another good example of transforming something into something else.

 

In the example posted part of the power of it is in the idea that it amplifies what is already there in the source film, ie. in the first place - that there is an incestuous relationship going on between the character played by Mickey Rooney, and the character's mother. And that this plays off against the idea that such can't possibly be what the source film was otherwise suggesting. It is the realm of unconscious or semi-conscious thoughts that are being explored.

 

But yes, we've certainly veered off from the topic.

 

C

Edited February 17, 2016 by Carl Looper