Willy Wonka

The analogy of hypertext being like film editing got my thinking about the ‘fake trailers’ or ‘recuts’ that people make, transforming the genre of famous films.

This idea that hypertext creates meaning through linking things together, ones that may be completely unrelated, matches up with how an editor cuts shots together to create a film narrative.

This fake trailers are made from the exact same shots that are used in the real film, but have been edited in a different order, changing the structure, and with a different soundtrack (and sometimes a voiceover), the meaning of the film is drastically altered.

These trailers detail how meaning is created through how things are linked together, rather than the actual content, showing that when hypertext users choose which link to follow, a completely different meaning may be created.

This trailer recuts Top Gun as a romantic movie, creating a love story between the two main characters, just be re-ordering the shots, and adding music and a voice-over. A scene with the characters in a bar, which was something entirely different in the original, becomes a romantic interaction between the two, due to the way it is cut after a scene with Tom Cruise previously, and the use of that annoying Dido song. A new meaning is created solely through editing the exact same shots in a different manner.

Another good one is Willy Wonka recut as a horror movie. The maker cleverly recuts it to portray Wonka has a crazy man that uses his factory as some sort of torture house, and this is achieved through editing. The scene where Willy Wonka first meets Charlie and the others is intercut with shots of the children getting into trouble inside the factory, making what Wonka is saying, which seems polite and innocuous in the original, eerie and ominous in the recut.

This one is a bit different, as it doesn’t really alter the film’s genre, but rather just what era it’s from. It transforms 2001: A Space Odyssey, into a 2012 Summer, popcorn blockbuster. This is achieved almost solely in changing the pace of the editing, going from the very slow, long shots of the original, to fast, rushed editing of the recut, making it seem more like a modern day action movie. This is also complemented by a loud, obnoxious, and booming soundtrack.

This recuts help to show how many is established the structuring of individual parts, and that it is so easy to alter meaning merely through re-ordering these parts, something that has become inherent to us with hypertext and the internet.