The premise: the original Star Wars movie cut into 15-second segments to be re-filmed by thousands of fans and then carefully edited together into an amusing patchwork of fan-generated footage. The resulting film is an awesome retelling of Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope through the eyes and creative talents of Star Wars fans around the world.
Star Wars: Uncut was the genius idea of Casey Pugh, a 26 year old web developer and (one assumes) serious Star Wars fan.
“I was working as a web developer for Vimeo and I was doing a lot of video-based stuff, but I was also thinking about how I could enable filmmakers to create either short films or feature-length films together remotely,” he says. “I bounced an idea off my friends but I had no idea it would blow up to this scale–it’s just crazy.”
Crazy or not, Star Wars: Uncut earned Pugh and his collaborators an Emmy award (the 2010 Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Creative Achievement In Interactive Media – Fiction, to be precise).
Despite being a diverse mashup of live-action, claymation, stop-motion, kittens, hand drawn animations, CGI, hand puppets, babies, Legos, men and women in drag, Popsicle sticks, papercraft, and practically every other type of style and imagery you can think of, Star Wars: Uncut manages to stay true to the original film’s narrative and is recognizable to anyone who has seen it.
Most of the clips are silly, unrehearsed videos of the viral sort (complete with trash can R2D2s and newspaper hats). But there are also polished, beautiful-looking scenes from talented fans whom you can tell put forth a lot of time and effort.
The entire film was recently released to the internet masses and you can watch it right here:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ezeYJUz-84
Star Wars: Uncut is a film made by Star Wars fans for Star Wars fans. I promise it will be the most fun and entertaining two hours of your life.
