III. A. Casey Pugh: Star Wars uncut

Casey Pugh

Casey Pugh describes himself as a ‘creative technologist’. His career began in 2007 when he joined the team behind the website Vimeo. In his time working for the online film sharing service, view was instrumental in developing their unique video player (Zebo, 2010). Later he went to work for Boxee – an Internet TV service and has since quit it and co-created VHX, a film distribution service which aims to let go makers distribute their work straight to fans, cutting distribution fees.
Star Wars uncut is in essence the original ‘Star Wars: A New Hope’ film, which Pugh has split into 473 15-second clips. The twist is that in Pugh's remake of the film every 15 seconds have been made remade, filmed or animated by a different person. Star Wars Uncut is a fan feature film made on a massive scale. It is available to watch online, for free (starwarsuncut.com).

The process

Pugh recognised that his first challenge would be to get the word of his work out into the crowd (Zebo, 2010). He began that process by posting about the project in his blog, and asking his friends to share and tell others of his efforts. According to him ‘they re-blogged it and it just created a viral, chain effect.’ (Zebo, 2010).
The next priority was to make participation as easy as possible. He designed a gallery where the scenes appear in thumbnail format and allowed users to reserve their preferred scenes. Once a user reserves the scene, they had 30 days to submit a 15 second remake for that segment.
The responses for the project were very positive, with all the scenes claimed in the first three days after the site's first release (the big interview, 2009). You suggested to participants that they should keep the first and last seconds of their contributions relatively true to the original film to allow the film to run more smoothly. Otherwise, there were encouraged to produce whatever interpretation of their scenes they desired. By the end of this process, you received almost 1000 submissions.

End result

In an article titled The Work of Art in the Age of Mediated Participation: Crowdsourced Art and Collective Creativity, Ioana Literate describes the result of Casey Pugh's work as ‘recreating the famous world of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia with everything from cats to fingers to costumed children to salt and pepper shakers.’ (Literate, 2012. p.23). The end result is a wonderfully coherent ‘mash up’, as she describes it.

In 2010 Pugh attended the Emmy awards ceremony where he won the award in the interactive media category. Upon his nomination he released a statement saying ‘the real stars other fans and contributors’ (Stelter, 2010). Indeed, today on the website there is a list crediting all the participating users by their Vimeo usernames.
The director’s cut featured on Vimeo is interesting, because despite the name which suggests Pugh's editorial input, his real part in that version is programming system which chooses the most popular scenes based on a number of Vimeo ‘likes’ and compiles them seamlessly to form the two-hour film.

The next instalment in the Star Wars Uncut saga is now in production, but there is no expected time of release.