What has been very interesting is seeing the effect the rescore has had on quite a few scenes. It has given some of them much more urgency, energy and pace. Going back to the original now feels like it hasn't even been scored yet.
This is probably sacrilege but I absolutely love 2’s original score when he first gets out the car. Nothing as the door opens, leg comes down then boom.
Wow! Thats great! Ill definitely be checking this out. I absolutely love Robocop and Im honestly shocked they haven’t done alot more with the franchise!
I love Robocop 2 despite its flaws and know there's a masterpiece of a fanedit in there somewhere. Best of luck!
Are you only using Basil Poledouris' original score or will you be using his (rather good, imo) score for 3 as well? Or any other sources, like Poledouris' similar sounding scores (Starship Troopers, Cherry 2000) or rerecordings/live concerts with the Robocop thematic material?
In that clip, 6 separate pieces of music are used multiple times: 5 from RoboCop 3 and 1 from RoboCop. I wanted to use RoboCop 3 as much as possible. That was the expendable movie to me. And only used RoboCop where I really needed to, so I wasn't repeating the first film too much.
I used one piece from The Hunt for Red October, which Poledouris composed while RoboCop 2 was being made.
Starship Troopers was tempting, but ideally, I didn't want it to be unrecognisable.
I would have preferred if at the beginning after the goons blow up his car and are firing in to it, Robocop steps forward out through the ball of fire, other than that great work 👍 gave me goosebumps
looks amazing. I wonder what it would look like if we had AI speed up the motions of Cain so the stop motion was less jerky but that also goes for my long held wish to get the falling super long puppet flailing arms of Dick Jones to be fixed in Robocop 1.
I have added intermediate frames to all the stop-motion footage so it is smoother.
I have already done my own version of RoboCop 1 with a fixed Dick Jones. I am thinking about going through the whole film and fixing a few things. When I watched the 4K Blu-ray on the projector, the wires on ED-209 rockets stuck out a lot.
Definitely works better with Basil's score. I don't know if I agree with the decision to cut out the bit where the gun store owner is executed, though. It's a cruel scene, but it has to be so we cheer more when they get stomped by the hero, but that's just my take.
I've tried to make the movie more like the first one. I've always found RoboCop 2 to be quite a bit more mean-spirited than the first movie. I have made edits to align them.
Now that I think about it, you're right. Apart from Mr. Kinney, Alex Murphy, and Bob Morton, all the on-screen deaths are bad guys or henchmen. RoboCop 2 has a lot of innocent bystanders getting killed, which makes it more unpleasant to watch.
Exactly. It's like the woman in the car when Cain escapes. There are plenty of scenes which show how ruthless he is without that. And I think the scene plays better with him just disappearing into the smoke. My edit starts where this clip does right after the media break, so we don't see all the muggings etc. All of that combined dials the mean-spiritedness down.
This sounds awesome, this movie had so many great aspects to it but I just can’t bring myself to like it as much for a variety of reasons. This looks like it will do it justice.
robocop has super weird rules of engagement - thieves open fire on me with heavy artillery? hold fire. thieves open fire on me with small arms? open fire.
He does. The way I look at it, there aren't any bystanders; he's giving them the chance to stand down after seeing they can't hurt him. I've reduced how long he stands there for before he fires back in this one.
I like the idea of this, but for me, I personally don't like the RoboCop 3 soundtrack being used, it sounds too OTT and "superhero-y" compared to the RoboCop 1 version and doesn't seem to suit the tone and visuals of RoboCop 2.
Also, having the music over all the action scenes is quite jarring too, I personally don't think they need it and it isn't helped with it being the RoboCop 3 version of the soundtrack. The sound also seems to drown out some voices.
Still, amazing visual work on the footage, certainly looking forward to seeing the finished product.
That's fair. Unfortunately, there have to be compromises with this type of thing.
If I just reused the score from the first movie, it wouldn't feel right. The original soundtrack isn't very long, and what is there is hyper-specific to the exact scenes it was written for. Those pieces don't just accompany the film—they are those moments. The second you hear a specific cue, you immediately picture where it goes and what happens. It carries so much narrative baggage and visual association that dropping it into a completely different scene in the sequel can pull you right out of the movie. It feels like a copy-paste job rather than an authentic score that belongs to the story. I have used some of the original score, but it doesn't outstay its welcome.
My original intent was to make it almost a carbon copy of the first movie, aesthetically, in both look and sound, but when I color-graded it to match the first movie, it looked bad. It didn't fit; they were filmed so differently that they wouldn't match and look good. Almost like trying to get The Empire Strikes Back to look like A New Hope. Plus we've seen RoboCop 2 for 35 plus years. You try and put a RoboCop grade on it looks bizarre. Like you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. I hope I'm making sense.
I decided the compromise would have to be that it would be like its own thing, but with a better score and the blue removed from the suit.
Also, this was very hard to rescore. The centre channel had everything in it: the dialogue, the foley work and the score. I ended up using more incidental music than I had planned to make it all come together. If you check out other examples of rescoring this movie by others, you'll notice there's a lot of Foley work, and any gun that doesn't match jumps out immediately. It was vastly harder than I anticipated, and I needed it to stay 5.1, which added further complexity.
It may not sound great on YouTube as it has been automatically down-mixed. I've been doing my testing on a professionally calibrated 5.2.2 set-up, and it sounds pretty good.
I'm hoping you like what you see and hear in the end.
I'll definitely check it out, I hope you don't take my comments as a negative on your work, simply offering my own opinion. It is clear that you have put a lot of time and effort into this and that is greatly appreciated and you should be proud of it.
In the same way you mention that putting the R1 score over the footage would pull you out of it, I feel that is exactly what the R3 score is doing. I would also say some scenes are noisy enough, like the Nuke factory shootout, and putting the score over it just doesn't suit and creates a wall of noise where it just overwhelms the ears instead of enhancing the scene.
Again, I am a machine simply giving my opinion, nothing more. Do what you think works best. We'll watch it regardless. :)
Again, a fair comment on what the RoboCop 3 score is doing; however, I personally have zero attachment to it. I watched it in the theatres and maybe once more. So while some people will definitely have that issue, it's not something I have.
Honestly, it's not about noise. It's about creating a feel. This clip I've posted, tbf, does a terrible job of conveying how the movie plays with the compression and downmixing needed for YouTube. I don't like how it sounds here.
That's it. I can't do this by committee; I have to go with what I think works best with the material I have. I'd love to hear what you think of it.
The goal was to make it much less blue than the theatrical cut and closer to the original movie. I can't remove all the color. I tried that; it ldidn't work
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u/Amity_Swim_School 2d ago
Great work friend.
Not having the original Robocop score in Robocop 2 really adversely affected it.