Gifts from the Inn of the Indigo Phoenix, brought to you by 卯侍 藍凰舎 (ぼうジ あいこうしゃ) Aikousha
First,
let me apologize for letting this exceed 700MB, but I tried encoding
this five different times... The .avi encode couldn't handle the audio,
and the video size/quality ratio sucked under that encode... So I fell
back upon my trusty .mp4 encoder...
The Dark Crystal:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083791/
And this will definitely be of interest to Dark Crystal fans:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460907/
Way
back, when the state of the art in computer graphics was 280x192 in 8
colors, and no such thing as CGI effects existed, Jim Henson made a
beautiful classic little fantasy film called, 'The Dark Crystal.' Long
before the movie was released to theatres in the US and UK, it was
provided to test audiences for reactions. The surveys taken at the
showings, guide the filmmakers and producers in how to tweak and make
final edits to the film. I GOT TO SEE IT THIS WAY!
As a kid, I
was overjoyed with this, it was better than ANYTHING else provided for
kids at the time (I still LOVE this film!). Jim Henson was a GOD!
Unfortunately,
the test audience comprised a large number of mundanes and the dramatic
challenged, people better suited to be couch-potatos, not
theatre-goers.
When the movie was finally released to theatres, I
got a shock, when what I had been waiting to see again was chopped up,
and dumbed down immensely. It was great to finally see most of the
special effects, but the film became severely hobbled, and the benefit
of paying attention to get all the details was destroyed by having
everything explained plainly or tossed in your face. These variations
may not seem that big, but they were very noticeable to me... and I had
waited so long to see this film again.
Then I attended The
Answer, 'The Rat Stuff!,' the 42nd WorldCon in Los Angeles. There I
found a large number of fans of the film, most who were twice my age at
the time, and one of them knew a person who knew another person.... And
so after waiting several more weeks, I received this precious little
videotape. It was a copy of a workprint of the film, used to review
different background music soundtracks to the film (anybody remember
'Legend' where it was released in the UK with a Jerry Goldsmith
soundtrack, and in the US with Tangerine Dream?). The first two were
Trevor Jones (the actual choice, a strikingly beautiful OST, like all
his work) and Vangelis. Unfotunately the VHS tape was not long enough
for more than 15 minutes of the Vangelis material.
So, after my
last move, I dove into my 3000 tape VHS collection and fished out that
old tape, and encoded it. Hopefully you will enjoy it, if not as a
curiosity, an example of what minor things can be done to a film by
others, a better version, or at least a view of what is, effectively,
the directors cut of the movie.
Some things to be aware of before you watch this:
1.
It is a WORK-PRINT, it was never intended to be anything but a quick
hack together by the editors to test things like timing, edit points,
level corrections, etc.
2. This is in black & white. My
assumption is that they used monochrome stock because it was cheaper to
deal with and it was not at the stage for color work.
3. As a
work-print, edits, cuts, and notes are actually marked on the film with
both grease-pencil and marker. You will see a lot of this. As an edit
test, light levels also were not a concern, and therefore black and
white levels vary considerably from one scene to another. This made it
impossible for me to do any correction work. A filter might clean up
one scene but completely destroy the next.
4. The film stock was
actually handled by a very large number of people, and ended up picking
up lots of dirt. Again having a dirty print did not matter for this
work print, image clarity was not important.
5. The work print
was transferred first to professional videotape, each of the small
spools of film were transferred, so between each of the nearly dozen
small spools of film, there was a hard analog videotape break, with all
the expected audio and video noise one would expect. I edited most of
these out, but that was nearly 3 minutes of hashing and breakups.
6.
That tape was then transferred to VHS from which my copy of the tape
was made. unfortunately, this was a long time ago and image
stabilization was not yet a large part of the electronics of the
consumer VHS market. Therefore, any time there was a little jump or a
little noise in the original tape, the machine could not maintain the
image and it often lost a lock on the image. Noise on the original tape
made for chaos on the copies, and this is most apparent during the
Skesis' banquet segment.
7. Many of the special effects, and
things like the titles, were not present at this stage of work, so odd
things tend to show up in places. Characters appearing on black or grey
backgrounds, only a small area of the screen is used because a matte
would be added later, seeing a bit of the English countryside in a shot,
or seeing an oddly shaped object ascending on a rope in place of the
special effect of the Ur-skeks ascension... A few of the voices are
even a little different.
Of the things you will notice different
from the released film are the cutting of several scenes (notably a
naked Jen, and the Skesis funeral), re-arrangement of some of the scenes
(mostly at the start of the film), trimming of some scenes (Podling
villager festival), the addition of voice-overs (lord was that
distracting), added narration, and a complete re-dub of all the
non-English languages. In the test version, English represented the
Gelfling tongue, you should hear only English when Gelfling is spoken...
Every other race had it's own language, but the final film changed
that, and you really have to look hard to see that all the races did not
speak the same language. I must have been an odd child, because I
didn't have any problem understanding the gist of what was being said,
when the characters didn't speak English. I find that touch added quite
a lot to the proper feel of the film.
So, here it is, Monochrome
704x352, mono audio 44.1khz AAC. This encode is the best balance of
file-size versus quality I could get from the source. If anybody wants
to try enhancing this, feel free, but it's probably not worth it.
This won't play on iPods, as the width of the image is too great.
Since
there was probably only one copy of the test audience print (35mm clean
color version of this), and no sign of this version of the film on any
of the seven releases (soon to be eight) of the film to the consumer
market, I am guessing that this may be the only surviving version of the
film in this form. I hope it isn't, because I would love to see this
in HQ color. However, two of the more recent DVD releases of the film
reference the loss of the deleted material. Specifically that the only
full copies of the Skeksis funeral was from the camera videotapes (even
though a segment of the funeral was on the preview spot that appeared in
theatres).
I do plan to make a 4.38GB version of this to archive
on DVD (my capture is nearly 8GB), but unless there is a VERY LARGE
demand for it, I have no plans on posting it in any other form, than
this.
Enjoy.
--卯侍 藍凰舎 Aiko

1
00:00:00,000 --> 00:01:30,000
Snow_Girl_And_The_Dark_Crystal
Re-Sync & Edit
Tharindu Lakmal Jeewantha
2
00:01:30,320 --> 00:01:34,609
Gods rule in Heaven, demons suffer in Hell,
and men stride the earth.
3
00:01:35,080 --> 00:01:39,529
Bearing their sins, seeking enlightenment,