Kids' stuff

Seems that the Emmy committee liked the remake as much as the original; Brian Stelter has the story in The New York Times:

Hundreds of internet users remade Star Wars: A New Hope into a fan film last year, fifteen seconds at a time. This month they all played a part in The finished product, Star Wars Uncut, won an Emmy in a relatively new category, interactive media, heaping new attention onto a project that its producers call a “user-directed broadcast.”
The award is all the more remarkable because, in a world in which television heavyweights like HBO and NBC mount big-budget campaigns to win Emmys, Star Wars Uncut is just a hobby for its creator, Casey Pugh, a 26-year-old web developer who lives in Brooklyn. “I’m just so happy that the Internet is taking this step into the broadcast world,” he said in an interview, adding, “It’s partly because broadcast is letting it in.”
The makers of Star Wars Uncut were encouraged by a Television Academy member and past winner, Richard Cardran, to submit their project for an award. The annual awards recognize television production, but in the age of online video streaming they also acknowledge the ways that shows can connect with fans online.
“Fans want to be involved in shows,” said Geoff Katz, a co-governor of the Emmys’ Interactive Media Peer Group, which oversees the category, officially called “outstanding creative achievement in interactive media.”
In previous years winning websites have effectively been marketing vehicles for television shows like Lost and Heroes. But Star Wars Uncut is more; it is completely independent, a work of art by film aficionados around the world. Mr. Katz called it a “major milestone” for the Emmys.
That is something that Mr. Pugh and his fellow filmmakers also highlighted in a reel for the voters this summer. “At ‘Star Wars Uncut’ users aren’t just getting more information about their favorite characters, they are the characters,” the video’s narrator, Jamie Wilkinson, said.
The project was rooted in Mr. Pugh’s interest in crowd-sourcing, a term for divvying up tasks by way of the Web. Last fall he sliced A New Hope into fifteen-second scenes— 473 in all— and concocted a website where fans could sign up to recreate each scene. All told, there were multiple submissions for each fifteen-second scene, a wild assortment of live-action, animation, Lego set-ups, stop-motion sequences, and more.
“The reward for people is doing the work,” he said. “That’s their favorite part: actually re-enacting the scenes.” That was one of Mr. Pugh’s motivations, too: wanting to create a scene of his own. He drew attention to the project by writing about it on his blog.
This month Mr. Pugh put online the Uncut Movie, which appears to be a fully finished fan version of A New Hope but is actually just a seamless playing of the 473 scenes in a row.
A computer program written by Mr. Pugh automatically plays the highest-rated rendition of each scene, and it compiles those scenes on the fly, so the movie can change in real time depending on the ratings of users.
“I think the reason we won the Emmy is because this is an entirely new type of broadcast,” said Annelise Pruitt, the designer of the Uncut website. She calls it “crowd-sourced and code-directed art.”
For Ms. Pruitt, too, it has been a hobby.
The producers’ final work is a fully-edited fan film with the actual Star Wars soundtrack. They have told fans on their website that “we are working through the legal issues in order to bring that to everyone as soon as possible.”
Mr. Pugh said Lucasfilm, which is notoriously protective of the Star Wars brand, contacted him early in the creation of Uncut and told him that it wanted to support the project. Because Mr. Pugh has signed a non-disclosure agreement, there is little he can say about the discussions with the company, except that “Lucasfilm isn’t out to make money on this, and neither am I.”
Lucasfilm said in a statement that “we are really pleased that they won an Emmy for their efforts” and that its long-time partner for fan productions, Atom Films, is in talks with the producers. Atom holds an annual Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge, which culminates in screenings of winning films on the Spike channel, and “we hope that some day Star Wars Uncut can air on Spike,” Lucasfilm said.
Already, the fully-edited film has been screened once, at a festival in Copenhagen in April, but Lucasfilm put off planned screenings in New York, Mr. Pugh said. He said he had hoped to start recutting The Empire Strikes Back this summer, but that, too, has been delayed.
Ms. Pruitt, Mr. Pugh, his brother Chad, and Mr. Wilkinson, paid $400 to submit Star Wars Uncut for an Emmy. “The real stars are the fans and contributors,” they wrote in a blog post when they were nominated.
In the interactive media category, they were up against websites tied to Glee, the Fox musical, and Dexter, the Showtime drama, but they were feeling confident when they flew here for last Saturday’s Creative Arts awards ceremony, a precursor to the Emmys ceremony that is on NBC on Sunday night. At the judging session in early August, “people were whispering ‘You’re gonna win,’ ” Casey Pugh said.
Aas the win sank in and the celebrating wound down, Ms. Pruitt posted a photo of the producers onstage on her blog. Echoing the team’s acceptance speech, she captioned it, “I guess the force was with us.”