Shrek Retold https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM70TROZQsI is a similar fan-made reproduction, but it's way more polished. The movie is split into roughly 1min sections, with each one done by a different creator. The quality is all over the place, in a hilarious way. One minute it's produced by a professional animator nailing the scenes, then the next minute it's people goofing around in their backyard.
I love the differences between those three movies (The Free Movie, Shrek Retold and Star Wars Uncut).
Star Wars really looks like a work of love. Shrek looks like a work of love that tries it's best to not take itself seriously. Free Movie looks like a bizarre troll post.
While this is coherent with each movie's tone itself, and perhaps with the time each "demaster" was made (I don't know, I didn't check), I feel like this is most coherent with how each movie is viewed by the community:
- Star Wars is a beloved movie, with a huge honest fan base. Thus, it was remade with love and attention to detail.
- Shrek is a beloved movie, but doesn't take itself seriously in the first place, and is also a meme. Thus it was remade with love, but trying hard to look like it's a troll.
- Bee Movie is mainly a meme, isn't AFAIK a beloved movie, and its fan base is mostly made of memers and trolls. Thus it was low-effortly remade at this non-flattering image.
Bee movie has more of a cult fanbase at best. It's still Seinfeld, and the jokes aged surprisingly well.
But there's only so far you can get with a story of a bee breaking out of his natural programming,followed by a bee-human romance, followed by said bee suing humanity for stealing bee-kind's honey. You can't even truly explain the plot without breaking it down into 3 episodes.
It's a surprisingly good benchmark to ask "is it better than Bee movie" when measuring other Dreamworks movies against themselves.
You forgot the part where the bees then sit around and do nothing after getting all their honey back. It's basically a diatribe against universal basic income, since without the incentive to slave away for the rest of their lives, their lives become meaningless.
> Star Wars is a beloved movie, with a huge honest fan base. Thus, it was remade with love and attention to detail.
Agreed. Star Wars Uncut exists because devotees wanted to set the record straight regarding controversial changes in later versions, and their efforts were laudable. Still, the image and sound quality cannot match the latest, greatest studio versions, so watching Uncut versions on the newest home theatre gear means accepting the warts and all.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's remaster was also a labour of love but with a different purpose (image clarity and upscaling):
I believe you are confusing Star Wars Uncut with Star Wars Despecialized Edition. Image and sound quality are far, far away from the first thing I would point out when distinguishing Uncut from the studio masters.
Similar is "South Park Reanimated: The List" [1]. From the description:
> 6 years, 175 animators, 260 unique scenes, 1 copyright dispute, and a lot of love-- we are proud to finally present the South Park Reanimated Project! We are so grateful for everyone who participated and made this such an amazing recreation. We hope you enjoy!
I drew a few frames in this, but it was a real shame to see how little quality control there was in the final cut. Makes it kind of unwatchable.
Progress near the end was really fast, as lots of people had caught on and were racing to get as many frames in as possible.
I really don't think this concept has been worn out yet, and someone could make their own version of this with a small review step and then we'd get some fun, actually watchable hand-drawn movies :)
You’re right, I can’t believe they didn’t cut frames that are totally unrelated, there so many left in that are just scribbles or text.
I just tried making some frames for the dune remake. The editor is so hard to use. I can only draw a one pixel line with no smoothing. It’s really laggy/glitchy. I can barely even make out what the original frame is because it’s in grayscale with an overlay. I got one frame that could have been a landscape of snow and rocks, or it could have been sand dunes, or water. I have no idea, it was just gray and white blobs.
I get that they are going for a retro style, but even MS paint had different size brushes.
It’s such a cool idea, I wish the tooling was better.
From a few moments of watching, it seems like over half the crowd-sourced frames are just trolling and not actually a representation of the original film. I guess that kind of adds to the aesthetic, but I'm a little surprised they kept those troll frames...
Yeah I agree, there should be a voting system that can kick out bogus frames and have someone remake them, would be really interesting to see what it’d look like if everyone was trying to recreate it. Kind of like rotoscoping I suppose. As it is, there’s just a ton of discontinuity because of the troll frames.
I skipped to a random spot, and lasted about 5 seconds. Two drawings of dicks, 50% scribbles, and a couple frames of just the word PENIS. Yes, this is truly a noteworthy effort.
I’m as equally curious as you, just on the other side of the horseshoe.
Same here. If you skip to a random part of the movie, and move frame by frame, it becomes a game of "spot the penis". Just one or two can be "tolerated", but we're far from that here, so ... My opinion is that it does not really belong in HN
> My opinion is that it does not really belong in HN
It's a fascinating tech/social experiment. It belongs on HN because it was done and the outcome is what it is.
If you actually want to watch the Bee Movie then watch the original. I doubt generating a watchable alternative was behind anyone's motivation in this.
A penis drawing isn't something that's needed, it's something that happens. Feel free to rail against them in a Kanute-like manner, but learning to cock an eyebrow and say "yeah, that figures" can be self-preserving.
For what it's worth I too prefer the plausible deniability of Georgia O'Keefe's outrageous lies. It's a more sensible chuckle.
I can understand the negativity because this only appeals to specific sensibilities.
I admit that it’s low brow but it hits my fascination the exact right way. To me there is something special about so many people being organized around something so mundane.
We could probably fine-tune a tiny convolutional neutral net image classifier and just hold on the last good frames for longer to cover the frames with clear trolling and nsfw images.
I think it would be subtractive. To my eye, it seems like the point of the project was to celebrate the free expression of the crowd. The lack of censorship and filtering is core to the purpose of the project. If you start filtering out individual contributions in order to more accurately reconstruct the original movie, then I don’t really get why you wouldn’t just pirate the movie.
Back when I was first playing around with AI, I built a website where people could upload fine tuned GlowTTS and Tacotron2 text to speech model weights.
One of the first things users did was to emit the entire transcript of the Bee Movie:
I never watched or read the series but my wife was watching it (last week actually), I passed by and saw a chase scene where they were shooting from their wands at each other and I made a comment like "Oh, it's Jason Bourne for kids.. now I see the appeal"
The execution is part of the art of it, like, there's a statement being made about the Internet, anonymity, and humanity here. It may not be what the artist originally set out to create with their art, which I find fascinating.
I can certainly see why many commenters here find this many dicks hard to swallow, but when I take them wholly with the rest of the work, I find they come together satisfyingly and rawly defile copyright and DRM.
