SWU is the brain child of former Vimeo developer Casey Pugh, who broke the original Star Wars into 15-second sections and invited fans to pick a section and shoot it in whatever way they saw fit. Homemade clips of varying quality flooded in like fans to a free Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes concert. Pugh and his cohorts let the internet vote on which were the best, then edited the winning clips together to create an entirely new movie.
How is it? Well, it turns out most Star Wars fans don’t have access to a whole lot of Industrial Light & Magic, so they used the materials they had on hand to lovingly craft their tributes. That means every 15 seconds the movie switches from clever animations to trash-can R2-D2s to stop-motion Lego figures to soup-pot Stormtrooper helmets to dudes draped in old carpets making Wookie noises. But none of that really matters; watching Star Wars Uncut is like watching old video of freshly liberated Germans gallivanting on the just-downed Berlin Wall: Not the most organized party the galaxy has ever seen, but the enthusiasm and uniqueness more than make up for it.
Predictably, a full-on release of the movie — which, no kidding, just won an Emmy — has been hampered by legal issues. But if you’d like to watch Star Wars Uncut in its entirety, all you need to do is use the Force … or that link.
