The Curious Editing of Artemis Fowl

oh hey real quick just want to answer a question that i'm sure you're asking yourself right now uh the answer is no you do not need to have seen the art of misfoul movie or read the artemis val books for that matter to understand and appreciate this video so um enjoy [Music] i never expected to be making a video about artemis fowl i mean i wasn't even convinced i'd see it and i see everything i saw the fantastic crimes of grindelwald multiple times a movie i hate but i've never read the books about artemis fowl i have very little knowledge of the character and i'd more or less forgotten that this movie was even coming out but artemis fowled as something so strange something i have never seen a movie do before that i feel like i need to tell you about it so join me won't you on a strange and unbelievable journey to once and for all uncover the truth behind the curious editing of artemis fowl you seem to have a pure and unspoiled heart which means you probably haven't seen 2019's 2020s disney plus as artemis fowl so let me give you the necessary information to understand this video artemis fowl is a movie produced by walt disney directed by kenneth brauna that's right this is a gilderoy lockhart joint it's allegedly based on the popular children's book series of the same name by irish author owen colfer the books tell the story of a child criminal mastermind artemis fowl described as a hans gruber type who causes trouble goes on adventures in the hidden world of fairies that exists just below the surface of the earth the movie is kind of that artemis fowl is a child and there are fairies but he isn't much of a criminal mastermind until the very end of the movie where he calls the villain and tells them that he is artemis himself is played by ferinda shaw the supporting cast includes a young fairy cop named holly short played by laura mcdonald a troublesome dwarf named mulch diggins played by josh gad artemis's trusty butler slash bodyguard named damavoy butler played by nanzo anzier and it wouldn't be a late 20 teens disaster without an appearance by dame judi dench as ferry police chief commander root here's the plot art mrs dad artemis fowl senior played by colin farrell who rolled off the set of a dolce gabbana commercial is kidnapped by the bad guy who cares and to rescue his father artemis puts in motion a master plan that centers around a fairy kidnapping hostage negotiation and a troll bull fight by the way in this series varys is a catch-all term for pixies dwarfs trolls and other magical creatures it's not explained super well in the movie but that's a helpful thing to know now this movie is not good i have a feeling disney would have dumped this on disney plus with or without a hopefully once in a lifetime pandemic this movie fails on every level it is boring confusing filled with exposition weird accents some of the worst fight choreography i have ever seen josh gad dislodging his jaw and pooping out dirt and surprise surprise this movie has been in the works forever plans were made in 2001 which just happened to be the first year that a certain series that shall not be named was turned into a movie it wasn't until 2015 when brauna was attached and it was originally scheduled to be released in 2019 but a couple months before it was expected to be released it was pushed back a year to 2020. there was no specific reason that was given people speculated it may have had something to do with disney just wanting to put a different movie in that release date but this is where things get interesting there was some speculation that this delay had something to do with reshoots there were some extremely negative reactions to the genuinely confusing first trailer and it would make sense that disney may want to make some changes before they release the final product makes sense after all reshoots are a normal thing lots of movies have them avengers end game had some reshoots some pretty serious ones from all accounts but it was still awesome like reshoots don't mean that a movie is bad however while reshoots don't always equal bad movie bad movie very frequently equals reshoots justice league suicide squad fant4stic ryze skywalker dark phoenix doolittle not good some truly awful movies all of which represent a significant studio investment in not only one movie but a franchise or in dude little's case a potential franchise that cannot afford a flop so after a negative test screening there are usually reshoots but most movies cannot be fixed that easily that list i just told you is a pretty good example of why fan four stick justice league those movies had fundamental issues that reshoots could not address and then the reshoots just end up creating a frankenstein's monster situation not only do the big issues remain but now we're dealing with tonal issues the story's disjointed characters act differently scene to scene wigs mustaches i understand why reshoots have such a bad reputation and upon first glance it seemed like artemis fowl had some reshoots and that would explain the year break and it would explain the clunky story and all the constant exposition and specifically the runner where mulch dickens was being interrogated by mi6 that felt like it was added after the fact to explain more interesting bits of fairy world to the audience but i don't think that is all that happened i think disney did something much weirder you see in post-production there's something called adr stands for either automated or additional dialogue replacement basically if there's an issue with the audio from a movie maybe there was too much background noise or the original line read wasn't clear instead of reshooting the scene producers will have the actor re-record their line to match the original shot the actor will show up to a recording studio watch the scene again and attempt to mimic their own voice that's a big part of what we think of as adr and you barely ever notice it but then there's the other kind say your movie is confusing test audiences don't get it which doesn't mean it's actually that confusing test audiences are tricky if you don't know what i mean look up david f sandberg's video about test audiences it's funny but like say you need to explain what the infinity stones are because the test audience is confused you may have an actor record an additional line where they explain it and then add that line into the movie maybe over some images or a wide shot where you can't really see the character's lips moving clearly or take a shot of the back of that character's head or another character seemingly reacting to the speaker that way it fits pretty seamlessly into the scene and usually audiences don't notice those either but i just knew something was off about artemis vowel something not quite right the story didn't make sense and the editing was insane erratic upsetting then friend of the channel owen lars 2 brought something to my attention they sent a very interesting thread of tweets to myself dj and diggins after we covered artemis fowl on our podcast mostly nitpicking please subscribe the thread reads i just finished the artemis fowl episode and wanted to share with y'all my theory on why the movie is so astronomically bad i think something happened that made half of the film scenes unusable so they frankensteined it a few minutes into the film i realized that almost no one on screen ever talked there was plenty of dialogue but it all came from off screen or in scenes where we don't see the characters mouths i think this is most painfully obvious in the scene where juliet brings artemis a sandwich she says the word eat on screen and then there is 40 seconds of pure dialogue before we see artemis get to say a line on screen almost the entire scene seems to have been done in adr i think something happened with what they had filmed that caused much of it to be unusable maybe the hard drives of the digital copies got damaged or some legal issue came up with using what was filmed whatever happened i think they were forced to piece together remains pick any five minutes of the movie and really pay attention to how much adr and over editing went into it if you got a good tv you may even notice some digital scenes from putting characters into scenes they were not filmed in this is my weird conspiracy theory but i think it would go a long way to explain how this film failed so much harder than 125 million dollars should ever have allowed the presence of adr creates an interesting opportunity we can get an idea of what may have been changed after the fact and specifically what was added so after watching the movie again i can confidently say that at least one major plot point exists almost exclusively in adr and that is the oculos but nando you may be thinking we see the oculos our characters hold it there's no way they adr all of that to that i say correct from that point on exactly one hour into the movie i do believe characters are talking about the aculos i believe it existed in every cut of the movie from that point forward but before that let's take a look join me won't you welcome to the aculos zone this is the part of my apartment where i go to obsess about the oculos don't believe me here check this out this is my whiteboard that i use for my patreon exclusive monthly whiteboard videos on it i have taken the liberty of writing down the line in timestamp of every time the word aculos is used before the hour mark so before we actually see the aculos it is mentioned 29 times once it's part of a crawl i didn't include that but 29 times a character says the word aculos now a couple of observations about that these three here these are part of the mulch digging interrogation runner so is this one here artemis one at the oculus so those four were 100 percent part of reshoots take away those four and you're left with 25 25 times that a character uses the word aculos on or off screen before we see the oculos an hour into the movie so i want to ask you a question out of those 25 times how many times do you think we clearly see a character say aculos like we're not looking at the back of their head we're not looking at another character we're not looking at some illustration or some image vaguely related to the oculus we see a person's lips move and it's clear that oculos is what word is coming out of their lips out of 25. take a guess put it in the comments you ready five out of 25 times we see the word aculos actually spoken five times that means the other 20 times a character says the word aculos before we actually see it it's off screen and it is so clearly adr the actual instances are bizarre i'll show you a couple of them like this one the villain is approaching this underling named raya kudjan raya is told that he's being released so that he can help villains steal the oculus but watch the shot see if anything stands out to you all charges dropped i've convinced the executives to grant a pardon after your court martial commander root was powerless to stop it the villain does not move like at all he's perfectly still the only movement at all in this shot is some cgi smoke and look here it is again i'm willing to bet that all of this was just one image that they throw up whenever the villain needs to explain how what she's doing ties into the plot how about this one judy dench is about to give a speech about the oculos where she conveniently never clearly says the word oculos on screen but before root speaks just off screen some random character throws this gem in and then root says it's in the news quick cut away too the oculus is still missing and back for the next line count verbal b squad c squad you're all on triple night duty downtown also not sure what this weird globe thingy is but it makes a real handy judy dench mouth hider and just to put the cherry on top of this adr nightmare we get one more mention of the oculos from the back of root's head that sounds nothing like the lines that proceed or follow it see it and report it we must recover the aculos and protect our anonymity and then there's this scene between juliet and artemis where virtually no dialogue is spoken on screen but that scene is followed by this one foley's introduction where he root and holly discuss a rogue fairy and unlike so much of this movie almost every line is spoken on screen except and i swear this is the real edit in the movie all active duty officers are downtown searching for the aculos but my personal favorite the negotiation root is invited into foul manner to negotiate for holly's freedom and most of the dialogue is on camera and it almost kind of works as a scene until we start talking about you guessed it the oculos first we get this preposterous overhead shot of the table when artemis first mentions the oculos and then what may be the most telling individual edit in the movie root says i beg your pardon and then from the back of his head we hear artemis say you heard me the oculus and then we go right to artemis's face for in one of those pots from under a rainbow i presume now i don't know much about aculoses i mean since diaculos only exists in this movie and considering how many times i've seen the movie i actually may be the world's foremost authority on aculoses but from what my expert opinion can reveal this slide doesn't track with anything we've heard thus far in the movie the oculos is not in a pot if anything it's an acorn so i guess it'd be under a tree but let's imagine the word oculos was adred in in post-production that line makes a lot more sense if artemis asks for the gold that he is originally after in the books i want a ton of fairy gold i beg your pardon you heard me gold in one of those pots from under a rainbow i presume so i am completely convinced that all 20 times the word aculos is spoken off screen our last minute adr to write the gold out of the story but why why make these changes why go through all of this trouble i have two theories first one simple this is a kids movie and two plot devices are confusing so getting rid of the gold and making the entire movie about the quest for the oculos should in theory make the plot easier for a child to follow i would argue that the aculos and all the other fairy magic is the far more confusing plot device of the two but hey that's a possible explanation the other explanation is both dumber and in my opinion far more likely so earlier i said that the character of artemis is a criminal mastermind described as a hans gruber type for those who aren't familiar hans gruber is the iconic villain from the 1980s action film die hard it's played by alan rickman in one of my favorite performances in any movie he is cool calm sassy he's having fun and all the while you have complete confidence that he will kill anyone if they get in his way or in the case of ellis if they annoy him and even though hans seems like a terrorist out to use this hostage situation to free other freedom fighters we eventually learn that he's only in it for a safe filled with bearer bonds there are a lot of sides to hans he's always surprising you and because of his unpredictability mixed with his natural charisma hans gruber is a joy to watch he's constantly oscillating between likeable and unlikable throughout the film like hans artemis is the villain of the first book the first scene in the first book is even artemis torturing a fairy for information which we'll get to over the course of the series he becomes slightly more heroic but in the beginning of the first book artemis is the villain i believe disney was concerned about making the hero a villain even if later in the movie he gets redeemed by using the oculos to find his dad and giving it to holly i believe disney wanted this to be their franchise that shall not be named okay they wanted a harry potter a child focused novel based on a series of books they could use to sell toys and plays and eventually turn it into a theme park but artemis fowl is not harry potter he's a jerk he's arrogant scheming an anti-hero and by trying to turn artemis into harry potter disney stripped artemis of his defining characteristic so they were left with nothing a main character who is detached bland and cliche for no good reason the craziest part of this to me is that it isn't like disney was just chasing trends they were chasing the wrong trends i would understand if a sanitized artemis fowl movie were released in the 2000s but the 2010s have been nothing but anti-heroes deadpool venom dread hellboy kingsman maleficent the guardians of the galaxy logan joker parasite john wick solo rogue one baby driver suicide squad birds of prey mad max sherlock holmes morally dubious unconventional heroes hell two of the most profitable franchises in hollywood currently are the fast and the furious movies and the despicable me series people like this a pitch along the lines of it's harry potter but he's kind of a jerk feels like a slam dunk but i wonder if this sanitization had something to do with streaming and this is all purely speculative from this point on but go with me on this one you ever wonder why online trailers put those little five second clips of the end of the trailer at the beginning of the trailer like bright burn one of the best trailers of the last decade for that movie about what if superman but the omen that trailer begins like a shot-for-shot remake of man of steel same fields color grading music but about halfway in you learn that something's wrong with brandon and the trailer switches gears to reveal that this is actually a horror movie it is an incredibly effective trailer well if you watch it on sony's official youtube channel the bright burn trailer starts with a shot of the horror movie finale which completely undercuts all of the man of steel style build up but they did it anyway why well according to an article on the verb by chris palant the structure is built for the new way people discover videos on the internet the independence day trailer may run as an advertisement before another youtube video and viewers must be convinced to not click the skip ad button or the trailer may be shared on facebook in which case those who come across it people who may have their smartphones or laptops muted must be convinced in a couple seconds to stop scrolling and give the full video a trailer about what you'd expect but chris continues and hits on something really interesting the teaser within the trailer speaks to a moment in which we have so many distractions and choices that marketers must sell us on giving a trailer three minutes of our time and i believe that may have something to do with why artemis fowl was edited the way it was when it comes to streaming we have so many distractions and choices besides the other content on disney plus we can choose one of the other streaming services or watch cable or youtube they all come from the same place through the same interface watching a new movie before screaming was a very different kind of choice say you have two hours and you decide you want to watch a movie you either look up a movie ahead of time or pick one at the theater from the moment you buy the ticket you have a binary choice either you stay and watch the movie or you leave and don't which feels like more of an investment in that movie you don't have a million other options unless you're willing to pay for another one streaming does not work the same way we need to decide a few minutes into streaming a movie whether we want to watch it or not and if the answer is no then we can switch to any other service and watch any other movie from the beginning there's almost no investment no consequences to stopping a movie and starting something new and that's kind of what i'm afraid of perhaps originally artemis fowl was unlikable purposefully so and by the end of the movie he has a slight redemption arc that turns him into a more likable hero over the course of the movie you learn about his character what he really cares about maybe you learn about his mom who is apparently cast in the movie and like what happened to her but whatever you empathize with artemis and by the end of the movie we are on artemis's side but if your audience is a streaming audience maybe they won't enjoy that first 10 minutes of a movie where the main character is a jerk maybe they'll switch to something else with a more harry potter-ass hero and they'll never see that development so like the breitbart trailer this movie needs to throw out all subtlety and please the crowd from the beginning you think he's just after gold no artemis wants to use the oculus to save his dad because he's a good boy like harry potter in fact forget about the gold fowls don't care about gold cut all references to it even though we filmed an entire ending where artemis cleverly escapes the time freeze wakes up and finds a bunch of gold and my best piece of evidence to support this motivation is a deleted scene which you can find on disney plus it's kind of tricky here's how you do it in this scene artemis and butler travel to vietnam find a fairy and then torture her so they can take pictures of her book which they could seemingly use to learn information about the fairy world this scene is almost completely finished it features hong chow who played lady true in hbo's watchmen watch it and parts of this scene even made it into the first trailer it also happens to be the first scene of the first book so why leave it out well the artemis in this scene is characterized very differently than the one we see in the movie artemis is ruthless uncaring even a little cruel but he gets what he wants this is the artemis book fans recognize but what if this were also the first scene in the movie even though the kid turns out okay in the end is he so unlikable that people won't watch past the first few minutes i think he might be disney knows what they're doing i mean clearly if they knew knew what they were doing this movie would be good but i have a feeling disney did their homework conducted tons of focus groups screened an original cut of artemis fowl and watched the dial turn immediately from like to dislike and then they made a decision rewrite the movie without shooting it change lines plot devices and instead of making the main character an unlikable villain who's after gold he can be a brave hero who is after the fairy equivalent of an infinity stone regardless of how the movie played out artemis needed to be just heroic enough that the audiences never disliked him long enough to watch something else and i think that sucks oh and one more thing so i am clearly not a huge fan of the artemis fowl movie i do want to tell you about the one legitimately good thing that i think came out of this movie and it's you know it doesn't have that much to do with the actual movie but here we go one of the trailers for the movie featured a song by an artist called campfire the song is called start it up and it's just a fun pump up song that i listen to before i record a video or a podcast to get me amped you may recognize campfire as the band that made the song superhuman which was from marvel spider-man ps4's launch trailer which is also a fun pump up song and if you're like me and you're at home and you want to listen to a nice little pump up song i would definitely recommend doing it on headphones made by this video sponsor raycon so that's apparently how these are going to go raycon sponsorships are going to feature me talking about music that i like so if you want to keep hearing about those i would definitely think about buying a pair of raycons raycon makes premium wireless headphones in earbuds that start around half of the price of others on the market i've actually had a pair of raycons for a while and like a lot of you i've been spending a lot of time indoors recently and it's really nice to just throw your wireless earbuds in and listen to a podcast or an audiobook like if you want to listen to the original book of artemis fowl whatever you're doing you've got your music your podcasts your audiobooks wherever you go they sound as amazing as the other top audio brands you guys know and their latest model the everyday e25s are the best one yet with six hours of play time seamless bluetooth pairing more bass and a more compact design that gives you a nice noise isolating fit it also comes in fun new colorways and click the link in the description below buy raycon dot com slash nando and get fifteen percent off of your order it is that easy recon use them to listen to podcasts videos artemis fowl audiobooks and cool pump up music like started up by campfire hey as always i have a humongous thank you to everyone who continues to support the channel on patreon because you guys are the best if you want to see your name up here get access to videos early other cool stuff like if you want to watch or even choose the topics for my whiteboard videos i use this whiteboard it's attached to a wall and it's not covered in aculos research but if you want to be part of those videos join the patreon if you want to be part of the new tier that i am about to start i think i'm gonna have to eliminate maybe like 20 patrons or something like that we did a pilot program of a book club where we all read kingdom come and discussed it and it's a really really fun experience i had a great time i think everybody really enjoyed it so i think that's going to be an official tier keep an eye out for that on the patreon i will tweet about it and uh yeah you have no idea how much i appreciate it also definitely subscribe to my podcast mostly nitpicking where every week me and my friends dj and diggins pick apart a piece of pop culture by looking exclusively at the details we did what i think is like a two plus hour episode on just the artemis fowl movie which is really interesting we recently did an episode on quibby we're gonna be doing episodes on whatever new thing is released or whatever old thing you guys want us to talk about tweet us suggestions we're at knitpickingpod on twitter last thing as always follow me on twitter instagram and now tick tock my handle is nando v movies on all those that's where i post updates on videos podcasts talk about artemis fowl show pictures of my cat it's all great stuff oh and the teas for a future video is an x-men thing i'm really excited you guys know i love the x-men it was just the 20th anniversary of the first x-men movie so i am going to be making an x-men video that i am very excited about very soon that is all i've got i'll see you next time you

Channel: Nando v Movies

Views: 169,995

Keywords: Disney, Artemis Fowl, Movies, Editing, ADR, Books, Josh Gad, Mulch Diggums, Colin Farrell, Nonso Anozie, Domovoi Butler, Holly Short, Judi Dench, Commander Root, Ferinda Shaw, Die Hard, Hans Gruber, Disney+

Id: _ui0eoqPsdU

Length: 28min 5sec (1685 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 17 2020