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Originally Posted by Anguirel
Me too! A couple of old schoolfriends and I are (painfully slowly) "remaking" LOTR...we've reached the Council of Elrond.
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Good luck with your project. Is a visit to Cannes far off?
Our remake was entitled "The War of the Ring" as we didn't want anyone to confuse our version with that of Bakshi. We used many of the JRRT character names, included a Ring and sort of followed the general story line, but other than that it was mostly out of our heads. Definitely a spoof. I had a hand in writing the script, and so can say that not only was the screenplay atrocious, but the story made little sense. Given different names, one may never know that it was Tolkien-based (hmm...one might say that of other's works too
). I got to be Gandalf (I have
no! acting abilities) and wrote myself a love interest named Tinúviel (I had a crush on the woman playing this character, and so...
).
Problem was that we received no support from our families, who just didn't get what we were doing - yes, it was like that back then too - nor a school program that we pretended to be doing the project for - "Sure, you can make a film for your class project; we just won't help you do it." And this was back in the days when VHS was just starting out. Our school had a videocamera, and we could *use* it, yet were not permitted to leave the school with it. Try shooting the Bridge scene or Weathertop in your school's hallway
.
So we used Super 8MM film. Each minute of film cost about $5 (to buy it and have it developed), and as I made about $5 a week cutting lawns...well, you do the math. Every scene was run twice 'dry,' then we did the one and only final take. At times the script was rewritten to account for what was filmed. We drew up contracts for the actors, and part of their contract was that they had to supply their own costumes. One such costume was a white garbage bag! And my buddy spliced the scenes together using ordinary clear tape and scissors, and so you can see that it was a real
production.
So we didn't get very far. Would like to start again sometime, but with the kids, don't have that kind of time to spend.
Note that this footage has become priceless as all of the cast and crew are now about 100 years older, and it's so funny to look back at how we looked and what we did, etc. So if you can, do it.
Anyway, again good luck.