|
HEAD TO THE DOWNLOADS PAGE FOR MORE INFO. Please make sure you legally own copies of both Dunkirk and Darkest Hour before watching this edit! Seriously, just go buy them on Amazon while you're downloading. Fan edits are meant to be alternatives to their theatrical versions, not replacements of them. Please support the original creators of these films. It's taken nearly two years, but I've finally managed to make the Bluray for Finest Hour! What started as simple procrastination turned into laziness, lack of motivation and ultimately dread that I'd have to get around to doing it eventually. But here we are! As with my previous fan edits (The Hobbit and Rogue One), I've pulled out all the stops for a high-quality Bluray release. The picture quality is high-bitrate HD. Sound quality is equally superb, although Adobe recently removed the ability to export 5.1 audio from its Creative Suite, robbing me (and all of you) the chance to hear Finest Hour in digital surround sound. I've created custom menus, added some fun and relevant Bonus Features, and of course designed the box and disc art for those who are willing to go the extra mile for a physical copy. The first disc contains the feature in color, and the second disc contains the feature in black & white. Here's the artwork, along with screenshots of the menus. I suspect I'll be making a DVD version as well, but the priority for me was to get the Bluray out the door! Enjoy!
0 Comments
VISIT THE DOWNLOADS PAGE HERE. Please make sure you legally own copies of both Dunkirk and Darkest Hour before watching this edit! Seriously, just go buy them on Amazon while you're downloading. Fan edits are meant to be alternatives to their theatrical versions, not replacements of them. Please support the original creators of these films.
After receiving some suggestions from folks who watched an early cut of this fan edit, I now have a (hopefully) final digital copy of Finest Hour! This fan edit/supercut takes two excellent World War II films (Dunkirk and Darkest Hour) and combines them into a single, sprawling war epic that tells a fuller story about the Dunkirk evacuation. In addition to providing a color version of Finest Hour, I have also created a black & white version with added film grain. This is a totally different experience than the color version in my opinion, but it isn't for everyone which is why I am offering both versions. If you're into older war epics from the 50s/60s like The Longest Day, I'd highly recommend the black and white version...the cinematography is stunning in monochrome. THE CUT LIST
There are plenty of other trims, cuts and changes I've made but these are the major ones. I color corrected both films to help them match each other visually as well. This wasn't easy because Dunkirk has a very sharply contrasted, natural look and Darkest Hour is much softer and stylized in terms of lighting. The sound mix was re-worked a bit because of all the audio changes that needed to be made, especially for Dunkirk. Even though most of the dialogue/SFX were on the center channel, there was still a good deal of spillover onto the other channels that occasionally had to be muted since it was mixed with the film's score. As a result, some of the scenes may not sound as "full" as the original. Dunkirk also had a preposterously loud sound mix, so I bumped some of the action scenes down a hair so the transition between them and the Darkest Hour scenes wasn't so dramatic. I showed this version to a friend and they were surprised that they could actually understand all the dialogue from the Dunkirk scenes! Questions/comments? Let me know, I'd love to get some feedback!  VISIT THE DOWNLOAD PAGE HERE
I had honestly assumed that someone would have made a fan edit of Dunkirk and Darkest Hour already, but this seems to be the first real go at it that I am aware of. So many people talked about the idea of combining these two films after they were released, among them the team behind Darkest Hour and even Gary Oldman himself. There was even an excellent fan made trailer making the rounds online back in December that showed the potential in a Dunkirk/Darkest Hour fan edit. Both of these films take place during the same time period in WW2, that being the spring of 1940 when Germany was advancing along the western front and Britain was finding its hopes for victory being drained by the day. This culminated in the entire British army (300,000 men) being trapped at the French sea port of Dunkirk, not knowing if they would be evacuated across the English Channel in time before being captured or wiped out by the Germans. But while one film focuses on the frontlines of this conflict, the other deals with the backroom battles between Britain’s politicians and generals on how to handle the military crisis. Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk was praised as a visceral action film with unending suspense, yet it alienated some people for its lack of exposition (a rarity for a Nolan film) and for its occasionally confusing editing structure. Meanwhile, Darkest Hour was praised for Gary Oldman’s Oscar-winning performance as Winston Churchill and its depiction of the War Cabinet Crisis, but it didn’t show much in terms of action. It’s a period drama, after all! Both films are excellent in their own way (they were both nominated for Best Picture) and they complement each other wonderfully because of their overlapping stories and conflicts. This is why I (along with many others) thought it would be a great opportunity to combine these two films into a single narrative. So I am about 95% finished with this edit. Just a few small things and it should be done. Just like my previous fan edits (JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Rogue One: The Battle of Scarif), I sourced the Blu-rays in full HD along with 5.1 audio. The 5.1 audio has been absolutely crucial to this edit and I’ll get to that below. Dunkirk is around 100 minutes long and Darkest Hour is around 120 minutes long. This edit clocks in around 150 minutes, and slightly favors Dunkirk in terms of footage used. Before I get into specific cuts, the major thing I’d like to mention is that I have completely unwound the non-linear editing structure of Dunkirk. It was a very interesting way to depict three different timelines, but when combined with a completely different narrative (Darkest Hour), it just doesn’t work anymore. This presented the largest challenge for me on this project, since Dunkirk’s score and sound design are so closely intertwined with the film’s editing. For example, Tom Hardy’s first aerial battle over Mark Rylance’s boat is spread across Dunkirk’s middle runtime and contains several different music cues depending on what other scenes it is intercut with. For my edit, I wanted it to be a single, continuous scene that showed the fight from the air and sea perspective. To do that, I had to piece together the separate shots and determine when they took place chronologically. This made the accompanying music unusable since it jumped all over, but thankfully the center channel of the 5.1 retained the dialogue and SFX by themselves. This allowed me to insert one of Hans Zimmer’s cues from the score and basically lay it over this newly edited scene. I had to take this approach to the entirety of Dunkirk, and it made for a unique but fun challenge. I’d compare it to the joke in Ghostbusters about Egon straightening out a Slinky! I'll get into specific cuts in another post. Stay tuned! |
FINEST HOURThis is the blog page for Finest Hour, a fan edit/supercut of Dunkirk and Darkest Hour. Archives
July 2020
Categories |
RSS Feed