Smallville Destiny

I started watching Smallville when it first came out. I loved the show. Although I would get the occasional ribbing from friends (but i had the perfect retort “What guy doesn’t wish they were Superman? What guy wouldn’t want to date Lana Lang?!”). Anyway, I stopped watching around Season 3 or 4 and then periodically tuned in every now and then when Green Arrow showed up etc. But I really did enjoy the early episodes of the series so I was excited to hear about LastSurvivor’s fanedit.

DVD Design: I really liked the DVD Menu Design. Music, Animated Scene Selection Menus. Great Job!

The Edit: I really have to applaud LastSurvivor’s efforts on this edit. I can’t begin to imagine what a huge undertaking this was. To sift through 20+ (or however many) episodes and distill it into a coherent and entertaining story. Although knocking out the majority of the “Freak of the Week” storylines was a major part of the edit, the decisions of the storylines to keep in were more interesting (and i imagine the harder part of the edit to do). I liked the choices that LastSurvivor made (the elderly woman who was psychic, Ryan’s storyline – a nice way to end part 1 btw!). The merge of the Season 1 finale and Season 2 premiere was very well done too. And wrapped up with a nice ending. This was an extremely enjoyable fanedit! Great job.

Technical: The video editing was well done but what really stood out to me was the audio editing. In my opinion it was nearly flawless. And I always read on the forums, or read about rejected edits and it almost always has to do with shoddy audio editing. Audio editing is arguably the most difficult part about fanedits. So great job on that!

Excellent firstling! I look forward to LastSurvivor’s future fanedits.

I would recommend this edit if you are already a big fan of the show or your S.O. wanted you to catch up on season 1 of smallville.

Video:

The video quality was good and the added contrast to the video gave the movie a more serious look. The increased color gain wasn't overwhelming and added to some of the scenes emotionally which was nice.

Audio:

One thing that erked me about this edit was that it was just ever so slightly sped up. I don't know if this was intentional or part of the source translation by chance, but it is something that is often done to films that are too long/slow. It really bothers me because It makes everyone sound like they are huffing helium. If it wasn't for that, I would say it was beneficial in that Smallville does tend to be a little bit slow at times. If the audio pitch could haven be compensated, it wouldn't have bothered me as much I don't think.

Story:

The very beginning of the edit is a very good origin story plot with a very classic pacing. Some where in the middle of part 1, it became very much a series of sort order episodes. Part 2 seemed to be a stringing together of the "tempest/vortex" story with only very light editing. While there is nothing wrong with this, it just seemed like it's own separate edit from part 1 because they are so different in style.

The narrative does not veer from the Smallville storyline in anyway that I could tell. The "Comic book" stills were a really good idea that played well in the opening credits. But I often felt that they would sometimes miss that "snap shot" moment and instead would freeze frame after the moment was gone. It would have been really good to use that effect to break up the many "chapters" in the edit, but alas, that did not happen.