“Back when we were doing this as kids in the '80s, as far as we knew, we were alone in the world,” says Eric Zala, director of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation, a shot-for-shot remake of Steven Spielberg’s 1981 original. At the dawn of the home video boom, making anything like what Hoekstra and his friends pulled off would have been much harder. Most importantly, the shot-for-shot project was an opportunity for the group to actually learn about filmmaking now that it’s easy to try it with minimal investment. It’s a loving parody that reminds the audience that Revenge of the Sith’s more objectionable elements - the stilted dialogue, bad acting, and bizarrely misogynistic plotting - can still be fun, especially through a lo-fi lens. The result is a bad movie, but one that sends up what most Star Wars nerds already regard as a bad movie. To make the bare-bones VFX, the Knights used Microsoft PowerPoint to create starfighters, and Rebaslight, a free tool made specifically to create lightsaber effects. The entire film was shot with just a Samsung Galaxy A5. Turns out we couldn’t, but we finished it anyway.” “ Revenge of the Sith is probably our favorite Star Wars film,” Hoekstra says, “though none of us were game enough to admit it, and we thought we could basically quote the entire film at the time. They wanted to honor the franchise they adored by making their own version of their favorite movie in the series. Hoekstra and company - who’ve decided to call themselves the Knights of Renesmee, a play on the Knights of Ren from The Force Awakens and Bella Cullen’s daughter Renesmee in the Twilight saga - had just come down from a Star Wars marathon high when they decided to shoot their tribute film. On the other hand, Michael Haneke’s 2007 English-language reproduction of his 1997 German-language film Funny Games was widely regarded as an interesting experiment. Gus Van Sant was reviled in 1998 when he claimed his $60 million Psycho remake would be a shot-for-shot duplicate of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic. Like any movie, short, or even trailer, they vary wildly in quality. Directors set out to re-create every scene as faithfully as possible, with meticulous attention aimed at blocking, cadence, camera angles, and even the soundtrack. Shot-for-shot work lives a few steps deeper into the fan-film cottage industry. And it’s not uncommon that some of the best or most surprising ones develop followings of their own. As a genre, fan films exist between remixes and original work they draw heavily from established canon, but often set out to do something new. Over the last several decades, amateur and professional filmmakers have produced movies drawing on everything from Star Wars and Star Trek to Venom and Power Ranger s to show their devotion to the properties they love. And the shot-for-shot remake, which aims to painstakingly re-create beloved scenes and even entire movies, is enjoying a quiet yet extended moment in the sun, as both the purest expression of love for a nerdy property and one of the best ways to learn filmcraft.įan filmmaking is a huge and hallowed corner of fandom. Thanks to the proliferation of accessible, affordable gear and software, low-budget fan films have exploded on platforms like YouTube and Vimeo. “Most of us were complete novices with no experience in filmmaking.”
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