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I recently repaired my parents old Bell & Howell Super 8mm Projector. Also cleaned and scanned the now 50 year old films. During that time I had purchased a number of 8mm and Super 8 films to practice cleaning, splicing, and initially running through the projector to test it. Following my mother's 100th birthday open house this past Saturday I gave her many grandkids a picture show of their parents as kids on the projector. Most of them have never watched a film on a projector so it in itself was a huge treat. But one extra step I took was to take a Super 8mm b&w 10 min short of the 1942 The Spoilers film (starring: Marlene Dietrich, Randolph Scott, and John Wayne) I had found in a lot of film and digitize it. I also purchased the full version the movie on a vhs and digitized that, then stacking the two digitized versions in Adobe Premiere Pro edited and saved an mp4 sound version matching the Super 8 film. Using the mp4 I typed out a script and noted sound effects, then sent copies of the mp4 short film (sound, silent, and full versions) to select brothers and sisters to practice their parts and prepare for the show. During movie night we had slap sticks to imitate the sound of punches in the fight scene, sound boards for busting furniture, glass jars with broken glass for mirror and windows shattering, the train bells, and Hmm'ed the music (my brother accidentally left the kazoos in Atlanta) while we acted out the sound portions of the silent Super 8 film as it played. There are only maybe 5 minutes of dialog in the 10 minute short film. For audience participation I assigned a phrase for 8 of the (two dozen) grand children who volunteered (each with their own specific phrase) to repeat during the bar and fight scenes in the movie, to mimic the sound of the crowd in the movie. Omg! It was a blast. Has anyone done this?
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Joe,
That sounds like an amazing live presentation. You should take it on tour!
I've sound striped many films that were released only in silent versions and added the sync audio from DVDs & Blu-rays, but friends and I (long ago) did a screening where we improvised dialogue to old Republic serials. You put a lot more work into your show than we did.
Congratulations on your mom's centenary! -
I've done the same thing in reverse. I have revised digital copies of movies to digests/cutdowns. Musicals are well suited to this treatment.Originally posted by Douglas Meltzer View Post
Another thing you can do with foreign films is to revise the subtitles to insert funny lines into the film. You can take film like The Longest Day which a lot of German dialogue and create you own What's Up Tiger Lily? *
You can download the SRT files for many films. The SRT file is plain text with timestamps and associated dialogue. Here is a sample from the subtitle file for Tenet:
22
00:03:20,274 --> 00:03:22,443
We live in a twilight world.
23
00:03:22,510 --> 00:03:24,479
And there are
no friends at dusk.
Of course the ultimate revision is the Fan Edit of films. You don't like the "revised" version of Star Wars? Watch the Fan Edit version. You didn't like Water World? You will love the Fan Edit!
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What's Up, Tiger Lily? is a 1966 American comedy film directed by Woody Allen in his feature-length directorial debut.
Allen took footage from a Japanese spy film, International Secret Police: Key of Keys (1965), and overdubbed it with completely original dialogue that had nothing to do with the plot of the original film.[2] He both put in new scenes and rearranged the order of existing scenes, producing a one-hour movie from the 93 minutes of the original film. He completely changed the tone of the film from a James Bond clone into a comedy about the search for the world's best egg salad recipe.Comment
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