What is this? WHY?!
Star Wars Wars started with a simple desire to hear how all the opening title themes sounded being played simultaneously. Obviously that ballooned into wanting to hear it with sound effects, and then wanting to see all the images at the same time. I found an effect (a "blending mode" called "lighter color", "lighten", or "max" depending on your software) that takes the given layers of video and only displays the layer with brightest pixel. This is why Hoth blows everything away, why lightsabers, explosions, and blasters always show up, etc. I played around with contrast of each film to get it blended to my preference, and mixed the audio so they all had equal share in the soundtrack.
In March of 2015 I did a test with the first 10 minutes of all 6 Star Wars films overlaid on top of one another, and uploaded it to YouTube. People liked it. I decided to attempt to produce the entire length of all the films.
By June I had finished. What I ended up enjoying the most were the still frames that this method of overlay created. I put them on Imgur and got a wonderful response. When the video was up, it took off.
The video was picked up by Esquire, Wired, Nerdist, LA Times, Time, CNet, /film and a lot of others.
But there was a problem. I had accidentally uploaded the standard definition version.
After a week or so I was able to get the 720p version on youtube and out for download. Things were great for a couple of months. The two videos combined had reached just over 1.4 million views. Then one day I received a message that the HD version had been removed by YouTube for violation of community guidelines.
I'm still not totally clear what cause it to go down, since I have yet to receive a copyright strike. The language from YouTube seems to indicate that I violated a duplicate content rule by uploading the same video twice. Derp.
Whatever the case, I decided to move my HD version to vimeo, but then host it in a place where I can always update fans in case there are future takedowns. Also, this allows me to provide the magnet links, so you can freely download the films in full HD and enjoy them whenever you want.
As a little bonus, I made a version of the Star Wars Wars with just the Original Trilogy, as was a common request.
Thanks for watching.
- Marcus