An epic video edit compilation of epic epicness.
So, this one is a bit different than the other video edit projects you’ll find here. During the summer of 1995 (I think), my friend Eric Sorensen was back in town from college. He and I would catch a movie in the theater every week or two, then after that, we would mess around for a couple of hours editing together various stuff into themed segments, including an opening and closing clip for each (and a couple bits mixed into the segments here and there).
To break things up from the way I normally did the video edit projects, we decided that I would only be the producer/editor on it and that Eric would be the director. We both thought up various clips to use, but Eric was in charge of things like music choices and segment themes. As you might guess, most of the music featured in this project is not my choice, as it’s definitely music that I don’t like…
We weren’t completely sure how long the whole project would end up, nor how many segments it would have. When the summer ended, we had ended up with 8 segments:
- Opening
This is just random stuff set to Metallica’s “The Struggle Within”, Lords Of Acid’s “Young Boys”, and Ozzy Osbourne’s “I Don’t Want To Change The World”. - Explosions
As you might guess, this segment involves various clips of explosions. It’s set to Van Halen’s “The Seventh Seal”. - Guns
I bet you can’t guess what this segment is about. That’s right, it’s clips of gunfire in movies and it’s set to Filter’s “Hey Man, Nice Shot” (of course). - Fighting
Yep, here we have all sorts of movie clips involving people fighting one another. Naturally, it’s set to The Immortals’ “Techno Syndrome (Mortal Kombat)”. - Water
One of the more esoteric of segments in the video, featuring clips of water. I’m pretty sure this was just so Eric could use Fishbone’s “Swim” for something in the project. I tried to put up a fight to this one, cause I thoroughly hate this song (yes, even more than a number of the others in this project). But hey, I was only the producer and editor on this project, not the director… - Falling
Ah, yes. People falling off stuff. A classic stuntman staple. It features a bit of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Mr. Tinkertrain”, then the rest features AC/DC’s “Back In Black”. - Death
Finally, we get to a segment where I was able to come up with a couple of music choices that worked better than anything Eric came up with. As such, this is my favorite segment of the project. I’m actually quite fond of it. The first part of the segment uses the more violent type of death scenes set to Paul McCartney’s “Live And Let Die”. I’m rather fond of having OJ’s ridiculous death scene performance from The Naked Gun during the flowery breakdown of Live And Let Die. The second part of the video features either dramatic death scenes or extra-violent ones used as a silly counterpoint to the gracefulness of the music, Suede’s “The Next Life”. And yes, there is one bit in the second half of this segment that I’m not particularly proud of. Of course, I had to close the segment with a clip of the greatest death scene in movie history. - Flight
Finally, we have a segment of flying scenes from movies. The music choice of Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” was neither Eric’s nor mine, because it was so obvious and obligatory, it would have been the pick by either of us.
Then I tacked on a couple ending clips and an end title sequence, which uses AC/DC’s “Big Gun”. An amusing bit to note about the end credits is that there was only a pan & scan version of Ferris Bueller available when we had gotten to the end of the project, so the “life moves pretty fast” bit is in pan & scan. But I put the end credits together a month or two later, and a letterboxed version of Ferris Bueller had come out on laserdisc between the previous clip and the “go home” bit at the end. That letterboxed laserdisc release was stupid, too, because it was 1.85 aspect ratio rather than the full 2.35 aspect that Ferris Bueller should be (and future releases properly were). Anyway, enough nerd rambling about that.
A few months after it had been finished, I also cut together a trailer for the project, which I’m actually rather fond of. It’s cut to Art Of Noise’s “Dragnet & Peter Gunn Have A Day At The Races”. It’s short, but is some of the better editing I did back in the good ol’ VHS days in the ’90s:
This project was edited in the painstaking method that I’ve written about in this post. It was fully edited in S-VHS, sourced mostly from LaserDiscs. The master S-VHS tape survived in remarkably good quality for when I did a digital capture of it around 2005. I did some clean-up of the capture at that time and remixed the audio to also clean it up. The result is a surprisingly good quality preservation of the project.
And, yes, I know that Imporium is spelled wrong. That was an accidental mistake that I caught immediately, but we thought it would be amusing to just leave it that way and see who notices. Had I the choice to do that over again, I would have fixed it. 🙂
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