Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Classic Serials: Undersea Kingdom (Faster-Paced Version), Chapter Four

With this installment, YouTube started saving my videos at 480p resolution as well as 360 and 240.  So enjoy the bigger player window!


(originally posted November 22, 2008)

Onward we go to Chapter Four of our faster-paced edit of the 1936 Republic serial Undersea Kingdom. Don't ask me why it's called "Revenge of the Volkites," when they have no part in any of the action. I did cut out a sequence where they appeared in a couple of shots, but even then, they were just down in their work pit, throwing switches.



To paraphrase a Late Late Show segment, What Did We Learn from the Editing This Week, Winston? Make the biggest cuts first, because it may turn out you don't need to make the smaller ones.

The big Black-vs.-White fracas at the end (or, as I like to call it, the Battle of Helm's Really Deep) originally had a whole GNDN daytime section. Since I'd already made the earlier cuts, this brought the chapter down to nine and a half minutes. Still, I decided not to put anything back to bring it back up nearer to ten minutes. (This is probably my limited Final Cut skills talking, but putting things back is much more difficult than cutting them out.)

Incidentally, one of the cut bits featured Unga Khan's assistant Ditmar sending out the bombers, only to have Unga belay the order on the grounds that the explosions might bring down Atlantis' protective dome. So one has to wonder why they used them in Chapter One—or even invented them in the first place. As I mentioned last time, I'm not viewing ahead, so I didn't know about this when I edited Chapter One. Otherwise, I'd probably have cut the bomber sequence from there.

I lost a few more seconds from this chapter by cutting out the two shots at the very end that constitute the latest Cheat Cliffhanger.

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