Star Wars Uncut: The World's First Great Crowd Sourced Feature Length Film?


Star Wars Uncut is an 2010 Emmy Award winning shot-by-shot remake of George Lucas’ 1977 Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope. Here's a link to the complete Star Wars Uncut online.

Star Wars Uncut was instigated and organized by Casey Pugh and made by 473 volunteers who each took their own short segment to recreate using whatever tools they had at hand.

In addition to being a hugely enjoyable ride - the completed Star Wars Uncut (which screens at the Lincoln Center Film Society in NYC at midnight on Friday June 1st, 2012) also stands as a landmark experiment in what many of us have been predicting - a new mode of collaborative filmmaking.

In July 2009 Casey Pugh created a web site where fans could sign up to recreate one of 473 scenes. There were multiple submissions for each 15-second spot. For the version that plays in theaters, Casey Pugh chose the best from a wild assortment of backyard live-action, crude animation, Lego stop motion, etc. But Casey Pugh also created an online version, that automatically played the highest-rated rendition of each scene, compiling scenes on the fly, so the movie could change in real time depending on the ratings of users.

In either version, Star Wars Uncut suggests a future in which films are crowd sourced by filmmakers from all over the world who are connected only by the internet and their shared passion for their subject.

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