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Convert Movies From R to PG13 to PG On The Fly
uchi writes "Trilogy Studios announced the launch of its "Movie Mask" web site - www.moviemask.com , which will eventually lead up to the release of its "Movie Mask DVD Player" and "Movie Mask Director" software. The Director software will allow users to selectively add/edit a video adding graphics and special effects, which is nothing special in my opinion. The Movie Mask DVD Player, on the other hand, will allow its users to download a movie config file(for lack of a better term) which will have various portions of the movies to bleep/cut out depending on the rating which the person set. It can be changed on the fly while watching the video. This seems like a good idea - it would allow many people who don't wish to be subjected to violence/nudity/language a chance to watch any movie they want without waiting months for it to be released on network television, already PG-13ized."
I think this would be a much better product if they allowed you to set levels for each of language, sex, violence, etc. Although, it does seem that you can make your own "masks", so I guess a third party could do that.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
I thought that DVD could already do this? Most DVD players have a parental lock feature which can result in by-passing scenes in the movie, e.g. the pie scene in American Pie. What's this offering that we don't already have?
Of my two parents, one (my mother) had no problem with nudity in films but didn't like violence, while the other (my father) has no problem with violence in films, but didn't like nudity. My tastes are closer to my mother's: it's a screwed up world that deems it okay for a youngster to watch someone getting their brains blown out, but not someone taking their clothes off.
The point is, creating a branched film which incorporated various versions of scenes could be a great idea, as long as they allow you to select *what* you do or don't see at a fine grained level.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
Movie making is an art form that very few people can do well. What about the impact of deleting out violent scenes has on the overall impact of the movie? Doesn't this device impact on screenwriter/director's rights?
Could we also rip out pages of a book to eliminate the offensive materials without the author's permission?
I think a bad aspect of this is that it allows viewers to muck with the director's vision at will. (And yes, the MPAA does it all the time.)
Movies are made from a script with certain events and dialogue, and the director has the unifying vision that drives how it's all shot and put together. When the viewer can select what is in the movie and what is cut, it's no longer the movie the director made, unless the movie was made with this in mind.
Just like viewing a pan-and-scanned movie (you don't see the movie that was shot), this changes the movie you watch. Should we extend this technology so in an art museum we can wear special glasses that allow us to put clothes on the nudes?
(I recently saw an exhibit that happened to feature some nude paintings and there was a big warning out front - "Might be offensive!")
OK, here's a very debatable point: movies are art. Not necessarily good art, but art nonetheless. Even if you don't agree, they are very complex creations requiring the effort of many people over long periods - surely so much effort is worth something.
I don't know -- certainly people have the right to choose not to see/watch things that offend them, but do they have the right to change works of art? To screw with the artist's vision? Even to change very complex creations that may not be "art" but took a helluva lot of effort...?
Hmmm.
Actually, this is done already all the time... but by hollywood. When a film is made, the MPAA reviews it and gives it their rating. Frequently, Hollywood will submit a movie and it will come back with an 'R' rating. The studio may decide that an 'R' rating would make them less money by restricting it from a large portion of their target audience, and if they decide that, the movie goes back to editing (sometimes in extreme cases, scenes are re-shot) and a new version is submitted, one that will get them their "target rating". The perfect example of this is the film Basic Instinct. When that film was submitted for review, it became the first movie to recieve the then new, NC-17 rating. The studio decided that since they wanted the money of the under 17 crowd, that they would re-edit it and shoot for an R, which they got. Later that decision was (partially) reversed, when the studio actually released the film in BOTH NC-17 AND R versions to theaters, and home video. So as far as I can tell, this would broaden up the spectrum of available movies for a lot of parrents who are paranoid^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h concerned about their children seeing what they want^h^h^h^h shouldn't.
Now granted, I doubt it will do much for some films, like the Southpark movie or such great "classic" films like Strip to Kill. Seeing as those films would probably be about 8 minutes long and have nothing even resembling plot if they were cut down a rating... But there are THOUSANDS of films out there that only have content that people find objectionable for their children to watch in a couple scenes which can be cut without significantly dammaging the plot. Take one of my favorite films for example, Top Gun. Most people would probably think that the violence is the worst part of the film, but there is lots of language that I never even realized would have to be cut for TV. I just never thought of it when enjoying the film. Everything form "Mother Goose, you Pussy!" to "You'll be flying a cargo plane full of rubber dog shit out of Hong Kong" Most parrents don't mind their kids seeing violence as long as it's not overly graphic. But lots of parrents DO mind swearing in movies because their children tend to emmulate it. They tend to emulate some of the violence too (through play, etc) but for whatever reason, this is more acceptable, but that's another discussion entirly...
Another example, Starship Troopers I think, probably a better example... there are about a dozen scenes in that film that add to the atmosphere of the film, but take nothing important away by being cut. The nude scenes (shower and sex scene), for instance, and some of the more graphic scenes of soilders being literally torn apart. You can have a war movie without these scenes. I personally would rather see the movie as it was intended to be seen, but I can understand the choice of parents that want to control what their kids see. In many ways it's not censorship at all, think of it as browsing the films at 4 or 5 rather than ar -1.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
Quite a few Hollywood movies are otherwise excellent productions that have been ruined by the addition of gratuitous sex, nudity, violence, coarse language, and so on. Why? Hollywood believes that it sells. But the truth is that most people don't appreciate the garbage, and would go see movies without it, and would be just as entertained. That's why edited movies are so popular.
There are plenty of adults who prefer not to be exposed to unnecessary filth. Call us old-fashioned, uptight, naive. But the fact is that we're the ones holding the country together by raising good strong families.
And don't excuse the garbage that Hollywood pushes by saying that movies just mirror reality. If anything, they present a selective view of reality -- there is much more to life than sex and violence!
In the case of decency standards, take the words "screw" and "fuck" -- which mean the same thing, but one of them is considered so harmful that films and CD's containing the word actually carry warning labels. "Fuck" is just a syllable -- the notion of what is considered a dirty word is completely arbitrary. When I was ten, I had an idea for solving the problem of "foul language" in movies: just declare that at midnight on the next January 1st, all swear words are reclassified as "slang" so they're not swear words any more.
The entire "Why we do this" page [rant :)] is quite interesting; well worth a read. Not like any of it would ever happen. :)
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Well, actually it was a buddy's idea, but I've been working on it. I have hacked Xine to do on-the-fly edits of DVDs. My code can do various edits now, but I'm just beginning to work on the "edit script" stuff that tells it what to do. My approach is to use a pair of XML files, one that documents the content of a DVD movie, along with links to files with replacement video, audio and subtitles, and one that is a sort of a movie-watching "stylesheet", that specifies how you want the player to handle various kinds of content. Rather than just allowing you to select an MPAA rating level, I'd like to allow you to specify what kinds of things you don't like, what degree you'll accept, and how to deal with it when the movie exceeds those bounds. For example, should the player just fuzz out the boobs, or skip the scene entirely? Or should it go into slow motion so you can watch every jiggle? The content script will also have to have some sort of a "relevance to plot" rating for each section, so that the stylesheet can specify different actions for stuff that matters.
I'm also making the script engine pluggable because I see value in other kinds of scripts. For example, with a more procedural type of script you could string together snippets of video from one or more DVDs, interspersing other bits of video, splashing words or other images over the top, etc., to make collages, artwork, etc.
There seem to be a lot of people questioning whether or not any of this is useful, and I've run into a suprising amount of opposition when I talk to people about it. Here are some uses:
To me, this is about freedom of choice. I like to watch movies, but I may or may not want to watch them in exactly the way Hollywood makes them. This is really going to piss off directors who will feel that the "artistic integrity" of their movies is damaged, but I'm interested in my own entertainment, not in their "artistic integrity", and since I'm paying them, I think it's my choice that matters. Others may be more interested in the message the director is trying to convey, and they're welcome to watch the thing in its entirety. Others may be interested in an easy way to create derivative artworks (until Fair Use is abolished, of course).
I guess I'll abandon my vague ideas of productizing my work (I was quite enjoying the idea of people buying a DVD player and recieving a CD-ROM full of source to all of the GPL code that rus it, "Martha, what in hell is this crap" ;)), but if anyone is interested in helping me work on this, send me an e-mail.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Besides, why would I want to ruin a director's vision of what s/he would like the audience to see?
Gee, what a great attitude! Let's apply it to software.
"Why would I want to ruin a developer's vision of what s/he would like the user to see?"
Possibly because the developer is not omniscient and can't decide what all users will want to see. Possibly because the developer's vision is flawed. (Phantom Menace 1.1, anyone?) Possibly for reasons I can't begin to imagine but which will become obvious once the device is on the market.
Converting from R to PG-13 results in the loss of nudity and language, but you'd probably keep all the same levels of violence. Roger Ebert rants about this all the time.
From his Movie Answer-Man column on November 4th:
The fundamental problem with the MPAA is that it avoids making any kind of common-sense evaluation of a film, and simply counts f-words and evaluates nudity. ''Waking Life,'' one of the most affirmative and challenging films I can imagine for smart teenagers, gets the R rating, while the thriller ''Domestic Disturbance,'' which shows a small child exposed to a murder, an incineration, the beating of his mother (leading to a miscarriage) and the beating of his father, after which the kid himself causes an electrocution, gets the PG-13--presumably because there is no nudity and the language stays below the cut-off point. What sane parent would prefer their teenager to see ''Domestic Disturbance'' rather than "Waking Life''?
To me, this is absurdity. Parents cannot rely on these crap ratings. If you are truly concerned about your children/family, you need to watch the movie yourself beforehand and then make an honest judgement.
This is the horrific result of what happens when :)
a society becomes so inhibited that it develops
specific tools to allow people to remain naive.
An entire family of people who have automatic
reactions to certain language. They're just words!
They're just combinations of sounds that, for some
odd historical reason, some religious freaks and
other prudes have somehow decided to focus on..
I'd bet that if there were a language without them,
these kind of people would be the ones to make them
up in order to be able to whine about people using
them
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
I can't say I don't have some misgivings about this. Generally speaking, I think technology is making life just a tad too customizable, and that has some disadvantages.
It used to be that we only got our news from three or four major sources. This was bad, but the advantage was that everyone was on basically the same page.
Now we have a wide variety of different news sources, of widely varying competence. Does this help keep everyone honest? Or does it offer recipients the ability to ignore just about everything they don't always agree with?
The answer, of course, is both. It's up to you whether you get all your news from a Rush Limbaugh/James Carville*, or select from a wide variety of sources to get a full picture of events.
So what happens when you get to decide precisely what you see and what you don't? Imagine being able to alter the CNN feed to bleep out any stories about errant bombs or atrocities by the Northern Alliance. Or filtering so that all you got was stories about Open source, school shootings, and the Microsoft/DOJ settlement. How skewed could your worldview get if you're only subjected to things which confirm it.
So inasfar as this allows people to see only that which they are comfortable with, I'm not comfortable with it. Most people, myself included, generally only seek out information which supports whatever memes are already lodged in their brains.
For example, if you liked what I've written so far, you could filter out the final paragraph which might change your opinion:
This is an evil weapon of intolerance, and it must be wiped off the face of the Earth! Death to all fanatics! Make me your king and bootlegged DVDs will flow through the streets!
*I almost said "George Carlin." Weird.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Thanks for saying it.
Most mindboggling thing about 9/11 - a moment where the censors just popped in raw video footage from a guy who had a handicam pointed in the right/wrong place when the second plane went in.
The reaction of the camera holder was predictable: A scream of "Holy fucking Christ!"
The news guy apologized profusely for the language. I blurted out in shock and laughter at the patent absurdity of that ("What the fuck?"), and a person next to me said, in a concerned voice, "Well, you know there might be children watching"
Yeah, lady, your crotchfruit have just spent the past three hours watching 6000 people get incinerated, crushed, and splattering on the ground like sacks of wet cement, over and over again, live and on replay on National TV, and you're worried about them being emotionally damaged by hearing naughty words?!?!
Holy fucking Christ indeed. Holy fucking Christ.