277 pointsby gaws5 days ago22 comments
  • tristanj5 days ago
    Shrek Retold https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM70TROZQsI is a similar fan-made reproduction, but it's way more polished. The movie is split into roughly 1min sections, with each one done by a different creator. The quality is all over the place, in a hilarious way. One minute it's produced by a professional animator nailing the scenes, then the next minute it's people goofing around in their backyard.
    • lloeki5 days ago
      I believe the trendsetter was Star Wars Uncut, made of 15s slices:

      https://www.starwarsuncut.com/

      Which I now realise I never watched in full...

      • cafeinux5 days ago
        I love the differences between those three movies (The Free Movie, Shrek Retold and Star Wars Uncut). Star Wars really looks like a work of love. Shrek looks like a work of love that tries it's best to not take itself seriously. Free Movie looks like a bizarre troll post.

        While this is coherent with each movie's tone itself, and perhaps with the time each "demaster" was made (I don't know, I didn't check), I feel like this is most coherent with how each movie is viewed by the community:

        - Star Wars is a beloved movie, with a huge honest fan base. Thus, it was remade with love and attention to detail.

        - Shrek is a beloved movie, but doesn't take itself seriously in the first place, and is also a meme. Thus it was remade with love, but trying hard to look like it's a troll.

        - Bee Movie is mainly a meme, isn't AFAIK a beloved movie, and its fan base is mostly made of memers and trolls. Thus it was low-effortly remade at this non-flattering image.

        • Freak_NL5 days ago
          > Bee Movie is mainly a meme, isn't AFAIK a beloved movie, […]

          All you had to do was add one more 'e'. What a senseless waste of a pun…

        • johnnyanmac5 days ago
          Bee movie has more of a cult fanbase at best. It's still Seinfeld, and the jokes aged surprisingly well.

          But there's only so far you can get with a story of a bee breaking out of his natural programming,followed by a bee-human romance, followed by said bee suing humanity for stealing bee-kind's honey. You can't even truly explain the plot without breaking it down into 3 episodes.

          It's a surprisingly good benchmark to ask "is it better than Bee movie" when measuring other Dreamworks movies against themselves.

          • soperj4 days ago
            You forgot the part where the bees then sit around and do nothing after getting all their honey back. It's basically a diatribe against universal basic income, since without the incentive to slave away for the rest of their lives, their lives become meaningless.
        • cf100clunk4 days ago
          > Star Wars is a beloved movie, with a huge honest fan base. Thus, it was remade with love and attention to detail.

          Agreed. Star Wars Uncut exists because devotees wanted to set the record straight regarding controversial changes in later versions, and their efforts were laudable. Still, the image and sound quality cannot match the latest, greatest studio versions, so watching Uncut versions on the newest home theatre gear means accepting the warts and all.

          Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's remaster was also a labour of love but with a different purpose (image clarity and upscaling):

          https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19453745

          • dmonitor4 days ago
            I believe you are confusing Star Wars Uncut with Star Wars Despecialized Edition. Image and sound quality are far, far away from the first thing I would point out when distinguishing Uncut from the studio masters.
            • cf100clunk3 days ago
              Thank you, I did indeed mistake one for the other.
    • vhodges5 days ago
      There is an episode of Bob's Burgers that did something similar to this. https://bobs-burgers.fandom.com/wiki/Brunchsquatch/Trivia#:~...
    • wk_end5 days ago
      There’s an extremely goofy version of RoboCop that’s sort of like this as well.

      https://m.imdb.com/title/tt3528906/

      • plussed_reader4 days ago
        Our Robocop Remake is a scene by scene remake, made in the same spirit as this FreeBee Movie.

        Worth a watch with friends present: https://vimeo.com/85903713

      • aceazzameen5 days ago
        The Robocop remake was my first thought. Some of those scenes are hilarious.
    • asabla5 days ago
      Some of the most goofiest scenes reminded me about my self growing up, recording dumb re-creations of movies/tv-shows with friends.

      I had a blast watching that! thank you for sharing.

    • tzs5 days ago
      Similar is "South Park Reanimated: The List" [1]. From the description:

      > 6 years, 175 animators, 260 unique scenes, 1 copyright dispute, and a lot of love-- we are proud to finally present the South Park Reanimated Project! We are so grateful for everyone who participated and made this such an amazing recreation. We hope you enjoy!

      [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QXX6AnO0nI

    • sirbranedamuj4 days ago
      also featuring a great reimagining of I'm A Believer by Hot Dad :)
  • ikesau5 days ago
    I drew a few frames in this, but it was a real shame to see how little quality control there was in the final cut. Makes it kind of unwatchable.

    Progress near the end was really fast, as lots of people had caught on and were racing to get as many frames in as possible.

    I really don't think this concept has been worn out yet, and someone could make their own version of this with a small review step and then we'd get some fun, actually watchable hand-drawn movies :)

    • sjf4 days ago
      You’re right, I can’t believe they didn’t cut frames that are totally unrelated, there so many left in that are just scribbles or text.

      I just tried making some frames for the dune remake. The editor is so hard to use. I can only draw a one pixel line with no smoothing. It’s really laggy/glitchy. I can barely even make out what the original frame is because it’s in grayscale with an overlay. I got one frame that could have been a landscape of snow and rocks, or it could have been sand dunes, or water. I have no idea, it was just gray and white blobs.

      I get that they are going for a retro style, but even MS paint had different size brushes.

      It’s such a cool idea, I wish the tooling was better.

    • ElCapitanMarkla4 days ago
      What would be interesting is if multiple submissions could be made for each frame, and you could rank each.

      You could build a version of the best frames every year and watch it progress.

  • kevingadd5 days ago
    From a few moments of watching, it seems like over half the crowd-sourced frames are just trolling and not actually a representation of the original film. I guess that kind of adds to the aesthetic, but I'm a little surprised they kept those troll frames...
    • doubled1125 days ago
      For at least a few seconds it was an odd game of phallus or frame.
    • 5 days ago
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    • jsight4 days ago
      Yeah, there really needed to be some voting or other feedback system to encourage consistency over time.

      This is a mildly interesting experiment that largely just looks like a failure at the moment.

    • lukevp5 days ago
      Yeah I agree, there should be a voting system that can kick out bogus frames and have someone remake them, would be really interesting to see what it’d look like if everyone was trying to recreate it. Kind of like rotoscoping I suppose. As it is, there’s just a ton of discontinuity because of the troll frames.
      • chem835 days ago
        I imagine that trolls would eventually band together to try to steamroll the voting system like it happens on r/Place. Maybe.
        • nielsole5 days ago
          If votes are attributable, such voting rings should be easily detectable
      • pcblues5 days ago
        This is a fascinating idea. Sort of like a wikipedia, but trying to establish the truth of a single movie rather than everything we know.

        It would probably end up needing moderators, harassing people for funding, and pay for political purposes as well as its core reason for existing :)

  • Reviving15145 days ago
    This is amazing. I love that this exists. I'm surprised how negative some of the comments are.
    • SV_BubbleTime5 days ago
      I skipped to a random spot, and lasted about 5 seconds. Two drawings of dicks, 50% scribbles, and a couple frames of just the word PENIS. Yes, this is truly a noteworthy effort.

      I’m as equally curious as you, just on the other side of the horseshoe.

      • polonbike5 days ago
        Same here. If you skip to a random part of the movie, and move frame by frame, it becomes a game of "spot the penis". Just one or two can be "tolerated", but we're far from that here, so ... My opinion is that it does not really belong in HN
        • andybak5 days ago
          > My opinion is that it does not really belong in HN

          It's a fascinating tech/social experiment. It belongs on HN because it was done and the outcome is what it is.

          If you actually want to watch the Bee Movie then watch the original. I doubt generating a watchable alternative was behind anyone's motivation in this.

        • filcuk5 days ago
          Because of a penis drawing? Are we in preschool? There have been those ever since caveman times.
          • robertlagrant5 days ago
            I think the point is we're not in preschool, nor are we cave(wo)men, so we don't need the penis drawings.
            • gopher_space5 days ago
              A penis drawing isn't something that's needed, it's something that happens. Feel free to rail against them in a Kanute-like manner, but learning to cock an eyebrow and say "yeah, that figures" can be self-preserving.

              For what it's worth I too prefer the plausible deniability of Georgia O'Keefe's outrageous lies. It's a more sensible chuckle.

              • robertlagrant4 days ago
                No-one's railing against anything.
                • gopher_space4 days ago
                  I was hoping to introduce my old “donging through the millennia” thesis work and ride that hobby horse around the room a little :(
          • shermantanktop5 days ago
            Did the caveman Bee Movie have penises in it? Because then you’d have a really good point.
      • aceazzameen5 days ago
        I'm sure this one had an absurdly short TTP (time to penis).
    • astura5 days ago
      >I'm surprised how negative some of the comments are.

      It's literally unwatchable - It's 85% scribbles and "jokes."

    • tyleo5 days ago
      I can understand the negativity because this only appeals to specific sensibilities.

      I admit that it’s low brow but it hits my fascination the exact right way. To me there is something special about so many people being organized around something so mundane.

  • eigenblake5 days ago
    We could probably fine-tune a tiny convolutional neutral net image classifier and just hold on the last good frames for longer to cover the frames with clear trolling and nsfw images.
    • BriggyDwiggs425 days ago
      I think that would miss the point
      • mkagenius5 days ago
        No, that point was already made. This will be a new point unlike the previous point.
        • BriggyDwiggs425 days ago
          But i like the previous point. Why would you take it from me?
          • I-M-S4 days ago
            It's not taking away, a new point is by definition adding. Just like The Free Movie added to The Bee Movie.
            • BriggyDwiggs424 days ago
              I think it would be subtractive. To my eye, it seems like the point of the project was to celebrate the free expression of the crowd. The lack of censorship and filtering is core to the purpose of the project. If you start filtering out individual contributions in order to more accurately reconstruct the original movie, then I don’t really get why you wouldn’t just pirate the movie.
  • binary_slinger5 days ago
    Who is going to put each frame into image to image AI model and get out a photorealistic output and recompile?
    • cafeinux5 days ago
      Lots of photorealistic phalluses are going to be generated.
      • davidmurdoch5 days ago
        Only if you're using a model trained on them
        • RankingMember5 days ago
          I think it would be against the spirit of the project not to do so
    • Terretta4 days ago
      I've read white papers seemingly claiming with the right prompt these sketches would turn into the indicated art.

      That would be quite the compression scheme.

    • _bent5 days ago
      [flagged]
  • dang5 days ago
    Related:

    The Free Movie - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36687399 - July 2023 (100 comments)

  • echelon5 days ago
    Back when I was first playing around with AI, I built a website where people could upload fine tuned GlowTTS and Tacotron2 text to speech model weights.

    One of the first things users did was to emit the entire transcript of the Bee Movie:

    https://youtu.be/0_ToJXHnVFQ?si=qfMNuJXAHW-hWSz5

  • yboris4 days ago
    Different approach: splice in visual and audio effects of guns into Harry Potter

    Harry Potter and the Deathly Weapons -- Harry Potter With Guns

    https://harrypotterwithguns.com/

    • conductr4 days ago
      I never watched or read the series but my wife was watching it (last week actually), I passed by and saw a chase scene where they were shooting from their wands at each other and I made a comment like "Oh, it's Jason Bourne for kids.. now I see the appeal"
  • airstrike5 days ago
    I think the word "crowdsourced" is conspicuously missing from the title. It would explain a lot.
    • cafeinux5 days ago
      They do say it's "crowd-pirated".
  • r-w5 days ago
    Epilepsy warning please! :-)
  • bytematic5 days ago
    would be cool without all the trolling
    • smolder5 days ago
      Better in concept than execution, for sure. I feel bad for the people that actually drew their frames competently.
      • ternnoburn5 days ago
        The execution is part of the art of it, like, there's a statement being made about the Internet, anonymity, and humanity here. It may not be what the artist originally set out to create with their art, which I find fascinating.
  • 5 days ago
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  • pajko5 days ago
    The bunny reenactments are cool too: http://www.angryalien.com/
  • WesolyKubeczek5 days ago
    Nice idea, but I’m struggling to remember myself ever having consumed so many different pictures of dicks over the course of five minutes.
  • tuanx55 days ago
    Reminiscent of Shrek Retold
  • ashoeafoot4 days ago
    life finds a way to preserve around the cultural death that is copyright
  • Deprogrammer95 days ago
    Thanks for making me watch that? WTF
  • renewiltord5 days ago
    I watched 5 seconds and it was garbage. Felt like /dev/random
  • imdsm5 days ago
    I clicked randomly, at 00:37:09 and got a penis
  • brianbest1015 days ago
    [dead]
  • GrantMoyer4 days ago
    I can certainly see why many commenters here find this many dicks hard to swallow, but when I take them wholly with the rest of the work, I find they come together satisfyingly and rawly defile copyright and DRM.