Non-Romantic Star Wars

Still editing and refining noise film. Getting rid of the extraneous stuff that slows down the story. Sale—all beauty shots must go! The hours of footage we shot in the green room might end up being edited down to five shots. No matter what I do, however, we still end up at 15 minutes.

Also still thinking about the Star Wars redux idea which I started working on nearly a year ago according to this blog. The blog has become an indicator of how slowly I do things. Noise film was an attempt to "fix" an existing film—the Matrix, via Dark City. (And I'm surprised it looks like a noir film?) Stars Wars redux is turning out to be an attempt to "fix" Star Wars by de-romanticizing it. There are two great Romantic themes in Star Wars. The first is that success in life consists of uniting Enlightenment "science" and Romantic "art"— as in turn off the targeting computer Luke and "use the force." The second is that folk societies, as represented by the Ewoks and Wookies (home planet shown above), have an ideal relationship with technology.

So my movie would have scenes in the desert and a WWII sort of feel. It would have robots like the Erector set-and-wood planetary crawler I'm designing in my mod-punk style and those crazy extrapolated aircraft. I want to use more than one actor. But I know that I'm mostly interested in how props can be used to perform—machines, objects, puppets, whatever. On a side note, I've become obsessed lately by camera technology. There's a part of me that wants to cough up for an hvx100—Panasonic's HD, 24p, multi-speed (that's right, real slow motion) camera that stores images on P2 cards. 5K is just too pricey, but really, for what you get... Then I think I want to go cheap and get a Canon XL-A1 and put a Red Rock 35 mm adaptor on it. For some beautiful footage of the Red Rock at work, take a look at their demo page.

So being non-Romantic, there would be a scene where the peaceful tribal peoples get the crap bombed out of them because they did something wrong. And the main theme of the movie would be how to tell the difference between good technologies and evil technologies which look almost the same.